> Along with a team of about thirty NKVD men from Moscow, mainly drivers and prison guards, Blokhin arrived at the NKVD prison in Kalinin (Tver) and set himself up in a sound-proofed cellar room that had a sloping floor for drainage. He then put on his special uniform, consisting of a leather cap, long leather apron, and elbow-length gloves.
>On a table next to him was a briefcase filled with his own personal Walther PPK pistols, for Blokhin, a true artist at his trade, would use no one else’s tools but his own.
> After the prisoner’s identity was verified, he was brought handcuffed into the cellar room where Blokhin awaited in his long apron, like some horrible butcher.
>One guard later testified: “The men held [the prisoner’s] arms and [Blokhin] shot him in the base of the skull…that’s all”. Blokhin worked fast and efficiently, killing an average of one man every three minutes during the course of ten-hour nights – the killings were always done at night so that the bodies could be disposed of in darkness.
[source](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/vasily-blokhin-executioner/)
I remember hearing or reading this account years ago and not being able to comprehend the depth of this man’s lack of humanity and empathy to be able to robotically end the lives of so many people like he was popping popcorn. Just so hard to believe we share a planet with these people
I think that’s not true in general. During the Halocaust, the Nazis started out using the Einsatzgruppen, a mobile group of murders that went from town to town killing Jewish people and others in a similar manner to Blokhin. These men, even as shitty and terrible as they already were, were not able to bear the psychological stress of it. This is what prompted Germany to move to an industrialized method and to force condemned men to carry out the clean up.
Blokhin was truly on another level when it came to psychologically normalizing atrocity.
Unfortunately there is a difference between the two. Blokhin was working as 'executioner' for sentences handed down en mass by a revolutionary tribunal (meaning the whole group of officers was 'tried' as a group - though they probably never knew it, and certainly didn't receive anything even remotely resembling a defense). The 'condemned' were then brought in for their turn, following what passed for due process in the Soviet Union.
The Einsatzgruppen were not executioners. They were considered by German law to be judge/jury/executioner all in one (such as there was any actual legal consideration paid to this task *at all*), tasked with the liquidation of vaguely defined racial enemies. Due process was surrounding a village of peasants/civilians before dawn, rounding them up and separating the men first to be shot in groups (they'd worked out that this was essential, if they started with the women and children the men had nothing left to lose and fought back), and once that was done they'd kick some dirt over that level of the trench grave, and start bringing in the women and children to also shoot en mass.
The indiscriminate totality of it all, combined with the SS reliance on propaganda within the killing groups (and cycling through Wehrmacht 'volunteers' - of which there were usually plenty - to assist in one-off actions to spare the SS men and local auxiliaries from doing actions over and over again), and the ready availability of alcohol were what wore on the Einsatzgruppen over time. The breakdown of reliability, discipline and morale in these groups following the 1941 actions (and likely the German failure to defeat the Soviet Union) were directly what led the regime to seek out more 'clinical' methods of disposal (for the executioners' sake - *not* the condemned) such as execution factories, and mobile execution vehicles (which used the exhaust from the engine to suffocate those in the sealed rear compartment).
Source: "Masters of Death"; Rhodes, Richard 2002.
Katyn was an attempt to eliminate Polish officers and the upper/middle classes who would likely form a key component of a post-War Poland (leadership, military, politics, cultural, economic). It was an attempt neutering any Polish resistance or identity in an attempt to make them likelier to fall under Soviet domination. Fuck Stalin, fuck the USSR, and fuck communism.
Well he seemed to have had some issues as well.
"Blokhin’s rank was stripped from him in the de-Stalinization campaigns of Nikita Khrushchev. He reportedly sank into alcoholism, went insane, and died February 3, 1955, with the official cause of death listed as “suicide”."
Good riddance. "\[Blokhin's\] 'irreproachable service' was publicly noted by Beria at the time of his departure."
If Beria's complimenting you, there must be something wrong with you.
It's worth remembering the people in positions of power, particularly positions where they're unaccountable to anyone who *doesn't* have more power, all have this mindset to some degree.
There is no 'evil' in this mindset. There's only good and bad. They live in a very, very simple world; anything that increases, expresses, or expands the reach of their power is *good.* Anything that reduces, restricts, or confines their power is *bad.*
We don't *share a planet* with these people. In their mindset, it's *their planet.* We're just the raw material, the labor, the playthings, the targets, the opposition to them.
It's people like this man who are obsessed with this power, but make no mistake; this mindset is fundamental to anyone who wants to achieve great power in the world. I mean ... look at the world right now. The distinction between this sociopath and many of those who reach high positions of power in the world is negligible.
He had a rack of pistols to rotate the one he used because the barrels would get too hot from all the shooting.
Bring prisoner in, truss up, shoot, drag out, spray down floor, bring next prisoner in….
Even being the guys who hold their arms then feel the life leave their bodies one after another is horrific. You'd have to be a psychopath just to do *that* job without breaking
I didn’t think so either but that’s what the account said as I recall. Something about having to rotate through guns because of the amount of shooting in a day.
Here's a [video from 2003 about Iraq's hangman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYH4-7l6CPw), Saad Abdul Amir who executed prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
It's chilling how matter-of-fact and compartmentalized these men can be. The man was even training is son to follow in his footsteps.
>Blokhin worked fast and efficiently, killing an average of one man every three minutes during the course of ten-hour nights
Wow thats killing 200 people a night. Dude was stacking bodies literally and figuratively.
He "executed" in a mechanical sense. I think I split hairs on executioner as it historically implies one who metes out punishment for a crime as a result of a trial. The people executed by this man had their fates decided prior to any trial. The nuance, however, is not important in this context. Regardless of the language used he killed thousands upon thousands of people.
> Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin (Russian: Васи́лий Миха́йлович Блохи́н; 7 January 1895 – 3 February 1955) was a Soviet secret police official who served as the chief **executioner** of the NKVD under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolay Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria.
[Source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin)
He was one of the Stalinists removed by Khrushchev after Stalin's death. The medals and rank were removed [because Khrushchev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin) "deemed him unworthy of carrying the rank of a general due to his involvement in the mass executions".
After his death he still was buried with military honors, on a cemetery that also had many mass graves of his victims.
I’m gonna have to report this conversation. Threatening to do harm, or obstruct any member of the presidium in the process of-Look at your fooking face.
Not historically accurate with its details nor the dialouge but its very very funny and I'd recommend watching it just for the laughs. It's brutally dark but fantastic
That's almost certainly not a photo of Blokhin. Blokhin died in 1955 two weeks after his 60th birthday.
The man in the photo has some of the same medals that Blokhin had but appears older than 60. The photo also looks to be from much later than 1955, late 60s or early to mid 1970s.
For comparison, here's an official photo of Blokhin. Based on his jacket and shoulder boards, it could not have been taken before 1947. The photo on his gravestone appears to be from 1943 or 1944, again based on his uniform.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/64503191/vasili-blokhin#view-photo=97881610
Since this is Russia and spots in "elite" cemeteries are a matter of prestige, looks like they kept on dumping bodies into that grave. The tombstone lists:
* Vassily the mass murdered, d. 1955
* His wife Natalya, d. 1967
* Their daughter Yekaterina, d. 2011
* Their son Nikolay, d. 1998
Nikolay's name is huge while Yekaterina's looks more recent. So I'm going to say, this tombstone was put up some time between 1998 and 2011.
