Thur 3 Jan 2013 Welcome Back!! 

1. Thur 3 Jan 2013 Welcome Back!!  Deep and meaningful powerpoint from Ludwick about things you did not know! Maybe a map or two. Who wins wars? Why? Can you find Ludwick in the pictures above?! An army marches on its stomach. Napoleon

2. Nikolai Dyukarev • a 20-year-old member of a Soviet secret police (NKVD) unit in eastern Poland, was ordered in 1939 to forcibly relocate Polish families to remote areas of the Soviet Union. “I was given another officer to help me. We started to count their families. By February it was all completed and then we were ordered to resettle them. It was a difficult task. Very difficult. Then I was young and it was just do, do, do. But now when I think about it–to leave kids without milk or anything–it was a very hard thing to do. Well, Stalin was much like a god for everybody. And all of his words were the last word on any subject. You couldn’t even think it wasn’t right. One did not doubt it at the time. Every decision that was made was correct. That wasn’t only my opinion–we were all thinking like that. We were building Communism. We were obeying orders. We believed. When I grew up I started to think about it–what kind of task was that? Of course we shouldn’t have done that when I think about it–and I thought about it then, but it’s one thing to think and another to do.”

3. Dmitry Tokarev was the NKVD chief for the Kalinin region of the Soviet Union in 1940. In March of that year, Tokarev was instructed to oversee the murder of Polish prisoners who were to be transferred to a Kalinin prison from the nearby camp, Ostashkov. Each night for about a month, junior NKVD agents murdered Polish officers, intellectuals, and other members of the elite. “I should tell you that on the first night they brought 300 people. I thought it was too many. The night was short and we could only work during the hours of darkness. I saw all that horror. They came in and a few minutes later Blokhin [a junior NKVD officer] was wearing his special clothing–brown leather apron, brown leather gloves with cuffs over his elbows. This produced a horrible impression on me. I saw an executioner. The mechanics of the killing were worked out by Blokhin together with the commandant of our administrative board, Rubanov. They covered the doors to the shooting cells that led to the corridor so the sounds of the shootings couldn’t be heard. Then the accused, well, let’s call them that, were brought through the corridor. They were brought into the cells to be shot. I want to say the following: it was certainly a horrible business. Rubanov, for instance, went mad. Pavlov, my first deputy, shot himself dead. Sukharev, my driver, shot himself dead and even Blokhin shot himself dead.”