by Ludo Martens
.
The Nation 140 (36), 13 March 1935, quoted in Tottle, op. cit. , p. 8.
Underneath a photograph of a little girl and a `frog-like' child, Walter wrote:
`FRIGHTFUL --- Below Kharhov (sic), in a typical peasant's hut, dirt floor, thatched roof and one piece of furniture, a bench, was a very thin girl and her 2 1/2 year old brother (shown above). This younger child crawled about the floor like a frog and its poor little body was so deformed from lack of nourishment that it did not resemble a human being.'
.
Tottle, op. cit. , p. 9.
Douglas Tottle, a Canadian union worker and journalist, found the picture of this same `frog-like' child, dated spring 1934, in a 1922 publication about the famine of that year.
Another photo by Walker was identified as that of a soldier in the Austrian cavalry, beside a dead horse, taken during the First World War.
.
James Casey, Daily Worker, 21 February 1935, quoted in Tottle, op. cit. , p. 9.
Poor Walker: his reporting was fake, his photographs were fake, even his name was assumed. His real name was Robert Green. He had escaped from the Colorado state prison after having done two years out of eight. Then he went to do his false reporting in the Soviet Union. Upon his return to the States, he was arrested, where he admitted in front of the court that he had never set foot in the Ukraine.
The multi-millionnaire William Randolph Heast met Hitler at the end of the summer of 1934 to finalize an agreement under which Germany would buy its international news from the Hearst-owned company International News Service. At the time, the Nazi press had already started up a propaganda campaign about the `Ukrainian famine'. Hearst took it up quickly, thanks to his great explorer, Walker.
.
Tottle, op. cit. , pp. 13, 15.
Other similar reports on the famine would show up in Hearst's press. For example, Fred Beal started to write. A U.S. worker sentenced to twenty years of prison after a strike, he fled to the Soviet Union in 1930 and worked for two years in the Kharkov Tractor Works. In 1933, he wrote a little book called Foreign workers in a Soviet Tractor Plant, favorably describing the efforts of the Soviet people. At the end of 1933, he returned to the U.S., where unemployment and prison awaited him. In 1934, he started to write about the Ukrainian famine, and soon his prison sentence was dramatically reduced. When his `eyewitness account' was published by Hearst in June 1935, J. Wolynec, another U.S. worker who had worked for five years in the same Kharkov factory, exposed the lies that showed up throughout the text. Although Beal pretended to have heard several conversations, Wolynec noted that Beal spoke neither Russian nor Ukrainian. In 1948, Beal offered his services to the far-right as an eyewitness against Communists, in front of the McCarthy Committee.
.
Ibid. , pp. 19--21.
A book from Hitler
In 1935, Dr. Ewald Ammende published a book, Muss Russland hungern? (1936 English title: Human Life in Russia) Its sources: the German Nazi press, the Italian fascist press, the Ukrainian йmigrй press and `travelers' and `experts', cited with no details. He published photos that he claimed `are among the most important sources for the actual facts of the Russian position'.
.
Ibid. , pp. 23--24.
There are also photos belonging to Dr. Ditloff, who was until August 1933 Director of the German Government Agricultural Concession --- Drusag in the North Caucasus. Ditloff claimed to have taken the photos in the summer of 1933 `and they demonstrate the conditions ... (in) the Hunger Zone'.
.
Ibid. , p. 25.
Given that he was by then a civil servant of the Nazi government, how could Ditloff have freely moved from the Caucasus to the Ukraine to hunt pictures? Among Ditloff's photos, seven, including that of the `frog-like' child, had also been published by Walker. Another photo presented two skeletal-like boys, symbols of the 1933 Ukrainian famine. The same picture was shown in Peter Ustinov's televised series Russia: it comes from a documentary film about the 1922 Russian famine! Another of Ammende's photos was published by the Nazi paper Volkischer Beobachter, dated August 18, 1933. This photo was also identified among books dating back to 1922.
Ammende had worked in the Volga region in 1913. During the 1917--1918 Civil War, he had held positions in the pro-German counter-revolutionary governments of Estonia and Latvia. Then he worked in liaison with the Skoropadsky government set up by the German army in the Ukraine in March 1918. He claimed to have participated in the humanitarian aid campaigns during the 1921--1922 Russian famine, hence his familiarity with the photos of the period. For years, Ammende served as General Secretary of the so-called European Nationalities Congress, close to the Nazi Party, which included regrouped йmigrйs from the Soviet Union. At the end of 1933, Ammende was appointed Honorary Secretary of the Interconfessional and International Relief Committee for the Russian Famine Areas, which was led by the pro-fascist Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna. Ammende was therefore closely tied to the Nazi anti-Soviet campaign.
When Reagan started up his anti-Communist crusade at the beginning of the eighties, Professor James E. Mace of Harvard University thought it opportune to re-edit and re-publish Ammende's book under the title Human Life in Russia. That was in 1984. So all the Nazi lies and the fake photographic evidence, including Walker's pseudo-reporting on the Ukraine, were granted the `academic respectability' associated with the Harvard name.
