Massive Dehumanization Led To Mass Killing In WW2

When the war ended in 1945 Stalin’s Red Army didn’t magically call it quits and head back home to the East. They used the opportunity to seize new land, tons of it. One of the first places this took place was in East Prussia. There Soviet soldiers engaged in a massive murder and rape spree. One girl was raped by an entire unit and even an 84 year old woman was included in the madness. Legendary Soviet dissident and author Solzhenitsyn wrote a poem while trapped in the gulag to commemorate the poor girl. The way Solzhenitsyn was able to write when it was not allowed is remarkable…

Romania too fell victim to the advancing Soviet army after the end of WW2. As the Red Army came in like locusts upon the very religious people of Romania, Stalinists rejoiced while others became fearful.

Along with Romania and East Prussia, Czechoslovakia too became home to new Stalinist overlords. One priest Father Kolakovic saw communism coming and prepared his church ahead of time. Being a prudent man, already had set up a secret underground Church by the time the Stalinists took control of the government and started torturing dissident Christians.

Father Kolakovic is seen as a hero and even a model of Christian dissention under a regime that despises them. So says Rob Dreher who dedicated the book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents to commie-fighting Catholic priest. View the book on Amazon here.

Dehumanization In WW2

Author David Livingstone Smith writes about the massive dehumanization of the Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war against German forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German army, issued an order to inflict a “severe but just retribution upon the Jewish subhuman elements” (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as part of “international Jewry”, and were convinced that Jews controlled the national governments of Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, “soldiers and officers thought of the Russians and Jews as ‘animals’ … that had to perish. Dehumanizing the enemy allowed German soldiers and officers to agree with the Nazis’ new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any mercy or quarter.”

David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others

The Nazis thinking of the Jewish Germans and other Jews in Europe in this way is no surprise, but what is less than talked about is the Soviets practicing the same kind of thinking.

The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them civilians. When the tide of the war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder.
David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others

If dehumanization is the sickness then what is the prescription for a cure? The answer lies in the experiences of the victims of its destructive power. Czechoslovakia’s first President after the fall of communism there Vaclav Havel gives the metaphor of the green grocer as a powerful agent against the Soviet state and its machine of oppression.