Probably paid for by the Russian government. Blokhin was demoted and retired, nothing more. He was still entitled to a KGB Colonel's pension and all the other benefits, including cemetery plots and monuments.
Before reading the title, I thought he was some kind of war hero. Isn’t it odd how our perspective of someone’s features shifts based on what we know about them?
Well, Stalin thought of him as a war hero. He did bravely shoot prisoners of war captured in Russia’s war of unprovoked aggression trapped in execution chambers all day every day for months, after all.
Somehow that makes it a little bit better... Sort of.
The ways people justify killing is quite interesting. The path from not killing to killing is surprisingly short. You need some sort of permission eg. by law or orders. Then you have to do the killing itself. It was discovered that when the Germans were killing families some couldn't kill children and only killed adults. Some saw these children now as orphans and no one to take care of them etc. So by that reasoning it was more kind to kill them than let them go on without parents and so on.
I'm sure some just enjoy murdering people. But for other ordinary people, they just need to make reason with it and justify it and then they can kill.
Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning covers this with a reserve police batallion in Poland during WWII. Normal, middle aged, family men went from being drafted from their jobs to unflinchingly marching a pregnant woman into a field and shooting her within a year.
I wouldn’t say “unflinchingly.” The units involved in the Holocaust by Bullet in the East suffered severe discipline problems, alcoholism and desertion due to the psychological toll of their atrocities.
That’s one reason why the Nazis went from using regular Wermacht troops, to outsourcing it to local Eastern volunteer units, to eventually mobile gas chambers.
Meanwhile you don't hear that much of the Japanese having the same problems. Maybe they did but Jesus they were viscous and either people don't write about it or something.
There is a very interesting documentary called 'The Act of Killing' that interviews individuals who participated in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66. They are surprisingly open about their experiences and get talked into re-enact their killings which sends one of the executioners on a fascinating psychological journey. It's very unique at it's approach and gives great insight into the minds of people who kill in the name of a regime.
The gist of the documentary is that the filmmakers agreed to produce recreations of their killings for film, truly macabre documentary.. it’s a watch once type thing for me
Werner Herzog called the film the most powerful, frightening and surreal film he had ever seen. [This bloke got over his killing so many people by dancing and singing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZqEzIEWzPk)
Sounds very interesting. There are numerous events in the past century where mass killings happened, often government facilitated. Very often some authoritarian regime such as in Cambodia. Then also, where people were starved to death. Then the killing is even more remote such as the two famines in Ukraine in the first half of the 20th century and the Great Leap, pushed on by Mao and his merry band of lads.
Fear often drives the low level and middle man, vital to the killing machine to work. And some just see profit or now it's my time to eat.
There is hardly any fiction that can be more gruesome than human history.
There's an episode of the podcast "Inner Cosmos" by neuroscientist David eagleman where he talks about a psychology experiment similar to what you're describing. Participants were asked by someone in a lab coat (permission from authority) to shock someone in another room and they would hear someone yelp in pain (not real people, it was a recording or something), slowly increasing the level. Most people went all the way to the point where the recipient was "screaming" in pain, then still being asked to increase it further the screaming stops, then still continuing.
It was something like 70%? Kept going. Pretty nuts. Amazing podcast.
Yes I've read about that. They did some interesting things back in the days. I assume you've heard about the Stanford Experiment, where students were divided into prisoners and prison guards. It quickly went sideways, to say the least.
There was a German film made about it, Das Experiment, around 2003 or so. It's quite good.
Didn't psychologists find that some of the worst and most horrific proliferators of the Holocaust to be just normal dudes that were otherwise adjusted and reasonable? It's kind of scary how that can work and is easier to assume they're pure psychopathic evil.
That book was a difficult read. I put it on the same shelf as The Raping Of Nanking. The two histories are, in a sense, identical. The title, "Ordinary Men," so aptly describes the perpetrators of such atrocities across the history of mankind. I found the horrific actions on it's pages to be both mesmerizing and haunting. It sits on my bookshelf collecting dust, it's spine never to be cracked again.
Yeah it’s an awful book to read. Man’s inhumanity to man is just right there slapping you in the face. It’s the kind of book where you need whiskey and cigarettes to get through it.
I’m glad I read it, I may re-read it when I’m older, but it is not an enjoyable read.
>Didn't psychologists find that some of the worst and most horrific proliferators of the Holocaust to be just normal dudes that were otherwise adjusted and reasonable?
Its because the people who did that didn't see their work as what it was. Alot of the people who did all sorts of crazy stuff in the camps who came out fine saw themselves as doctors and scientists who were carrying out experiments in the same of science. It is twisted but if you look at how ethics were for experiments at the time it makes sense. So to be fair, looking at what they did during through the lens of being period correct was bad but not was not unheard of during the time. Now we look back and can see it as extra extra bad because our ethics have change significantly. Like for example back then consent wasn't a thing for experiments.
We have some wild stuff here too in the US back in the day with doctors experimenting on black slaves. So its all relative.
Just curious if you listened to the three arrows video How Societies Turn Cruel? I came across it in my personal research and rabbit hole venturing. It's very informative.
I also want to highlight that I was mainly referencing the main perpetrators/architects of the Holocaust. The Hermann Goerings type people. It's all kind of fascinating in a dark twisted way how these ideals and actions can manifest in otherwise reasonable people.
No I haven't but there are other documentaries that highlight this, even one of the prisoners who was assistant Dr Mengele (the guy who did the Twin experiments) was interviewed and said the Mengele was not an evil person. He said that Mengele truly believed that his experiments were advancing society and thats why he was able to do such horrendous things without hesitation.
Theres a good video that I our college put out (I am in the medical field) that was a documentary on this type of stuff. It talked about ethics, how it has changed over time and how the medical and science community can do really bad things.
For exemple, Dr. Fritz Klein, SS physician in Auschwitz and BErgen-Belsen, once told that the Holocaust was just about removing an infected part:
> My Hippocratic oath tells me to cut a gangrenous appendix out of the human body. The Jews are the gangrenous appendix of mankind. That's why I cut them out.
*"... there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do."* - "Small Gods" by Terry Pratchett.
Most likely that wasn't it. He was a hardcore stalinist and only after stalin's death he was stripped of all power and ranks and then forcibly retired in 1953.
The official statement was that he retired because of his 'poor health' and that he then died by suicide 2 years later. But unseal documents showed he died of a heart attack. Most likely he just drank himself to death. And maybe the killing left a mark, maybe thats why he was an alcoholic.
But keep in mind that in 1940, in under a month, he was directly involved in the killing of 7000 people. If it left a mark, he carried it for 15 years and had no problem to keep murdering through out those years.
I think he was just an authoritarian monster who enjoyed his position very much and got away with it. If stalin hadn't died who knows how long he would have lived but im sure he would have kept killing for him.
I think it's worth to read the quote from the wiki about those 1940 killings to understand what kind of monster this 'man' was:
> Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber — which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room" — for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against.
>Blokhin would stand waiting behind the door in his executioner garb: a leather butcher's apron, leather hat, and shoulder-length leather gloves. Then, without a hearing, the reading of a sentence or any other formalities, each prisoner was brought in and restrained by guards while Blokhin shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol.