The preceding year, far-right Ukrainian йmigrйs in the U.S. published The Great Famine in Ukraine: The Unknown Holocaust. Douglas Tottle was able to check that the photos in this book dated to 1921--1922. Hence the photo on the cover comes from Dr. F. Nansen's International Committee for Russian Relief publication Information 22, Geneva, April 30, 1922, p. 6!
.
Ibid. , pp. 4--31.
Neo-Nazi revisionism around the world `revises' history to justify, above all, the barbaric crimes of fascism against Communists and the Soviet Union. First, it denies the crimes that they themselves committed against the Jews. Neo-Nazis deny the existence of extermination camps where millions of Jews were slaughtered. They then invent `holocausts', supposedly perpetrated by Communists and by Comrade Stalin. With this lie, they justify the bestial crimes that the Nazis committed in the Soviet Union. For this, revisionism at the service of the anti-Communist struggle, they receive the full support of Reagan, Bush, Thatcher and company.
A book from McCarthy
Thousands of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators succeeded in entering the U.S. after the Second World War. During the McCarthy period, they testified as victims of `communist barbary'. They reinvented the famine-genocide myth in a two-volume book, Black Deeds of the Kremlin, published in 1953 and 1955 by the Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror and the Democratic Organization of Ukrainians Formerly Persecuted by the Soviet Regime in the USA. This book, dear to Robert Conquest, who cites it regularly, contains a glorification of Petliura, responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in 1918--1920, as well as a homage to Shukhevych, the fascist commander of the Nazi-organized Nachtigall Battalion and later the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
Black Deeds also contains a series of photos of the 1932--1933 famine-genocide. They are all fakes. Deliberate fakes. One picture is captioned `A little cannibal'. It appeared in issue 22 of the Information bulletin of the International Committee for Russian Relief in 1922, with the original caption `Cannibal from Zaporozhe: has eaten his sister'. On page 155, Black Deeds included a picture of four soldiers and an officer who had just executed some men. The caption reads `The Execution of Kurkuls [Kulaks]'. Small detail: the soldiers are wearing Tsarist uniforms! Hence, Tsarist executions are given as proof of the `crimes of Stalin'.
.
Ibid. , pp. 38--44.
One of the authors of volume I of Black Deeds was Alexander Hay-Holowko, who was Minister of Propaganda for Bandera's `government' of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Western Ukraine. During the brief existen
ce of this fascist clique, Nationalist mobs and Ukrainian auxiliary troops killed some thousands of Jews, Poles and Bolsheviks in the Lvov region. Hay-Holowko, who now resides in Vancouver, also served in the SS.
Among the persons cited as `sponsors' of the book is Anatole Bilotserkiwsky, alias Anton Shpak, a former officer in the Nazi police at Bila Tserkva. According to witnesses and documents Shpak/Bilotserkiwsky and others personally took part in the execution of two thousand predominantly Jewish civilians.
.
Ibid. , p. 41.
Between 1 and 15 Million Dead
In January 1964, Dana Dalrymple published an article in Soviet Studies, entitled `The Soviet Famine of 1932--1934'. He claimed that there were 5,500,000 dead, the average of 20 various estimates.
One question immediately comes to mind: what are these sources of the `estimates' used by the professor?
One of the sources is Thomas Walker, who made the famous `trip' to Ukraine, where he `presumably could speak Russian', according to Dalrymple.
Another source was Nicolas Prychodko, a Nazi collaborator who worked for the Nazi-controlled `Minister of Culture and Education' in Kiev. Prychodko was evacuated West by the Nazis during their retreat from Ukraine. He provided the figure of seven million dead.
These are followed by Otto Schiller, Nazi civil servant charged with the reorganization of agriculture in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. His text, published in Berlin in 1943 and claiming 7,500,000 dead, was cited by Dalrymple.
The next source was Ewald Ammende, the Nazi who had not been in Russia since 1922. In two letters published in July and August 1934 in the New York Times, Ammende spoke of 7,500,000 dead and pretended that in July of that year, people were dying in the streets of Kiev. A few days later, the NYT correspondent, Harold Denny, gave the lie to Ammende: `Your correspondent was in Kiev for several days last July about the time people were supposed to be dying there, and neither in the city, nor in the surrounding countryside was there hunger.' Several weeks later, Denny reported: `Nowhere was famine found. Nowhere even the fear of it. There is food, including bread, in the local open markets. The peasants were smiling too, and generous with their foodstuffs'.
.
New York Times, quoted in Tottle, op. cit. , p. 50.
Next, Frederick Birchall spoke of more than four million dead in a 1933 article. At that moment, he was, in Berlin, one of the first U.S. journalists to publicly support the Hitler rйgime.
Sources six through eight are William H. Chamberlin, twice, and Eugene Lyons, both anti-Communist journalists. After the war both were prominent members of the American Committee for the Liberation from Bolshevism (AMCOMLIB), better known as Radio Liberty. AMCOMLIB funds were raised by `Crusade for Freedom', which received 90 per cent of its funds from the CIA. Chamberlin gave a first estimate of four million and a second one of 7,500,000 dead, the latter number based on an `estimate of foreign residents in Ukraine'. Lyons' five million dead were also the result of noise and rumors, based on `estimates made by foreigners and Russians in Moscow'.
