Just like a thunder clap can sneak up on someone that saw the lighting, so too can an unholy act sneak up on a world long-prepared to recognize the signs of its imminent arrival.
The whole world looked at the savagery of World War II, particularly in regard to Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jewish among them, and said never again. There was simply no way that we, as a collective human race, wouldn’t be able to snuff out the next Hitler and smother their empire-building flame. All of this would be required reading in schools around the nation as well.
We would never let this happen again, until this week.
“The world has not seen the scale of the tragedy in Mariupol since the existence of the Nazi concentration camps. Russia-occupation forces turned our entire city into a death camp,” Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boychenko said in a statement translated by Ukrainian news outlet Interfax. “This is the new Auschwitz and Majdanek.”
“The world must help punish Putin’s monsters,” he added.
This was not conjecture. Not in the least. Evidence on the ground suggests that Russian troops are resorting to a number of Nazi Germany’s most vile tactics.
The Mariupol City Council on Wednesday accused Russian forces of relying on a mobile crematorium to cover up their alleged war crimes in the southeast port city of Ukraine.
Mariupol, which has been partially occupied for weeks, has been the target of one of the most brutal Russian offensives in Ukraine since the invasion began in February.
“The killers are covering their tracks,” the city council said in several social media posts, adding that the Russians have set up “mobile crematoriums.”
“Russia’s top leadership ordered the destruction of any evidence of crimes committed by its army in Mariupol,” the council added in a translated statement, accusing Moscow of reacting to widespread condemnation over mass civilian killings in Bucha.
To make matters even worse, (and to fully employ the idea that Putin and Hitler are reading the same playbook here), hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been sent to “filtration camps” within Russian borders, and there does not appear to be any way for the outside world to be made aware of their condition.