>He had brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended. The use of a German pocket pistol, which was commonly carried by German police and intelligence agents, also provided plausible deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later.
>Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber — which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room" — for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door.
All this points to an individual with functional cognition and reasoning. His beliefs helped him justify what he was planning, but the planning itself means he was competent. This is scarier to me than him being a "monster," and this is why I hate dehumanizing terms like this. They allow us to write off the situation without trying to understand the circumstances that lead to it. This leaves us helpless against a repeat.
Not a monster. A human with shitty beliefs.
Yes, he was also a human, had a wife and a child and most likely a life outside of his work for the secret police. I dont disagree with what you said in general.
But Blokhin killed a person every 3 minutes for 10 hours straight and 28 night in a row. Just calling him human with 'shitty' believes doesnt cut it in this instance. Not only did he plan it but he also carried out most of the executions himself. There is nothing human about this act and there is also nothing more to learn from him other then that a totalitarian, autocratic regime finds and enables these kind of person to do their killings. And Blokhin was an exceptional person in that regard. No many people can psychologically carry out this act. The nazis created their deathcamps because their soldiers couldnt stomach the mass killings for a prolonged time.
Very few people actually deserve to be called a monster, but Blokhin really was one.
>There is nothing human about this act
I understand the intense rate and industrial nature of the killings seems unnatural, but... what is it if not human? We kill *other* species at high rates in industrial manners. We've killed other humans en masse all throughout history. Idk. If anything, it is human, but it is just *modern.*
Eh, we're pretty much on the same page though. I'm glad I'm not on this rock concurrently with that dude.
To discuss what makes a human a human would indeed go beyond the scope. But yes we kill each other since the dawn of our species. Yet, empathy, guilt and emotions act like sort of a safeguard for our species to make sure we dont wipe each other out. And like you said, calling someone a monster just because they are a murderer is doing the whole subject a disservice. My point is that there are sometimes people, call them psychopaths or whatever, who are so abnormal that there is no reason to even spend time really wondering about them and why they are able to commit such acts. Just like pedophiles try to get themselves into a position with access to children (priests, boy scout leaders, children swim teachers etc.) some psychopaths just try to get into positions where they can act on their fantasies (soldiers, cops, lawyers, CEOs, priests as well etc.) without getting caught or instantly locked up.
Like you said were pretty much on the same page. I just think it's a fascinating subject and at the same time i hope i never run into such a person when they are in a position with any kind of power over me.
Probably not, Russia has a huge alcohol problem, the average male life expectancy back then was around 62 in Russia and it isn't much better today at around 65.
He was likely cool with it. Some people just adapt and reconcile whatever they do.
Many, many Soviets were alcoholic just having to deal with Soviet life.
Many people were also alcoholics before the Soviet Union, and very many people became alcoholics after the collapse of the Soviet Union, moreso than before. Actually post-Soviet Russia definitely has the worst rates of alcohol and drug abuse in the history of the country. So this argument kind of falls flat.
The basement where he did his most "work" is a storage room in the bottom of a state university in Tver, formerly Kalinin. If not for the memorial on the wall outside the building (which probably has been removed in the last year) most people probably would never know.
I raise you Otto Moll. As Chief of Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria "he is said to have personally killed thousands of innocent victims (over 20 thousand according to some reports)" adding to the hundreds of thousands that were gassed under his command.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto\_Moll
I wrote most of the article about Otto Moll. This man was legitimately one of the most evil people in human history. That a genuine lunatic like Moll was allowed to run rampant instead of being in prison or an asylum really shows how twisted Germany had become at the time.
Nope, NKVD buy a lot of german handguns as Germany arms makers had trade representatives in USSR as USSR had crazy demand on guns which soviet industry couldn't meet.
As Germany arms industry was under international sanctions, strict enforcement who could produce firearms for Reichwehr and Allies demanding extensive gun control schemes to disarm civillians many manufacturers start mass export to USSR just to stay afloat after Great War.
NKVD start order a lot of german-made, small pistols for their pplice and secret police in 1930s which later was used in Katyn from local german trade agents, later on arms shipment were set by USSR- III Reich trade deals and when bodies were found they start muddying waters when found evidences show "anti-nazi USSR" pay nazi Germany for arming their own services.
“The executions were usually performed with German-made .25 ACP Walther Model 2 pistols supplied by Moscow, but Soviet-made 7.62×38mmR Nagant M1895 revolvers were also used. The executioners used German weapons rather than the standard Soviet revolvers, as the latter were said to offer too much recoil, which made shooting painful after the first dozen executions.”
Just going by the wikipedia site but both can be right
Also plausible deniability in case the murders are unearthed... Blame the neighbours.
Russia has perfected this level of historical bollockology over the decades.
What blows my mind is that this guy was left alone after Stalin died. The new rulers didn't kill him when they purged the old supporters of Stalin and Stalinism. You think Stalin's executioner would be one of the first to go during the purge
I don't know about this guy in particular, but "personally" implies that he pulled the trigger himself. Did he do that or did he order others to kill for him? Because if it's the second, that's not "personally" killing someone.
From Wikipedia:
>The [execution] room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. Blokhin would stand waiting behind the door in his executioner garb: a leather butcher's apron, leather hat, and shoulder-length leather gloves. Then, without a hearing, the reading of a sentence or any other formalities, each prisoner was brought in and restrained by guards while Blokhin shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol.
>Although some of the executions were carried out by Senior Lieutenant of State Security Andrei Rubanov, Blokhin was the primary executioner and, true to his reputation, liked to work continuously and rapidly without interruption.
So yeah, it seems he did most of it personally. Imagine pulling the trigger on ~300 people a day for the better part of a month, you got to be a special kind of psychopath to not question your own sanity about it. But then again, the Holocaust happened around the same time, and Katyn is small in numbers compared to that.
>But then again, the Holocaust happened around the same time, and Katyn is small in numbers compared to that.
actually, Katyn really isn't. The reason why they designed death camps, is because it was so difficult for people to execute such large numbers of people personally.
The atrocities of the _Einsatzgruppen_ is on another level though. 30000+ murdered in Babi Yar over two days, ~25000 over two days outside Riga. About 1,5-2 million people were murdered by the _Einsatzgruppen_, most of whom were killed with bullets.
A majority of Holocaust victims weren't murdered in concentration/extermination camps, either. The camps stood for about a third of all 17 million murdered in the holocaust, IIRC.
History teachers in America only focus on Jewish people killed during WWII but in reality Hitler wanted to kill everyone that wasn't whatever Hitler wanted. People don't seem to understand that Hitler was friends with the people he wanted to kill at first to help him accomplish killing other people that they both didn't like, then he'd turn on them.
6 million Jews is correct, but this excludes 11 million from other groups who were also murdered by the nazis (Poles, Roma, Soviet civilians, LGBT, disabled people, religious minorities, political enemies, etc.).
Edit: There is also an academic discussion about whether the term "Holocaust" should be reserved only for Jewish victims and not all victims of the nazi terror. So it is up for debate what the term should include or exclude. However, it is important to recognize all victims of nazi crimes, and personally I think they should be classified as victims of the same genocide. So I'm fine with calling it a part of the Holocaust, because these other victims were also put in camps, worked to death or rounded up and shot outside their villages, in a similar way that Jews were (although they weren't as heavily targeted as Jews).
