Tens of thousands of people lived among bombed-out ruins with almost no hygienic facilities and little, if any, food. Disease was rampant, as was torture and mass murder.
Thousands froze or starved to death. On the July 21, 1941, a group of 45 Jews were roped together and 30 Russian prisoners were ordered to bury them alive. The Russians refused, so all were shot.*
*FACT: This is well documented. Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Himmler himself came to Minsk on August 15, 1941 to watch as 100 Jews were shot. We now know that he was so sickened by the sight he ordered that more efficient and humane methods of solving the “Jewish problem” be devised. More humane, not for the Jews, but for those who had to do the killing! It was from that little bout of nausea that the idea of the gas chambers was born.
It wasn’t just the Jews; I watched with unremitting horror and despair one frighteningly cold night in January, 1942 as 6,000 Russian POWs were marched out of the ghetto without coats or hats, ordered to lie down on the side of the road, and not to move. They lay there until they froze to death.*
*FACT: The accounts concerning Russian POWs are accurate. According to Nazi statistics, between the occupation of Minsk and February 1, 1943, 86,623 Jews were killed in the ghetto. Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Yes, I said, I saw this atrocity because I was a “guest” of the Minsk Ghetto, then the nearby Opera House slave labour camp from early August of 1941 until the following March. But I won’t burden you with more details of the brutality of which men are capable. Similar atrocities have been well documented in other ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps.
Most historians agree that of the well over 100,000 people forced into the Minsk Ghetto, including many transported from Poland and Germany, only a tiny handful were still alive when Minsk was liberated by the Red Army on July 4, 1944. As is only too typical, your wonderful “highly civilized” and ever “compassionate” citizens of the “morally superior” West have paid little, if any, attention to our agony. We were after all, according to Hitler, and I suspect many of you, a relatively inferior Slavic race not really worthy of headlines.
About 10,000 of us did manage to escape, myself included, forming numerous partisan groups whose members killed far more Germans and destroyed a great deal more military equipment, infrastructure and industrial capacity than anything you saw from that pitiful so-called resistance movement in France. Research it. You’ll see what I say is true. In Belarus we were fighting for our very existence. The French, when not jumping into bed with the Nazis or rounding up truckloads of Jews for the ovens, were mostly concerned with settling into some well-aged fromage and a robust Bordeaux. I can tell you this. We didn’t have to chop any hair from the heads of our women when the “supermen” finally left town!
What you’ll find, if you check, is something that to this day makes me very proud of my Belarusian heritage. Once again allow me to give you just a bit more background of what I lived through and the real story of who I am and why I came to Canada.
The history books will tell you that more than 1,000 various partisan groups were formed in Belarus with more than 400,000 of us, including thousands of women, fighting the Nazis. Believe it or not, the records, which by the way are available from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, show that we killed or incapacitated more than half a million German soldiers and blew up 34 armored battle trains, 29 railway stations, 948 military headquarters and destroyed more than 18,000 cars and trucks being used by the Nazis. No other occupied country fought the Germans as hard or as successfully.* Mind you, it was a matter of life or death for us. The Nazis killed many of my fellow partisans and at least a million other Belarusians.
*FACT: Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It was pure luck and accidental heroism that saved me!
It’s just one of the reasons I have to shake my head with anger and sadness when I read and hear the stories about my “betrayal.” Do you think I would betray my country to help the West whose leaders essentially just stood by while all of this was happening? Not on your life!
And let me tell you something else. There is plenty of evidence that Churchill, Roosevelt and, yes, even your prime minister of the day, Mackenzie King, knew very well what was going on. They understood perfectly well that Hitler planned the greatest act of genocide in the history of the world, but not only did they do nothing, they kept silent at a time when news of what was happening might very well have prompted the United States to enter the war much sooner and thus shorten the conflict and save the lives of millions.*
*FACT: The idea that the Allies knew Germany’s plans for the Jews and the entire Eastern Bloc is very controversial. However, Richard Breitman, Professor, Ph.D., Harvard, author of five books detailing the history of the Holocaust and now director of historical research for the US government agency called Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group, claims that 282 pages of radio intercepts from SS and police commanders in Belarus and Ukraine, taken with other documents, establish that the British knew that Jews were being targeted for atrocities as early as September 1941. This would be more than a year before Britain or the United States publicly acknowledged the plight of European Jews. “By late 1941,” Professor Breitman says, “the British knew a lot about the shootings in the Soviet Union and had concluded that it was perfectly obvious that the Nazis were executing every Jew they could get their hands on.” Source: Dr. Breitman’s book Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew, available from the US Holocaust Museum, Washington. While Dr. Breitman doesn’t state this, other historians suspect the British were reluctant to let the Nazis know they had broken their codes.
I’m telling you all of this so that you will understand why it would be unthinkable for me to betray the country of my birth. A country I fought for. A country I loved and still love. A sad and tragic country betrayed and abandoned by all, but most of all betrayed by the great civilizations of the West. Mine is a country of brave and noble people on whom all of you turned your backs.
Shame on all who knew!
[There is a slight gap in the tape here, some background noise, and then the voice returns.]
“Sorry, I dropped my notes, but let me continue.”
As I watched and suffered the horror of the Minsk Ghetto and the slave labour camps and even more so as I fought against the Nazis as a member of The Mstitel Partisan Party,* I made a pact with God that if He would allow me to live and let us defeat the Nazis, I would spend the rest of my life helping to rebuild my poor shattered country. I must confess that dreams of endless retribution against the Nazis who carried out the carnage continue to dance through my head even to this day. And unlike some of your more recent prime ministers, I make no apologies for my thoughts or the hate that sustained me during the darkest days.
*FACT: Mstitel means “Avenger.” Leonid Smilovitsky, Ph.D., researcher, Diaspora Research Institute, Tel Aviv University, refers to this group of partisans in a 1995 article which first appeared in the publication Shvut entitled “Minsk Ghetto: An Issue of Jewish Resistance.”
As you now know, my prayers were answered. God did allow us to defeat Hitler and me to live. He did even more. It was His hand that guided me as I struck at the very heart of the beasts destroying my country. He helped me remove a terrible scourge from Belarus— to wipe a Satan from the face of the earth.
Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube
“Satan!”
IN MINSK, Satan’s name was Wilhelm Kube, Generalkommissar Kube—General Commissar for Belarus with his headquarters in Minsk. A rabid and vile Nazi from the earliest days of the Party and incongruously, superintendent of the Lutheran Church in Brandenburg and head of the Berlin synod of the Lutheran Church. A man of God, indeed!*
*FACT: