Speech #980276881

For the first time there was spread on the record of an international tribunal the details of massive crimes involving millions of victimscrimes perpetrated not against individuals but against entire peoples and ethnic groups. While I was at Nuremberg I learned about other acts of genocide that were not made part of the trial record. I learned of the mass deportations of the Volga Germans and the Kalmuks and the Chechens and other Soviet minority people during the war years. I learned the true facts about the massacre in the Katyn Forest of 10.000 Polish officers who had been prisoners of the Soviets. I learned of the mass deportations of scores of thousands of intellectuals and community leaders from Lithuania. Latvia. and Estonia in the period following the Soviet occupation. I learned. in short. that Communist totalitarianism. like Nazi totalitarianism. uses genocide as an instrument of policy. and that the death of nazism did not necessarily mean that we had put an end to the problem of genocide.