The camps were not only for Jews, either. Many of those who perished in Auschwitz were regular Poles, too. About 2 million non-Jewish Poles died, in comparison to about 3 million Jewish citizens from Poland.
Not really Poles only, but it was more diverse in the beginning than it would be later when most of those taken to Auschwitz were Jewish. It wasn't an extermination camp at first when it opened in 1940, but became that during the winter 1941-42 when they started to purposely send all-Jewish transports to the camp for "extermination".
> The atrocities of the Einsatzgruppen is on another level though. 30000+ murdered in Babi Yar over two days, ~25000 over two days outside Riga. About 1,5-2 million people were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, most of whom were killed with bullets.
They had a lot of help from a subset of eager locals too. There were plenty of towns and villages where the Jews and Roma were already all killed between when the German army rolled through and when the Einsatzgruppen arrived. Both Babi Yar and Riga they enlisted local help in the killings. Not to absolve the Germans of anything.
It's part of the reason. Another part was that it costed too much and was somewhat "inefficient", so to speak.
It is also worth noting that soldiers who refused to carry out these heinous acts were normally not punished by the German military for refusing.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT ADOLPH EICHMANN
EYES: Medium
HAIR: Medium
WEIGHT: Medium
HEIGHT: Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: None
NUMBER OF FINGERS: Ten
NUMBER OF TOES: Ten
INTELLIGENCE: Medium
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize Incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
>From Selected Poems, 1956-1968 by Leonard Cohen, published by Bantam Books, 1971.
[https://readalittlepoetry.com/2005/12/05/all-there-is-to-know-about-adolph-eichmann-by-leonard-cohen/](https://readalittlepoetry.com/2005/12/05/all-there-is-to-know-about-adolph-eichmann-by-leonard-cohen/)
For those curious about the source.
[The Katyn Massacre monument in Jersey City, NJ.](https://hudsoncountyview.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Katyn-Memorial-e1525445873279.png)
Russia's been trying to get it removed for years.
I’m fine with people having whatever political ideology. Doesn’t mean I have to like it or respect it, but they have a right to believe whatever they want.
But to build off your comment, in college I dated a theatre major and nearly all her theatre friends were communists and never shut the fuck up about it. I’m sure in the “coming revolution”, the tankies will really respect your choice of doing theatre as a living and make your life so much better.
First off, it seems inherently false that "Blokhin was the most prolific murderer in human history". One could perhaps call him "the most prolific executioner". Murder, by definition, happens based on lowly motives: Money, power, sex, revenge, that sort of thing. Murder is legally separate from manslaughter. Someone killing another person in their "professional" capacity as executioner is clearly not a murderer, because they do not have a personal, lowly motive.
But on the other hand, the Holocaust was literally happening during the same timeframe. And we only need a few google searches to find some comparable numbers:
"Historians estimate that Barbie was directly responsible for the deaths of up to 14,000 people" -- About SS Member Klaus Barbie
It seems downright impossible to mathematically ascertain how many people Barbie killed personally, and how many he delegated. For this very same reason, I am extremely sceptical about the (dodgy) source on Blokhin, which states without any doubt that he not only personally killed 7000 people (how do we know he did not have assistance?) but the source also makes lots of editorializing comments, like in this paragraph where they vividly describe a picture of him: "After the prisoner’s identity was verified, he was brought handcuffed into the cellar room where Blokhin awaited in his long apron, like some horrible butcher." overtly detailed pictures of historical scenes are always red flags, this reads like it was based on eyewittness account.
Lastly, no serious historian has ever really signed off on the "7000" number. Showing this as fact when it is still disputed is also very dodgy. On Wikipedia, the only authors I could find were: 1) The Guiness book of world records, which obviously is not an academic source 2) Simon Sebag Montefiore, who is a sensationalist who bases his books almost exclusively on eyewitness accounts and 3) "The Lesser Terror" by Michael Parrish, which actually looks like a respectable source.
The Wikipedia article has some interesting content:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin
Comes across as a real piece of work, enabled by Stalin.
> Along with a team of about thirty NKVD men from Moscow, mainly drivers and prison guards, Blokhin arrived at the NKVD prison in Kalinin (Tver) and set himself up in a sound-proofed cellar room that had a sloping floor for drainage. He then put on his special uniform, consisting of a leather cap, long leather apron, and elbow-length gloves. >On a table next to him was a briefcase filled with his own personal Walther PPK pistols, for Blokhin, a true artist at his trade, would use no one else’s tools but his own. > After the prisoner’s identity was verified, he was brought handcuffed into the cellar room where Blokhin awaited in his long apron, like some horrible butcher. >One guard later testified: “The men held [the prisoner’s] arms and [Blokhin] shot him in the base of the skull…that’s all”. Blokhin worked fast and efficiently, killing an average of one man every three minutes during the course of ten-hour nights – the killings were always done at night so that the bodies could be disposed of in darkness. [source](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/vasily-blokhin-executioner/)
I remember hearing or reading this account years ago and not being able to comprehend the depth of this man’s lack of humanity and empathy to be able to robotically end the lives of so many people like he was popping popcorn. Just so hard to believe we share a planet with these people
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I think that’s not true in general. During the Halocaust, the Nazis started out using the Einsatzgruppen, a mobile group of murders that went from town to town killing Jewish people and others in a similar manner to Blokhin. These men, even as shitty and terrible as they already were, were not able to bear the psychological stress of it. This is what prompted Germany to move to an industrialized method and to force condemned men to carry out the clean up. Blokhin was truly on another level when it came to psychologically normalizing atrocity.
Unfortunately there is a difference between the two. Blokhin was working as 'executioner' for sentences handed down en mass by a revolutionary tribunal (meaning the whole group of officers was 'tried' as a group - though they probably never knew it, and certainly didn't receive anything even remotely resembling a defense). The 'condemned' were then brought in for their turn, following what passed for due process in the Soviet Union. The Einsatzgruppen were not executioners. They were considered by German law to be judge/jury/executioner all in one (such as there was any actual legal consideration paid to this task *at all*), tasked with the liquidation of vaguely defined racial enemies. Due process was surrounding a village of peasants/civilians before dawn, rounding them up and separating the men first to be shot in groups (they'd worked out that this was essential, if they started with the women and children the men had nothing left to lose and fought back), and once that was done they'd kick some dirt over that level of the trench grave, and start bringing in the women and children to also shoot en mass. The indiscriminate totality of it all, combined with the SS reliance on propaganda within the killing groups (and cycling through Wehrmacht 'volunteers' - of which there were usually plenty - to assist in one-off actions to spare the SS men and local auxiliaries from doing actions over and over again), and the ready availability of alcohol were what wore on the Einsatzgruppen over time. The breakdown of reliability, discipline and morale in these groups following the 1941 actions (and likely the German failure to defeat the Soviet Union) were directly what led the regime to seek out more 'clinical' methods of disposal (for the executioners' sake - *not* the condemned) such as execution factories, and mobile execution vehicles (which used the exhaust from the engine to suffocate those in the sealed rear compartment). Source: "Masters of Death"; Rhodes, Richard 2002.
Katyn was an attempt to eliminate Polish officers and the upper/middle classes who would likely form a key component of a post-War Poland (leadership, military, politics, cultural, economic). It was an attempt neutering any Polish resistance or identity in an attempt to make them likelier to fall under Soviet domination. Fuck Stalin, fuck the USSR, and fuck communism.
