period was a thirty-year-old Beriin Communist called KurtnFaulhaber, who told them that no Jewish prisoner wouldnhave been allowed to hold a post as privileged as his. AsnHitler remarked during the war to Albert Speer, Communistsnwere to be trusted, in the Nazi system, and allowednresponsibilities.nTo learn of Buchenwald’s second life I had to travel west,nsince the matter is seldom spoken of, and never writtennabout, in East Germany. In 1948 a Group Against Inhumanitynwas set up in West Berlin by survivors of SovietnBuchenwald, which in the event was to last from Augustn1945 down to February 1950, and their publications tell anrevealing story of contrasts in totalitarian styles.nSoviet Buchenwald was in all likelihood a deadlier placenthan the Nazi camp, in the sense that a higher proportion ofnits prisoners died. But they died not quickly, by shooting andnhanging, but by starvation and above all disease, tuberculosisnbeing the greatest of all killers. Soviet Buchenwald wasnpreeminently a place of chaos and neglect, and far unlikenthe military precision of its former self A prisoner seldomneven saw a Russian soldier, unless in the distance on one ofnthe control towers preserved from Nazi times, or at one ofnthe endless parades that made up camp life. Even thenrobbing of prisoners had already occurred before arrival, sonthat they were forced to survive in the camp with the fewngarments they had managed to keep, the best having beennseized by Red Army soldiers at the moment of arrest. Therenwere no prisoners’ uniforms now, little sense of order, andnfew exits by the bullet or the noose. If Nazi cruelty wasnactive, Communist was passive. One died, after 1945,nunregarded and by sheer inadvertance.nPrisoners included anyone known to have a history ofndissent or an instinct for free debate, and the death toll wasnhuge. One survivor reports that, of the 29 in his group, onlyn5 survived to be released in 1948. The daily diet amountednto 800-900 calories; enough to sustain life if you sit or lie,nbut not if you move. Only 10 percent of the prisonersnworked, within the electrified perimeter fence once built bynthe Nazis; the rest were confined, parades apart, to crowdedn18/CHRONICLESnLIBERAL ARTSnBELLOC SAW THE FUTURE IN 1913nThe legislator says, for instance, “Younmay pluck roses; but as I notice that younsometimes scratch yourself, I will putnyou in prison unless you cut them withnscissors at least 122 millimeters long, andnI will appoint one thousand inspectors tongo round the country seeing whether thenlaw is observed. My brother-in-law shallnbe at the head of the department atn£2,000 a year.n—from The Servile Statenby Hilaire Bellocnnnbarracks. The NKVD inherited from the Nazis 15 twostoriednstone barracks and 32 one-storied barracks, and thenthird and more who died at their hands were buried in massngraves near the camp. Daily parades took two hours, duringnwhich time prisoners were forced to stand or march. It wasnagainst the rules to die inside the barracks, and prisonersnwere forced to carry dying comrades to a sick bay, once theynwere declared unfit by Soviet doctors, where they receivednno treatment and were left to their fate. One survivor speaksnof faces like masks. As they were taken out, companionsnseized their spoons and their garments as objects toonprecious to lose.nThat the Soviets were running concentration camps inntheir zone of Germany was public knowledge in postwarnyears, though it is a fact now widely forgotten. There werenoccasional protests, at the time, in the West. An AFLnofficial, for example, speaking on behalf of American labor,ndemanded that the United States should refuse to treat withnthe Soviet Union for so long as Buchenwald and Sachsenhausennwere kept at their old task; and rumors of his speech,nbrought to Soviet Buchenwald by a new prisoner, gave theninmates a breath of hope. Thomas Mann’s record is lessnheroic. A resident by then of California, he revisited hisnnative Germany for the first time in 16 years in July andnAugust 1949, including Weimar in the Russian zone, andnwas urged by the Group Against Inhumanity to ask permissionnto visit the Buchenwald camp. He declined to ask; andnin an article in the Frankfurter Rundschau (July 28, 1949)nhe pleaded that his visit to Weimar was to commemorate thenbicentenary of Goethe’s birth and to receive the Goethenprize there: “To make demands . . . that the Germannofficials inviting me cannot fulfill is out of the question, andnthe society making the request knows that as well as I.” Likenthe first Buchenwald, as he rightly guessed, the second wasnnot for tourists. Mann breakfasted with the Soviet commandernin Weimar, General Tulpanov, gave a speech at thenNational Theater there, and took his prize; but he did not gonup the hill. Plainly the Soviet use of Buchenwald andnSachsenhausen was not a secret after 1945: in fact the deathnin Sachsenhausen of Heinrich George, a famous actor, wasnwidely reported. The world has simply chosen to forget.nWhether it now chooses to remember is a questionnentirely for us. Beyond the Iron Curtain such decisions arennot for individuals but for governments, but even there thenatmosphere may now be clearing. Poles are allowed to hint,neven occasionally to proclaim in print, that the massacres atnKatyn, near Smolensk, of some five thousand Polish officersnin April 1940 was a Soviet and not a Nazi atrocity. Since thenparty conference in Moscow in June 1988, crimes like thenstarvation of the Ukraine are publicly admitted even insidenthe Soviet Union. There is seldom a breath of publicnadmission that the Soviet Union was Hitler’s ally, however,nfor two years after August 1939; or that with the fall ofnFrance in May 1940 Stalin willingly supplied Hitler withnmaterials for his planned invasion of England and, a yearnlater, for his actual invasion of the Soviet Union; or that aftern1945 the Soviets used some of the Nazi camps, year afternyear, to an even deadlier effect than the Nazis.nSome day, perhaps, if glasnost spreads, such matters willnbe spoken of, even written about, in eastern Europe. Andnthat, as they say, will be the day. n