In the 1920s, the briefly indwpendent West Ukrainian Republic used paramilitary police to deport Poles to the newly independent Polish republic.


After the Poles, with the support of the western allies, occupied western Ukraine. they used paramilitary police to deport Ukrainians and Jews from the Ukrainian-majority area of Galicia - at first deporting them to Ukraine then to eastern Ukraine then after the Soviets took over the rest of Ukraine, to other parts of Poland where they were dispersed widely and prevented from forming communities.

At te same time, the Soviets were deporting Poles from Ukraine to Poland.

Then after the Soviet-German partition of Poland, the Soviets occupied Galicia and started deporting ethnic Poles to German-occupied Poland - where many of them were delivered straight to labour camps.

Here's the thing when the Germans started deporting Jews from Poland occupied Soviet territory, they were largely using mechanisms already in place for up to 20 years. In fact, many of the local collaborators who conducted the rounding up and transportation of Jews were the exact same individuals who had earlier rounded up Poles; then Ukrainians and Jews and then Poles again.

At the same time, entire ethnic groups such as the Crimean Tartars, Chechens and Volga Germans were being rounded up by the the Soviets and deported to central Asia. Millions died during transportation or after arrival.

Do you being to see why Himmler in 1945 insisted he was "only a policeman" and believed the Allies would not only pardon him but continue to employ him?

The Holocaust was unique in its scale and brutality and in that the extermination rather than relocation of its victims was always the planned outcome - at least after the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. Earlier plans for the forcible mass deportation of European Jews to Palestine or Madagascar fit even more closely the model already established.

So where did thee various states get the idea from in the first place? From the relocation of indigenous peoples in the Americas; Australia and Africa. As I've noted before, the concentration camps used in the extermination of the Herero people in what was then German South-West Africa look almost identical to the concentration camps of the 1930's and 40's. That's no coincidence because they were built by the same companies to the same plans.

the same phenomenon is being repeated today in Ukraine, except the Putinists prefer the term "filtration camp". 

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