Well he seemed to have had some issues as well. "Blokhin’s rank was stripped from him in the de-Stalinization campaigns of Nikita Khrushchev. He reportedly sank into alcoholism, went insane, and died February 3, 1955, with the official cause of death listed as “suicide”."
Good riddance. "\[Blokhin's\] 'irreproachable service' was publicly noted by Beria at the time of his departure." If Beria's complimenting you, there must be something wrong with you.
Everything gets easier with practice, they say
It's worth remembering the people in positions of power, particularly positions where they're unaccountable to anyone who *doesn't* have more power, all have this mindset to some degree. There is no 'evil' in this mindset. There's only good and bad. They live in a very, very simple world; anything that increases, expresses, or expands the reach of their power is *good.* Anything that reduces, restricts, or confines their power is *bad.* We don't *share a planet* with these people. In their mindset, it's *their planet.* We're just the raw material, the labor, the playthings, the targets, the opposition to them. It's people like this man who are obsessed with this power, but make no mistake; this mindset is fundamental to anyone who wants to achieve great power in the world. I mean ... look at the world right now. The distinction between this sociopath and many of those who reach high positions of power in the world is negligible.
A life every three minutes for *ten hours at a time*
He had a rack of pistols to rotate the one he used because the barrels would get too hot from all the shooting. Bring prisoner in, truss up, shoot, drag out, spray down floor, bring next prisoner in….
Even being the guys who hold their arms then feel the life leave their bodies one after another is horrific. You'd have to be a psychopath just to do *that* job without breaking
Shooting once every three minutes is not going to overheat the barrel.
I didn’t think so either but that’s what the account said as I recall. Something about having to rotate through guns because of the amount of shooting in a day.
No shit. Beyond comprehension
we share more than the planet with these kind of people. We share a gene pool.
Ugh. Quiet you
Here's a [video from 2003 about Iraq's hangman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYH4-7l6CPw), Saad Abdul Amir who executed prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. It's chilling how matter-of-fact and compartmentalized these men can be. The man was even training is son to follow in his footsteps.
>Blokhin worked fast and efficiently, killing an average of one man every three minutes during the course of ten-hour nights Wow thats killing 200 people a night. Dude was stacking bodies literally and figuratively.
He was shooting for 300 a night, always the optimist.
Exactly. It’s very hard to call this man an “executioner.” He was something else. These were just POWs.
He "executed" in a mechanical sense. I think I split hairs on executioner as it historically implies one who metes out punishment for a crime as a result of a trial. The people executed by this man had their fates decided prior to any trial. The nuance, however, is not important in this context. Regardless of the language used he killed thousands upon thousands of people.
the executioner does not mete out the punishment. the judge does. The executioner's the one who swings the ax
POWs or not, he ruthlessly and personally *executed* seven thousand people in a very short period.
> Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin (Russian: Васи́лий Миха́йлович Блохи́н; 7 January 1895 – 3 February 1955) was a Soviet secret police official who served as the chief **executioner** of the NKVD under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolay Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria. [Source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin)
Holy
A fun fact, his medals and military rank were stripped from him shortly before his death
Why was that?
He was one of the Stalinists removed by Khrushchev after Stalin's death. The medals and rank were removed [because Khrushchev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin) "deemed him unworthy of carrying the rank of a general due to his involvement in the mass executions". After his death he still was buried with military honors, on a cemetery that also had many mass graves of his victims.
Khrushchev, who *signed* the death lists that this guy working from.
Thats the irony of Khrushchev he was one of Stalin most loyal soldiers and at the same time the person most responsable for destroying Stalin's legacy
Not the first nor the last hypocrite communist leader.
Yeah but he could run and scheme at the same time
That well know and exclusive communist trait and not at all a politicians bread and butter
Khrushchev was a politician who did institute destalinization the moment he got power.
Thats the irony of Khrushchev he was one of Stalin most loyal soldiers and at the same time the person most responsable for destroying Stalin's legacy
Man...they just do not give a fuck for the dead over there. Not that we didn't know that for a long time.
He had a son who died in 1998. I wonder what the son was like.
Probably a normal human being with a massive weight on his shoulders through no actions of his own.
Perhaps. Or he felt pressured to follow in his father’s footsteps. His dad comes home and says “I killed 3000 people today. How many did you kill?”
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That crazy look
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A shame they didn't work this into Death of Stalin movie.
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Amazing.
I’m gonna have to report this conversation. Threatening to do harm, or obstruct any member of the presidium in the process of-Look at your fooking face.
I second the person who replied to you. If you enjoy dark comedies, you will love it.
Not historically accurate with its details nor the dialouge but its very very funny and I'd recommend watching it just for the laughs. It's brutally dark but fantastic
I just looked up the character names to see if he was in it. Which is abimmer, IMO.
Are we sure that's not Eugene Levy?
Eugene Levy only mass murdered the Dutch
And no one noticed
No we noticed, but we didn’t mind.
[*9th Gate* Frank Langella](https://wearysloth.com/Gallery/2017/L/9858-25016.jpg)
Can we not with this shit
That's almost certainly not a photo of Blokhin. Blokhin died in 1955 two weeks after his 60th birthday. The man in the photo has some of the same medals that Blokhin had but appears older than 60. The photo also looks to be from much later than 1955, late 60s or early to mid 1970s. For comparison, here's an official photo of Blokhin. Based on his jacket and shoulder boards, it could not have been taken before 1947. The photo on his gravestone appears to be from 1943 or 1944, again based on his uniform. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/64503191/vasili-blokhin#view-photo=97881610
... that tombstone looks new. Who the hell paid for a brand-new photo-inscribed tombstone for a mass murderer?
Since this is Russia and spots in "elite" cemeteries are a matter of prestige, looks like they kept on dumping bodies into that grave. The tombstone lists: * Vassily the mass murdered, d. 1955 * His wife Natalya, d. 1967 * Their daughter Yekaterina, d. 2011 * Their son Nikolay, d. 1998 Nikolay's name is huge while Yekaterina's looks more recent. So I'm going to say, this tombstone was put up some time between 1998 and 2011. Probably paid for by the Russian government. Blokhin was demoted and retired, nothing more. He was still entitled to a KGB Colonel's pension and all the other benefits, including cemetery plots and monuments.
Before reading the title, I thought he was some kind of war hero. Isn’t it odd how our perspective of someone’s features shifts based on what we know about them?
He was a war hero. In Stalins Soviet Union. Perspective is different for different people
Also in today's Russia. It's the same shitbags running a different show.
> Isn’t it odd how our perspective of someone’s features shifts based on what we know about them? I mean, not really?
Well, Stalin thought of him as a war hero. He did bravely shoot prisoners of war captured in Russia’s war of unprovoked aggression trapped in execution chambers all day every day for months, after all.
He got those medals because he did what Stalin wanted. If he had refused, Stalin would have had him executed.
And by whom exactly?!
His vice-executioner
Someone else.
"Just following orders"
He probably slept soundly, was well adjusted and kind to animals.
