Word: weissberg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DESPERATE MISSION (310 pp.)-Joel Brand's story, as told by Alex Weissberg-Criterion...
...searching or reflective but nearly good enough to set beside Witness was Austrian Physicist Alexander Weissberg's The Accused, one of the best accounts yet of what happened to victims of the Kremlin purge in 1937. And those who still doubted the Communists' double-dealing in the Spanish Civil War could read George (Nineteen Eighty-Four) Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, posthumously published in the U.S., one of the best books yet written about that tragic episode...
...broken on the "conveyer," would implicate a dozen innocent acquaintances. Each of these would implicate a dozen more. Prosecutors signed arrest warrants in bundles, without bothering to read the names. Examiners broke under the strain not only of their work but of fear of being named by their prisoners. Weissberg estimates (on good statistical grounds) that with this sort of thing happening all over the U.S.S.R., the total of purge prisoners could not have been less than 9,000,000. Most of them went to forced labor in Siberia-not because the labor camps needed them, but simply because there...
...Weissberg, an Austrian citizen, was handed over to the Gestapo in the Russo-Nazi exchange of political prisoners after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. His later experience in Gestapo prisons (he now lives in Paris) forms no part of this book, which is one of the most searching, intelligent studies of its kind to date, replete with scores of prison case histories and exemplary samples of cool-headed observation. The key question in it (which has haunted Weissberg for years) is the great why? Why, he asks again & again, did Stalin decide to destroy not only a horde...
...Weissberg can only think that "Stalin wanted power-power without limit." Only by mass terrorization could he carry out his aim of turning the U.S.S.R. into a nation consisting of "160 million slaves and one free man." Possibly this is the correct answer; but it will hardly satisfy those who, unlike Author Weissberg, believe that this was precisely the state of the Union before the purge began...