COMMENTS
For both Russia and Ukraine, today’s war is a continuation of World War II. Because while Russia is fighting against “Nazis”, the Ukrainians are fighting against occupiers, much like 80 years ago.
ARE THE Nazis ?: Ukrainians fetch water after their houses are bombed. Are they Nazis, or victims of Nazis? Photo: AP / NTB
sea view
–
Internal comments: This is a comment. The commentary expresses the writer’s attitude.
Published
Thursday, 23 June 2022 – 21:47
–
–
The Russian calendar is full of fateful anniversaries for the nation. June 22 is one such day, because that was when Hitler started his “Operation Barbarossa” – the invasion of the Soviet Union – 81 years ago.
The day is marked in Russia to commemorate all the dead – somewhere between 20 and 25 million Soviet citizens – in what is called the Great Patriotic War. With the war – or “special operation” – in Ukraine as the backdrop in question, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to commemorate the day by laying flowers on the tomb of the unknown soldier near the Kremlin in Moscow.
Hitler’s attack in the Soviet Union started in Ukraine, near the city of Lviv in western Ukraine. Here came the original Nazis, who many Ukrainians in the West first perceived as “liberators.”
This was because Stalin had moved into what was eastern Poland two years earlier, when Hitler and Stalin divided the country between them, and World War II began in 1939. But Hitler’s soldiers did not come as liberators from Stalin’s tyranny. They came as occupiers to colonize Ukraine’s fertile land, turning the Slavic Ukrainians – “subhumans” as they were according to Nazi racism – into a slave population for Aryan landowners and veterans, who would eventually receive Ukrainian agricultural land as war booty. That was the plan.
sea view
–
Then they started the real Nazis with their second mission, to kill Jews. Lviv was taken after a week. On June 28, Soviet forces left the city, but before that most of the more than 4,000 political prisoners in the city’s prisons were killed, many of them Ukrainian nationalists.
When the Germans arrived on June 30, they blamed the Jews for the killings of the political prisoners, and together with the people of the nationalist Stepan Banderas, the first orgy of killings of Ukrainian Jews was organized.
On July 3, 4,000 Jews had already been killed in Lviv. In all, about 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were killed during the war.
And the story of them the Ukrainian nationalists – and their leader, Stepan Banderas – Nazi ideology was created. This is what “Nazism” Putin identifies and says he recognizes in today’s Ukrainian leadership, despite the fact that the Ukrainian president himself is a Jew and almost his entire family was killed during World War II. And despite the fact that towards the end of the war, Bandera ended up in a German concentration camp.
It is the “Nazism” – and very exaggerated allegations of “genocide” of Ukrainian Russians and Ukrainians with Russian as their mother tongue – that justifies Putin’s war.
The death of the Soviet Union, and the historic effort to fight Nazi Germany, is thus a crucial justification for Putin’s war in Ukraine. Despite the fact that eight million of the Soviets killed were Ukrainians. This means that every third Soviet citizen who died was Ukrainian, much more than the Ukrainians’ relative share of the Soviet population. But the numbers are just one of the problems with Putin’s credibility when he claims that Russia is in Ukraine to “denazify” the country.
For the Ukrainians which fought on the German side during World War II was around 300,000. While the Ukrainians who fought for the Soviet Union were 2,400,000, ie eight times as many. And although the story of Bandera is an ideological battle ax on both the Russian and Ukrainian side, the vast majority of Ukrainians who fought during World War II against the actual Nazis.
For the Ukrainians the situation is now turned upside down. They fight an occupying army that brutally kills everything in their path. The occupying army says it is fighting for the Russian-cultural, and it seems with the intention of wanting to destroy all the Ukrainian-cultural, which by the way is often also the Russian-cultural.
Among other things, churches, cultural centers and museums have been targets of war, in a way that makes it appear that it is not only people – or if you want “Nazis” – but also the Ukrainian national identity itself that is under attack. from Russian bullets and grenades.
Besides, so fighting Putin’s army in a way that will be recognizable to the very few Ukrainians who still remember World War II, and to all those who have a genetic memory through the stories of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. At least one of those killed in this war – killed by Russian bombs – was a Jewish survivor from Auschwitz.
Who is a Nazi? What is a Nazi? Where’s a Nazi? It is not easy to maneuver in the Russian war rhetoric. But it is not so difficult to understand who in this war plays the role of the Nazis in front of anyone.
–
