JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2052

Adolf Ehrt (1902-1973) was a twice-born Nazi who in 1935 let
his 3-year membership in the party lapse so that he could do better work for
Hitler from the “outside”.  In short, and
to skirt some very interesting detail (over which I really don’t have much
expertise), Ehrt felt that there was too much influence from the Church and government
sources to fuel his unrequited need for purity in the party. 

Ehrt wrote this anti-Communist propaganda (Der Weltbolschewismus ein internationales
Gemeinschaftswerk über die bolschewistische Wühlarbeit und die Umsturtzversuche
der Komitern in allen Ländern) from an imaginary perch in something called
the Anti-Kominetern, but was really nothing more than an arm of the Nazi party.  Appearing in Leipzig
in 1936, this book savaged communism, communists and the Soviet
Union to no end.  I own a copy of the book because it is an interesting document and speaks to its period, and also has
hundreds of unusual photos, giving it a documentary appeal.  What I noticed just recently though was a map
on part of page 481 in the weirdly skimpy section on the Soviet Union—a reproduction
of a French map showing the distribution of concentration camps in the USSR.  I cannot remember seeing such a map in
English during this time period.  (The forced labor camps are referenced in the map as “concentration camps”, though in th eSoviet Union they were known by the acronym “Gulag”, which stood for Glavnoe Upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh LAGerei, or “Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps”.)

(Clickable/expandable image)
 

A more modern mapping of the Gulag system (for the period  1923-1961):

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gulag_Location_Map.svg]

Ehrt was a Nazi painting with broad historical/Nazi strokes
across a Communist canvas, and did get a lot of stuff right in his attacks; but
considering the source his book is useless except for its pictures.   The USSR was a wicked place to be at this time for millions and millions of people, the
bestial Joseph Stalin busy killing hundreds of thousands, imprisoning more—but
this was in general not the story reaching folks in the United States.
That this French map (source not given) showed two dozen or so concentration
camps (Gulags, work camps) is remarkable; and of course it is just the tip of
the Gulag system iceberg.  It was at
least a start. It was also just the beginning of a particularly nasty period
for the Russian people, who staggered under the weight of an edict called Article
58¹ that sent millions of people to their doom. 
This map was also published just before the Great Terror², a
spectacularly bad war of internal doom that tore millions from their homes and
hundreds of thousands  from the
earth. 

The map, rare as it is in appearance and sentiment,
seriously underestimated the extent of the barbaric Soviet existence of the
time. 

1. “One can find more epithets in praise of this
article than Turgenev once
assembled to praise the Russian language,
or Nekrasov to
praise Mother Russia: great, powerful, abundant, highly ramified, multiform,
wide sweeping 58, which summed up the world not so much through the exact terms
of its sections as in their extended diacritical interpretation.  Who among us has not experienced its
all-encompassing embrace? In all Truth, there is no step, thought, action, or
lack of action under the heavens which could not be punished by the heavy hand
of Article 58” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago    See “Article 58″  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58

2. NKVD Order no. 00447, 1937, directed against
“ex-kulaks”
and other “anti-Soviet elements” (such as former officials of the Tsarist regime,
former members of political parties other than the communist party, etc.)  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge  Generally, any unfriendly could be uprooted and shot or sent off to Siberia. .  The operative made it easy for local justice
units to identify trouble makers and shoot them.