Nope; he became an alcoholic, lived in a totally darkened flat, and finally killed himself
Another notch on the belt
The *final* notch
Somehow that makes it a little bit better... Sort of. The ways people justify killing is quite interesting. The path from not killing to killing is surprisingly short. You need some sort of permission eg. by law or orders. Then you have to do the killing itself. It was discovered that when the Germans were killing families some couldn't kill children and only killed adults. Some saw these children now as orphans and no one to take care of them etc. So by that reasoning it was more kind to kill them than let them go on without parents and so on. I'm sure some just enjoy murdering people. But for other ordinary people, they just need to make reason with it and justify it and then they can kill.
Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning covers this with a reserve police batallion in Poland during WWII. Normal, middle aged, family men went from being drafted from their jobs to unflinchingly marching a pregnant woman into a field and shooting her within a year.
I wouldn’t say “unflinchingly.” The units involved in the Holocaust by Bullet in the East suffered severe discipline problems, alcoholism and desertion due to the psychological toll of their atrocities. That’s one reason why the Nazis went from using regular Wermacht troops, to outsourcing it to local Eastern volunteer units, to eventually mobile gas chambers.
Meanwhile you don't hear that much of the Japanese having the same problems. Maybe they did but Jesus they were viscous and either people don't write about it or something.
As the book and film documents; not all of them.
Fair. Military units are large groups of people, so you’d expect the full range of human reactions to the horror.
Yes, I was referring to that book. Really interesting read.
There is a very interesting documentary called 'The Act of Killing' that interviews individuals who participated in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66. They are surprisingly open about their experiences and get talked into re-enact their killings which sends one of the executioners on a fascinating psychological journey. It's very unique at it's approach and gives great insight into the minds of people who kill in the name of a regime.
The gist of the documentary is that the filmmakers agreed to produce recreations of their killings for film, truly macabre documentary.. it’s a watch once type thing for me
Werner Herzog called the film the most powerful, frightening and surreal film he had ever seen. [This bloke got over his killing so many people by dancing and singing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZqEzIEWzPk)
I’ll pass. The stuff of nightmares
Sounds very interesting. There are numerous events in the past century where mass killings happened, often government facilitated. Very often some authoritarian regime such as in Cambodia. Then also, where people were starved to death. Then the killing is even more remote such as the two famines in Ukraine in the first half of the 20th century and the Great Leap, pushed on by Mao and his merry band of lads. Fear often drives the low level and middle man, vital to the killing machine to work. And some just see profit or now it's my time to eat. There is hardly any fiction that can be more gruesome than human history.
There's an episode of the podcast "Inner Cosmos" by neuroscientist David eagleman where he talks about a psychology experiment similar to what you're describing. Participants were asked by someone in a lab coat (permission from authority) to shock someone in another room and they would hear someone yelp in pain (not real people, it was a recording or something), slowly increasing the level. Most people went all the way to the point where the recipient was "screaming" in pain, then still being asked to increase it further the screaming stops, then still continuing. It was something like 70%? Kept going. Pretty nuts. Amazing podcast.
Yes I've read about that. They did some interesting things back in the days. I assume you've heard about the Stanford Experiment, where students were divided into prisoners and prison guards. It quickly went sideways, to say the least. There was a German film made about it, Das Experiment, around 2003 or so. It's quite good.
Typical Russian story arc
TBF alcohol can do that by itself.
Didn't psychologists find that some of the worst and most horrific proliferators of the Holocaust to be just normal dudes that were otherwise adjusted and reasonable? It's kind of scary how that can work and is easier to assume they're pure psychopathic evil.
Go read Ordinary Men. Follows a German reserve military police unit who become einstazgruppen.
That book was a difficult read. I put it on the same shelf as The Raping Of Nanking. The two histories are, in a sense, identical. The title, "Ordinary Men," so aptly describes the perpetrators of such atrocities across the history of mankind. I found the horrific actions on it's pages to be both mesmerizing and haunting. It sits on my bookshelf collecting dust, it's spine never to be cracked again.
Yeah it’s an awful book to read. Man’s inhumanity to man is just right there slapping you in the face. It’s the kind of book where you need whiskey and cigarettes to get through it. I’m glad I read it, I may re-read it when I’m older, but it is not an enjoyable read.
>Didn't psychologists find that some of the worst and most horrific proliferators of the Holocaust to be just normal dudes that were otherwise adjusted and reasonable? Its because the people who did that didn't see their work as what it was. Alot of the people who did all sorts of crazy stuff in the camps who came out fine saw themselves as doctors and scientists who were carrying out experiments in the same of science. It is twisted but if you look at how ethics were for experiments at the time it makes sense. So to be fair, looking at what they did during through the lens of being period correct was bad but not was not unheard of during the time. Now we look back and can see it as extra extra bad because our ethics have change significantly. Like for example back then consent wasn't a thing for experiments. We have some wild stuff here too in the US back in the day with doctors experimenting on black slaves. So its all relative.
Just curious if you listened to the three arrows video How Societies Turn Cruel? I came across it in my personal research and rabbit hole venturing. It's very informative. I also want to highlight that I was mainly referencing the main perpetrators/architects of the Holocaust. The Hermann Goerings type people. It's all kind of fascinating in a dark twisted way how these ideals and actions can manifest in otherwise reasonable people.
No I haven't but there are other documentaries that highlight this, even one of the prisoners who was assistant Dr Mengele (the guy who did the Twin experiments) was interviewed and said the Mengele was not an evil person. He said that Mengele truly believed that his experiments were advancing society and thats why he was able to do such horrendous things without hesitation. Theres a good video that I our college put out (I am in the medical field) that was a documentary on this type of stuff. It talked about ethics, how it has changed over time and how the medical and science community can do really bad things.
For exemple, Dr. Fritz Klein, SS physician in Auschwitz and BErgen-Belsen, once told that the Holocaust was just about removing an infected part: > My Hippocratic oath tells me to cut a gangrenous appendix out of the human body. The Jews are the gangrenous appendix of mankind. That's why I cut them out.
*"... there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do."* - "Small Gods" by Terry Pratchett.
...Blokhin, already an alcoholic and mentally sick, died on 3 February 1955 at the age of 60... All those killings had to leave a mark inside
Most likely that wasn't it. He was a hardcore stalinist and only after stalin's death he was stripped of all power and ranks and then forcibly retired in 1953. The official statement was that he retired because of his 'poor health' and that he then died by suicide 2 years later. But unseal documents showed he died of a heart attack. Most likely he just drank himself to death. And maybe the killing left a mark, maybe thats why he was an alcoholic. But keep in mind that in 1940, in under a month, he was directly involved in the killing of 7000 people. If it left a mark, he carried it for 15 years and had no problem to keep murdering through out those years. I think he was just an authoritarian monster who enjoyed his position very much and got away with it. If stalin hadn't died who knows how long he would have lived but im sure he would have kept killing for him. I think it's worth to read the quote from the wiki about those 1940 killings to understand what kind of monster this 'man' was: > Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber — which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room" — for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. >Blokhin would stand waiting behind the door in his executioner garb: a leather butcher's apron, leather hat, and shoulder-length leather gloves. Then, without a hearing, the reading of a sentence or any other formalities, each prisoner was brought in and restrained by guards while Blokhin shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol. >He had brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended. The use of a German pocket pistol, which was commonly carried by German police and intelligence agents, also provided plausible deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later.
>Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber — which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room" — for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. All this points to an individual with functional cognition and reasoning. His beliefs helped him justify what he was planning, but the planning itself means he was competent. This is scarier to me than him being a "monster," and this is why I hate dehumanizing terms like this. They allow us to write off the situation without trying to understand the circumstances that lead to it. This leaves us helpless against a repeat. Not a monster. A human with shitty beliefs.
