A Rare Map of the Soviet Gulags, 1936.

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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 it 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. 

 

(Clickable/expandable image)

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; 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.