As we rightly remember the Auschwitz death camp and the rest of the Jewish Holocaust, let’s take a mo­ment to recall the greatest mass killer of prisoners during World War II, the by now forgotten Soviet Major General Vasily Blokhin.

Blokhin claimed to have personally executed tens of thousands of prisoners in the Soviet Gulag. He was the chief executioner for NKVD (Soviet secret po­lice). Commissar Blokhin used his personal Walther PPK pistol to kill thousands of his victims by a shot to the back of the head. He wore a butcher’s apron, long gloves, a leather hat and goggles.

His primary target was Polish prisoners. Blokhin and his murderous assistants killed over 7,000 Polish officers cap­tured when the Soviet Union joined Germany in crushing Pol­ish independence to restore the pre–World War I status quo. This was also Hitler’s goal. Not world conquest, as the Allies falsely claimed. Russia’s strategic goals were similar.

Stalin ordered the sinister-looking Blokhin to wipe out the flower of Polish aristocracy and erase that nation’s na­tional identity. Blokhin also executed numerous Ukrainian nationalists as did Stalin’s secret police who, earlier, had ex­ecuted or starved over 6 million Ukrainian farmers, a crime at least equal in magnitude to the Holocaust of Jews, the mentally unfit, and gypsies.

Why do we hear endless repetition of the Holocaust and next to nothing about the even more murderous Soviet crimes of mass murder? The artful British were the war’s premier propagandists. They not only helped draw the US into WWII, but they also largely masked the alliance between the US and Britain with the murderous Soviet regime.

In fact, the strategic goal of the British was to divert atten­tion away from Soviet crimes by emphasizing Nazi crimes. This process continues today. The Jewish holocaust has al­most become a state religion while the larger, earlier Ukrai­nian holocaust (or Holodomor) is slipping away down the memory hole. We all know of the German-run Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald, but what of the Soviet gulag death camps like Solovetski, Kolyma, Magadan, Vorkuta, the Baltic-Volga Canal and the deportation centers in Central Asia. Without the splendid works of Alexander Sol­zhenitsyn, the memory of the Gulag – which stayed opera­tional into the 1970’s – would be gone.

No one had a monopoly on suffering. We must not forget that our ally in WWII, the Soviet Union, caused 75% of all German casualties. British-American propaganda likes to make us believe that it was the western allies – Britain, the US and Canada – that defeated Germany. Not true. It was the Soviet Union that suffered losses of 8.7 million military and 19 million civilians. 80% of the Luftwaffe was destroyed on the Eastern Front.

Without Soviet participation the Allies would not likely have won the war or defeated Germany and Japan. London and Washington were determined to downplay the key Soviet role in World War II. Accordingly, British and American pro­paganda were ordered to focus on the evils of Hitler while ig­noring the even more murderous Soviet system. The bloody destruction of entire peoples like the Chechen or Baltics and millions of others by Stalin was never mentioned by the dem­ocratic allies. Interestingly, films of Hitler playing with ani­mals and his promulgation of laws to protect animals from human cruelty were censored. Russia has gone far to erase the memory of the Gulag. The Russian organization ‘Memori­al’ that revealed the crimes of the Gulag was shut down by the Kremlin. The organizer of the murder by starvation or shoot­ing of 6 million Ukrainian farmers, the Jewish commissar La­zar Kaganovich, was never even charged with major crimes. He died peacefully at 91 on a sunlit park bench in Moscow in 1997. Stalin even called Kaganovich ‘my Himmler’ while talk­ing to British warlord Winston Churchill.

Stalin was a worse tyrant and mass murderer than Adolf Hitler, but he was our tyrant and essential ally, and we chose to ignore the facts.

Eric Margolis
The writer is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. Tweets at:@ericmargolis