On June 29th, 1941, the Germans invaded and occupied Lvov, Ukraine, slaughtering thousands of people. Russia followed a scorched earth policy as Germany invaded just as they had during Napoleon’s invasion. They burned, destroyed, flooded, dismantled and removed anything and everything in territory that they were forced to give up. As the Germans moved in, the Soviets proceeded to murder 3,000 Ukrainian political prisoners. It was so bad that the Germans were actually seen as liberators by the local population. Sadly, within days, they were forced to endure the horrors of the Nazi regime as some 2.5 million Ukrainians were shipped to Germany as slave laborers and the Ukrainian Jews were subjected to the same vicious racial policies as in Poland. Over 600,000 were murdered. Even the Ukrainian nationalists participated in the bloodshed by scapegoating Jews for “Bolshevism” and killing them in the streets.
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Note From JWR: This week my family is camping in a remote rural region in the Redoubt with very limited opportunities to access the Internet. So I’ve written and edited most of the blog posts for the week in advance. Today, I’m posting only one humorous item in the Snippets column. Rest assured that I will post lots of items in that column one week from today.
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SurvivalBlog Writing Contest
Today we present a review article written by Field Gear Editor Thomas Christianson.
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Round 101 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest is ongoing. More than $725,000 worth of prizes have been awarded since we started running this contest. Round 101 ends on July 31st, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how-to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.