A powerful piece, John. My wife's grandfather (RIP) was a survivor of Buchenwald. His crime was being a Slav policeman born in 1921 in the Sudetenland.

I got to meet him twice at the end of his life. He was able to return to his home after the war, a living skeleton. He had survived all those years because he was kept alive as a master carpenter making and repairing furniture. The horrors he must have seen, being there while "the witch of Buchenwald," Ilse Koch was there.

At the end of his life my wife's grandfather got a brain tumor. He would wake up in the night sometimes and run naked into his yard to stand at attention to be counted. 60 years after his liberation, the trauma he experienced as a prisoner of Buchenwald was haunting him still.

So when I read about how "Putin is Hitler" and the "Russians are Nazis" it really pisses me off. Real Nazis kill their own countrymen for the "crime" of "unpure foreign blood" or whatever nationalistic bullshit words they use. As authoritarian as Putin's Russia is, it ain't Nazi-controlled. There is a country just to their west however...