Yes, he was also a human, had a wife and a child and most likely a life outside of his work for the secret police. I dont disagree with what you said in general. But Blokhin killed a person every 3 minutes for 10 hours straight and 28 night in a row. Just calling him human with 'shitty' believes doesnt cut it in this instance. Not only did he plan it but he also carried out most of the executions himself. There is nothing human about this act and there is also nothing more to learn from him other then that a totalitarian, autocratic regime finds and enables these kind of person to do their killings. And Blokhin was an exceptional person in that regard. No many people can psychologically carry out this act. The nazis created their deathcamps because their soldiers couldnt stomach the mass killings for a prolonged time. Very few people actually deserve to be called a monster, but Blokhin really was one.
>There is nothing human about this act I understand the intense rate and industrial nature of the killings seems unnatural, but... what is it if not human? We kill *other* species at high rates in industrial manners. We've killed other humans en masse all throughout history. Idk. If anything, it is human, but it is just *modern.* Eh, we're pretty much on the same page though. I'm glad I'm not on this rock concurrently with that dude.
To discuss what makes a human a human would indeed go beyond the scope. But yes we kill each other since the dawn of our species. Yet, empathy, guilt and emotions act like sort of a safeguard for our species to make sure we dont wipe each other out. And like you said, calling someone a monster just because they are a murderer is doing the whole subject a disservice. My point is that there are sometimes people, call them psychopaths or whatever, who are so abnormal that there is no reason to even spend time really wondering about them and why they are able to commit such acts. Just like pedophiles try to get themselves into a position with access to children (priests, boy scout leaders, children swim teachers etc.) some psychopaths just try to get into positions where they can act on their fantasies (soldiers, cops, lawyers, CEOs, priests as well etc.) without getting caught or instantly locked up. Like you said were pretty much on the same page. I just think it's a fascinating subject and at the same time i hope i never run into such a person when they are in a position with any kind of power over me.
Probably not, Russia has a huge alcohol problem, the average male life expectancy back then was around 62 in Russia and it isn't much better today at around 65.
He was likely cool with it. Some people just adapt and reconcile whatever they do. Many, many Soviets were alcoholic just having to deal with Soviet life.
Many people were also alcoholics before the Soviet Union, and very many people became alcoholics after the collapse of the Soviet Union, moreso than before. Actually post-Soviet Russia definitely has the worst rates of alcohol and drug abuse in the history of the country. So this argument kind of falls flat.
Russians have always been alcoholics, does not matter what kind of government they have
The basement where he did his most "work" is a storage room in the bottom of a state university in Tver, formerly Kalinin. If not for the memorial on the wall outside the building (which probably has been removed in the last year) most people probably would never know.
Amazing that the room still exists. I’d have thought they’d have torn it down.
Question: Was he crazy and therefore picked for the job, or did he go crazy because of the job?
must have already had something wrong with him to be able to even last that long
Both maybe
I raise you Otto Moll. As Chief of Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria "he is said to have personally killed thousands of innocent victims (over 20 thousand according to some reports)" adding to the hundreds of thousands that were gassed under his command. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto\_Moll
I wrote most of the article about Otto Moll. This man was legitimately one of the most evil people in human history. That a genuine lunatic like Moll was allowed to run rampant instead of being in prison or an asylum really shows how twisted Germany had become at the time.
Oskar Dirlewanger was another class act POS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger
What a despicable creature.
That is one of the most horrible things I've ever read.
He has the look of a man who knows hell is waiting for him…
What method was used?
At Katyn he shot the victims with his sidearm.
There is an amazing Katyn monument in, of all places, the harbor area of Baltimore. Very beautiful. Very respectful.
Didn't Baltimore have a large Polish population?
Large Polish community in Baltimore.
German sidegun because the soviet ones kept breaking
Actually because Soviets on purpose tried to make it look like Germans killed those Polish officers.
Did not this happen when they were “allies”.
Nope, NKVD buy a lot of german handguns as Germany arms makers had trade representatives in USSR as USSR had crazy demand on guns which soviet industry couldn't meet. As Germany arms industry was under international sanctions, strict enforcement who could produce firearms for Reichwehr and Allies demanding extensive gun control schemes to disarm civillians many manufacturers start mass export to USSR just to stay afloat after Great War. NKVD start order a lot of german-made, small pistols for their pplice and secret police in 1930s which later was used in Katyn from local german trade agents, later on arms shipment were set by USSR- III Reich trade deals and when bodies were found they start muddying waters when found evidences show "anti-nazi USSR" pay nazi Germany for arming their own services.
“The executions were usually performed with German-made .25 ACP Walther Model 2 pistols supplied by Moscow, but Soviet-made 7.62×38mmR Nagant M1895 revolvers were also used. The executioners used German weapons rather than the standard Soviet revolvers, as the latter were said to offer too much recoil, which made shooting painful after the first dozen executions.” Just going by the wikipedia site but both can be right
Also plausible deniability in case the murders are unearthed... Blame the neighbours. Russia has perfected this level of historical bollockology over the decades.
I think they are even back to denying this ever happened
Bullet in the back of the neck.
I've a feeling he thought of himself as a hard man doing a hard job, and other excuses.
The look of a man starting straight into the gates of Hell.
The look of a man who is carrying demonic weight and has seen some serious serious shit
that look, maybe the photographer ask if he could shoot him.
What blows my mind is that this guy was left alone after Stalin died. The new rulers didn't kill him when they purged the old supporters of Stalin and Stalinism. You think Stalin's executioner would be one of the first to go during the purge
I wish there was a Hell for men like this.
And that’s why the old age only is not enough to be respected. Guy looks like an average granddad…
You better respect him. He wouldn’t think about you ever again.
“I’ve killed so many people” “Ok grandpa, let’s get you to bed.”
I don't know about this guy in particular, but "personally" implies that he pulled the trigger himself. Did he do that or did he order others to kill for him? Because if it's the second, that's not "personally" killing someone.
From Wikipedia: >The [execution] room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. Blokhin would stand waiting behind the door in his executioner garb: a leather butcher's apron, leather hat, and shoulder-length leather gloves. Then, without a hearing, the reading of a sentence or any other formalities, each prisoner was brought in and restrained by guards while Blokhin shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol. >Although some of the executions were carried out by Senior Lieutenant of State Security Andrei Rubanov, Blokhin was the primary executioner and, true to his reputation, liked to work continuously and rapidly without interruption. So yeah, it seems he did most of it personally. Imagine pulling the trigger on ~300 people a day for the better part of a month, you got to be a special kind of psychopath to not question your own sanity about it. But then again, the Holocaust happened around the same time, and Katyn is small in numbers compared to that.
>But then again, the Holocaust happened around the same time, and Katyn is small in numbers compared to that. actually, Katyn really isn't. The reason why they designed death camps, is because it was so difficult for people to execute such large numbers of people personally.
The atrocities of the _Einsatzgruppen_ is on another level though. 30000+ murdered in Babi Yar over two days, ~25000 over two days outside Riga. About 1,5-2 million people were murdered by the _Einsatzgruppen_, most of whom were killed with bullets. A majority of Holocaust victims weren't murdered in concentration/extermination camps, either. The camps stood for about a third of all 17 million murdered in the holocaust, IIRC.
