Anarcho-Bolshevik
@anarcho-bolshevik.bsky.social
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‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970
![In 1942, a new group of prisoners was targeted by the POW organizations and the Einsatzgruppen: so-called invalids. If they had not already succumbed to the mass starvation of 1941/42, the seriously wounded and maimed prisoners were subjected to various initiatives launched by camp functionaries.
In many cases, the police and the Wehrmacht arranged for POWs unfit for work to be murdered. In transit camps in places like Gomel, Bobruisk, or Polotsk, the camp personnel regularly killed the sick by shooting them. In the same camps, the very weakest prisoners were simply abandoned to the extreme cold on winter days, so that they would freeze to death — a tactic also known from German concentration camps.¹⁰⁶
Beginning in October 1942, many prisoners unable to work were removed in groups from Stalag 358 in Berdichev and shot nearby by members of the Security Police. The last group was murdered on
Christmas Eve.¹⁰⁷
In several POW camps, sick prisoners were killed in regular cycles. In Stalag 324 (Lososna, near Grodno), for instance, the sick were shot once a week. In the winter of 1942/43, the inhabitants of entire barracks — many tens of thousands — suffering from typhus were shot in the camps in Daugavpils and Rēzekne in Latvia. Immediately before its withdrawal from Gomel in November 1943, one Wehrmacht unit transferred 600 sick prisoners to a hospital and blew them up along with the building.¹⁰⁸
In camps on Belarusian soil, more killings were based on the selection of the sick and the weak than on the elimination of political opponents.¹⁰⁹ Even at a time when the manpower of Soviet POWs had become more valuable for the [Third Reich’s] war economy, by no means all Red Army prisoners were claimed by [Axis] industries. As noted above, three times as many Soviet civilians as Soviet POWs were sent to work in Germany during 1942. […] the chronically sick and seriously wounded among the POWs were never regarded as a valuable labor force; […] they remained expendable.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ulzxpcsiptydllpes32gdzes/bafkreienkhmnrv5uztbdgnbvnjz2nkkmes6wvjo4oatlrb3t5o5gotfmkq)
![During a fight with a German worker, Parkes, in broken German, called Hitler a ‘damned swine [verdammter Schweinehund]’ that needed to disappear. The court martial in Kassel sentenced him to 2 years in prison even though his attorney argued that the German worker had provoked Parkes.²⁸
American POWs, who came to Germany mostly during the later years of the war, also faced prosecution for political crimes. When William Kilpatrick, for example, received 2 days arrest for a minor infraction in a camp southeast of Berlin, he vented his frustration by drawing a caricature of Hitler onto the poster with the arrest rules in his cell. Under the caricature, he wrote: ‘Adolph [sic] Hitler, the Fuck-Up in Europe.’ On 5 September 1943, the court martial of Frankfurt on the Oder sentenced him to 4 years in prison. This sentence was meant to be a deterrent to other prisoners because the local camp authorities worried about losing control over the POWs. The U.S. State Department, through the Swiss Legation in Berlin, protested vigorously, and Kilpatrick’s attorney asked for non-confirmation of the sentence. The punishment was indeed so extraordinarily harsh that the higher German authorities, which normally interfered only if they considered a sentence too mild, ordered a retrial. On 25 May 1944, the court martial sentenced Kilpatrick to 1 year in prison (he was liberated not much later because he had already been incarcerated for almost a year).²⁹](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ulzxpcsiptydllpes32gdzes/bafkreigbzyjw5swtrx5negxrckt3vlda76qmrh3esp7act274z4cdcd74q)
![I have someone freaking out on me because I consider people doing Jewish deicide myths [sic] as Nazis](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ulzxpcsiptydllpes32gdzes/bafkreifqyq6y7mwnyh4j2dmizyoe6d2oa7cctrwsbnr6yvq2m3te5jyebq)
![Referring again to the thorn/burning bush, which here “radiated God’s presence,” Joseph describes his father, Rabbi Nathan, actually committing image desecration. He openly urinates on a cross in front of a Christian bishop, denying its sanctity and arguing that it should be considered putrid because it was the instrument that had caused the torture and death of Jesus:
Once my lord and father, Rabbi Nathan, may he rest in Paradise, was riding alongside the bishop of Sens.¹²⁰ The bishop got off his horse opposite a bush in order to urinate. My lord and father saw this, and he got off his horse opposite an abomination [a cross] and urinated on it. The bishop saw this and was angry. He said to him, it is not proper to do that, to make the cross smell bad. My father replied, “On the contrary, it was a foolish thing for you to do [Gen. 31:28]. You urinated on a bush, on which the Holy One, blessed be He, radiated His presence in order to bring salvation [that is, at the burning bush, Exod. 3:1–3]. But this [cross], on which you [Christians] say that [the god] you fear was defeated, stank, and rotted, it is right that you should expose yourself and urinate all over it!”¹²¹
The Jew holds the trump cards. It would, Rabbi Nathan argues, make more sense for the Christian to desecrate the cross himself rather than venerate it. He first criticizes the bishop for urinating on a bush when, according to the Christian argument, Christ revealed himself in one. Second, he contends that it makes no sense for the bishop to venerate an object that caused the death of his savior. If the bishop saw the bush as a place of Christian divinity, the Jew argues, then he (the Jew) has shown more respect for Christ by not urinating on the bush than the bishop who did! It might well be argued then, that Joseph the Official was responding to the spreading allegations of Jews violating Christian images and offered in this polemic an allegorical retort.¹²²](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ulzxpcsiptydllpes32gdzes/bafkreifkzhyahkuvsgoqazamkvt3ymb5jcrfoop3tsw3bnd5ahp5fuenbu)
