I don't suppose there can be many stamps featuring concentration camp commandants - you won't find Rudolf Hoess or Josef Kramer even on stamps from... oh, wait! What's this, from (^sigh of inevitability^) Putin's Russia?
Yes, it's Roman Rudenko, commandant of Sachsenhausen in its post-Nazi years, and directly responsible for over ten thousand deaths there, mostly Germans who found themselves on the wrong side of history back in 1945. People tend to overlook that this particular concentration camp carried on where its Nazi overseers left off: there's a sizeable area at the very far end of the present site where you can see the derelict barrack-blocks in which they were housed - not open to the public.
Of course Rudenko wasn't just a camp commandant - he was more significant than that. He was the chief Soviet prosecutor at Nuremburg (maybe he felt his Sachsenhausen period was some sort of payback for what he learned on that job); later he became Chief Prosecutor of the entire Soviet Union and, as such, was the man who brought down the feared Lavrentiy Beria.
So, perhaps this stamp is some sort of 70th anniversary memorial to or recognition of the Nuremburg Trials and the Soviet part played there by their top lawyer. But it is also an example of Russian tendency to ignore or erase the bits of history they don't want you to know about. If Rudenko is the sort of man present-day Russia wants you to remember or admire, then it's not a good sign.
I always appreciate your history lessons, and this is well told of a tale I knew nothing about (other than some Soviet tendencies that manifest themselves often and always in the dark). thanks for this.
David
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"Save the USPS, buy stamps; save the hobby, use commemoratives"
I had missed Sachsenhausen II, The Sequel. Thank you, Guthrum.
As to Mr Putin's motives, perhaps the message is: Mr Rudenko put a lid on the NKVD, so do as I say, not as I do, because I am the exception that proves the rule.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
There was, of course, a Sachsenhausen III, when unified Germany restructured the entire site and rid it of various communist-era accretions, repositioning the Jewish experience at the centre, and devoting a separate subterranean display to the Soviet years (which ended around 1950). A discreet but well-tended graveyard at the far end is where the German victims are buried. I guess some of these Germans were villains and Nazi fellow-travellers, but I doubt all were. Just goes to show things are never as simple as they might seem. Oddly the British and American inmates (which included some of the Great Escapers) still get no mention at all.
The massive 'Tower of Nations' still dominates Sachsenhausen as it did when this stamp was issued in 1960, but the curtain wall at its base is long gone.
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