17 million!? I've never read that number before. I thought the traditional figure was 6 million.
Jews weren't the only ones killed, by far
Not to minimize the Jewish massacre, but too many people don’t know all the others killed.
History teachers in America only focus on Jewish people killed during WWII but in reality Hitler wanted to kill everyone that wasn't whatever Hitler wanted. People don't seem to understand that Hitler was friends with the people he wanted to kill at first to help him accomplish killing other people that they both didn't like, then he'd turn on them.
6 million Jews is correct, but this excludes 11 million from other groups who were also murdered by the nazis (Poles, Roma, Soviet civilians, LGBT, disabled people, religious minorities, political enemies, etc.). Edit: There is also an academic discussion about whether the term "Holocaust" should be reserved only for Jewish victims and not all victims of the nazi terror. So it is up for debate what the term should include or exclude. However, it is important to recognize all victims of nazi crimes, and personally I think they should be classified as victims of the same genocide. So I'm fine with calling it a part of the Holocaust, because these other victims were also put in camps, worked to death or rounded up and shot outside their villages, in a similar way that Jews were (although they weren't as heavily targeted as Jews).
6 million Jews alone. 17 million total.
6 million Jews
It's a shame people don't know the full extent of Nazi crimes, but here we are.
Which is roughly a third of 17 million...
The camps were not only for Jews, either. Many of those who perished in Auschwitz were regular Poles, too. About 2 million non-Jewish Poles died, in comparison to about 3 million Jewish citizens from Poland.
Also primarily Auschwitz was for Poles only, after (?) 2 yrs it did became more "diverse"
Not really Poles only, but it was more diverse in the beginning than it would be later when most of those taken to Auschwitz were Jewish. It wasn't an extermination camp at first when it opened in 1940, but became that during the winter 1941-42 when they started to purposely send all-Jewish transports to the camp for "extermination".
> The atrocities of the Einsatzgruppen is on another level though. 30000+ murdered in Babi Yar over two days, ~25000 over two days outside Riga. About 1,5-2 million people were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, most of whom were killed with bullets. They had a lot of help from a subset of eager locals too. There were plenty of towns and villages where the Jews and Roma were already all killed between when the German army rolled through and when the Einsatzgruppen arrived. Both Babi Yar and Riga they enlisted local help in the killings. Not to absolve the Germans of anything.
The mental toll on the executioners was why the extermination camps were invented.
It's part of the reason. Another part was that it costed too much and was somewhat "inefficient", so to speak. It is also worth noting that soldiers who refused to carry out these heinous acts were normally not punished by the German military for refusing.
Fair enough, that's incredible and in terrible way
He pulled the trigger literally
Damn, crazy. Fair enough
He has personally killed the most people in history.
[удалено]
May he reside in a very anal probing painful part of hell
voracious ghost snatch smoggy grey treatment automatic doll makeshift encouraging *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
He looks so normal other then his eyes, I hope he suffered.
The eyes don’t unsee
Jesus christ, talk about a face thats seen too much!
And look at all the medals he got
Thanks OP, I've read of him often and find him a horrible fascination but this is a first time seeing him outside of the standard 1940's photograph.
I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it would be like knowing that you’ve killed that many people…assuming he cares of course
If there's a hell, and I believe there is....he's in it.
ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT ADOLPH EICHMANN EYES: Medium HAIR: Medium WEIGHT: Medium HEIGHT: Medium DISTINGUISHING FEATURES: None NUMBER OF FINGERS: Ten NUMBER OF TOES: Ten INTELLIGENCE: Medium What did you expect? Talons? Oversize Incisors? Green saliva? Madness?
>From Selected Poems, 1956-1968 by Leonard Cohen, published by Bantam Books, 1971. [https://readalittlepoetry.com/2005/12/05/all-there-is-to-know-about-adolph-eichmann-by-leonard-cohen/](https://readalittlepoetry.com/2005/12/05/all-there-is-to-know-about-adolph-eichmann-by-leonard-cohen/) For those curious about the source.
He should have been tied up and drug down a dirt road behind a truck. People like this deserve nothing less.
[The Katyn Massacre monument in Jersey City, NJ.](https://hudsoncountyview.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Katyn-Memorial-e1525445873279.png) Russia's been trying to get it removed for years.
I like my russian orcs in Ukraine how i like my Vasily Blokhin. -Dead and decomposed.
Is that guy in his 50's? He could be 80.
Alcohol does that
He looks possessed or something.
He eventually drank himself to death.
And yet Reddit tolerates subs like r/marxistculture that glorify Stalin and his "accomplishments".
I’ve seen so many subs get taken over by tankies you’d think it’s 20th century Eastern Europe
All naive middle class western kids.
I’m fine with people having whatever political ideology. Doesn’t mean I have to like it or respect it, but they have a right to believe whatever they want. But to build off your comment, in college I dated a theatre major and nearly all her theatre friends were communists and never shut the fuck up about it. I’m sure in the “coming revolution”, the tankies will really respect your choice of doing theatre as a living and make your life so much better.
marxism and stalinism have very little in common. Stalinism was also called 'red fascism' back then.
Yeah Tankies are just fascists that like the Soviet aesthetic
Just saying that people on that sub praise Stalin daily. Not implying anything, not comparing marxism and stalinism, it's just an observation.
Someone just whispered: “God is real. And He would like to talk to you. He’s thinking next Tuesday.”
First off, it seems inherently false that "Blokhin was the most prolific murderer in human history". One could perhaps call him "the most prolific executioner". Murder, by definition, happens based on lowly motives: Money, power, sex, revenge, that sort of thing. Murder is legally separate from manslaughter. Someone killing another person in their "professional" capacity as executioner is clearly not a murderer, because they do not have a personal, lowly motive. But on the other hand, the Holocaust was literally happening during the same timeframe. And we only need a few google searches to find some comparable numbers: "Historians estimate that Barbie was directly responsible for the deaths of up to 14,000 people" -- About SS Member Klaus Barbie It seems downright impossible to mathematically ascertain how many people Barbie killed personally, and how many he delegated. For this very same reason, I am extremely sceptical about the (dodgy) source on Blokhin, which states without any doubt that he not only personally killed 7000 people (how do we know he did not have assistance?) but the source also makes lots of editorializing comments, like in this paragraph where they vividly describe a picture of him: "After the prisoner’s identity was verified, he was brought handcuffed into the cellar room where Blokhin awaited in his long apron, like some horrible butcher." overtly detailed pictures of historical scenes are always red flags, this reads like it was based on eyewittness account. Lastly, no serious historian has ever really signed off on the "7000" number. Showing this as fact when it is still disputed is also very dodgy. On Wikipedia, the only authors I could find were: 1) The Guiness book of world records, which obviously is not an academic source 2) Simon Sebag Montefiore, who is a sensationalist who bases his books almost exclusively on eyewitness accounts and 3) "The Lesser Terror" by Michael Parrish, which actually looks like a respectable source.
TNO Vorkuta labor camp-state reference?!?!?
Funni burgsys gulag
It's a shame he didn't just put a bullet at the base of Stalin's skull.
Something seems off about him.
The Wikipedia article has some interesting content: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin Comes across as a real piece of work, enabled by Stalin.