The highest figure (ten million) was provided, with no details, by Richard Stallet of Hearst's pro-Nazi press. In 1932, the Ukrainian population was 25 million inhabitants.
.
Tottle, op. cit. , p. 51.
Among the twenty sources in Dalrymple's `academic' work, three come from anti-Soviet articles in Hearst's pro-Nazi press and five come from far-right publications from the McCarthy era (1949--1953). Dalrymple used two German fascist authors, a former Ukrainian collaborator, a right-wing Russian йmigrй, two CIA collaborators, and a journalist who liked Hitler. A great number of the figures come from unidentified `foreign residents in the Soviet Union'.
The two lowest estimates, dated 1933, came from U.S. journalists in Moscow, known for their professionalism, Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune and Walter Duranty of the New York Times. The first spoke of one million and the second of two million dead of famine.
Two professors to the rescue of Ukrainian Nazis
To help the new anti-Communist crusade and to justify their insane military buildup, U.S. right-wingers promoted in 1983 a great commemoration campaign of the `50th anniversary of famine-genocide in Ukraine'. To ensure that the terrifying menace to the West was properly understood, proof was needed that Communism meant genocide. This proof was provided by the Nazis and collaborators. Two U.S. professors covered them up with their academic credentials: James E. Mace, co-author of Famine in the Soviet Ukraine, and Walter Dushnyck, who wrote 50 Years Ago: The Famine Holocaust in Ukraine --- Terror and Misery as Instruments of Soviet Russian Imperialism, prefaced by Dana Dalrymple. The Harvard work contains 44 alleged 1932--1933 famine photos. Twenty-four come from two Nazi texts written by Laubenheimer, who credited most of the photos to Ditloff and began his presentation with a citation from Hitler's Mein Kampf:
`If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.'
.
Ibid. , p. 61.
The majority of the Ditloff--Laubenheimer pictures are utter fakes coming from the immediate World War I era and the 1921--1922 famine, or else portray misrepresented and undocumented scenes which do not describe conditions of famine-holocaust.
.
Ibid.
The second professor, Dushnyck, participated as a cadre in the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which became active at the end of the thirties.
`Scientific' calculations
Dushnyck invented a `scientific' method to calculate the dead during the `famine-genocide'; Mace followed his method:
`(T)aking the data according to the 1926 census ... and the January 17, 1939 census ... and the average increase before the collectivization ... (2.36 per cent per year), it can be calculated that Ukraine ... lost 7,500,000 people between the two censuses.'
.
Ibid. , pp. 69--71.
These calculations are meaningless.
The world war, the civil wars and the great famine of 1920--1922 all provoked a drop in the birth rate. The new generation born in that period reached physical maturity, 16 years of age, around 1930. The structure of the population would necessarily lead to a drop in the birthrate in the thirties.
Free abortion had also dramatically reduced the birthrate during the thirties, to the point where the government banned it in 1936 to increase the population.
The years 1929--1933 were characterized by great, violent struggles in the countryside, accompanied by times of famine. Economic and social conditions of this kind reduce the birthrate.
The number of people registered as Ukrainians changed through inter-ethnic marriages, changes in the declared nationality and by migrations.
The borders of the Ukraine were not even the same in 1926 and 1939. The Kuban Cossaks, between 2 and 3 million people, were registered as Ukrainian in 1926, but were reclassified as Russian at the end of the twenties. This new classification explains by itself 25 to 40 per cent of the `victims of the famine-genocide' calculated by Dushnyck--Mace.
.
Ibid. , p. 71.
Let us add that, according to the official figures, the population of Ukraine increased by 3,339,000 persons between 1926 and 1939. Compare those figures with the increase of the Jewish population under real genocidal conditions, organized by the Nazis.
.
Ibid. , p. 74.
To test the validity of the `Dushnyck method', Douglas Tottle tried out an exercise with figures for the province of Saskatchewan in Canada, where the thirties saw great farmers' struggles. The repression was often violent. Tottle tried to `calculate' the number of statistical `victims' of the `depression-genocide', caused by the 1930's Great Depression and Western Canadian drought, complicated by the right-wing Canadian governments' policies and use of force:
This `scientific method', which any respectable person
would call a grotesque farce for Canada, is widely accepted in right-wing publications as `proof' of the `Stalinist terror'.
B-movies
The `famine-genocide' campaign that the Nazis started in 1933 reached its apogee half a century later, in 1983, with the film Harvest of Despair, for the masses, and in 1986, with the book Harvest of Sorrow, by Robert Conquest, for the intelligentsia.
The films Harvest of Despair, about the Ukrainian `genocide', and The Killing Fields, about the Kampuchean `genocide', were the two most important works created by Reagan's entourage to instill in people's minds that Communism is synonymous with genocide.