Just for context, 7,000 people were left behind, 1.1 million people died there.
Hard to Imagine what the red army troops must have thought when they first encountered the camp and those poor people, even after all the death and destruction they’d already seen.
You make it sound like the soviets were white lambs when it comes to atrocious internment of people. You should read up on the history of the soviets and their invasion of e.g. the baltics before the nazis took over and then were taken back again by the soviets.
Wiki:
The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s. By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million.
- 18,000,000 people passed through the Gulag’s camps[1][2][3]
- 53 Gulag camp directorates (colloquially referred to as simply “camps”) and 423 labor colonies in the Soviet Union as of March 1940[4]
- The tentative consensus in contemporary Soviet historiography is that roughly 1,600,000[b] died due to detention in the camps.[1][2][3]
I can recomment the Museum of Occupation in Riga (Latvia) as well as the Cheka/KGB Cornerhouse Museum.
My point is: Soviet soldiers knew the concept of draconic encampment in gulags and arbitrary death sentences.
I’m not looking for a lecture pal, thanks all the same
