An Awful Revenge: The Eastern Victors’ Concentration Camps after World War II
“Staffed and run by Jews, the prisons were little better than torture chambers.”
— Thomas Goodrich, author of Hellstorm
The eastern victors continued to operate many formerly German concentration camps after World War II. Additional camps to intern ethnic Germans were established in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia. The existence and operation of these postwar camps is a matter of major historical significance. While the population of the German concentration-camp system had grown to a record peak of 700,000 by the beginning of 1945, the number of Germans incarcerated across Europe in similar camps by the end of 1945 was possibly even higher.[1]
Soviet-Run Camps
The German concentration camps at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mühlberg, Fürstenwalde, Liebe-Roze, Bautzen and other locations were taken over by the Russian Gulag Archipelago. The camp at Buchenwald, for example, was transformed into “Special Camp No. 2” and was operated by the Soviet Union until 1950.[2] Conditions at the camps under Soviet control were atrocious. The camps were labeled “special” because the Soviets insisted that the internees be cut off completely from the civilian population.[3] Even Gen. Merkulov, the Soviet official in charge of the concentration camps in .......
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