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Comment by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on the German government's change of approach to Germany's historical guilt for unleashing World War II

30 August 2022 10:26
1751-30-08-2022

In connection with the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II on September 1, we would like to once again draw public attention to the policy pursued by the German authorities, aimed at revising Berlin's historical role in the bloodiest conflict in the history of humanity.

We assert that in recent years, the German state - contrary to its representatives' persistent declarations in recognition of Germany's sole historical responsibility for unleashing WWII and for the inhuman crimes committed by the German Nazis and armed forces during that war - is in fact making consistent efforts to remove this question from the international public and political discourse. To this end, Berlin encourages deliberately distorted ideas about the genesis of WWII, which run counter to well-known facts and the generally accepted assessments, and such false stories are regularly planted in the information landscape. The German authorities are insisting on a reversed version of the past, stubbornly trying to shift to the USSR some responsibility for the start of the war, at least commensurate or even equal to their own historical guilt, because that guilt is obviously increasingly weighing on Berlin. In this context, they are intensively implanting an absurd narrative about an alleged equivalence between the state system in the "Stalinist" Soviet Union - and the German National Socialist regime, which was responsible for the Holocaust and the targeted extermination of millions of civilians, including in the Soviet Union. At the same time, Germany should know, like no other country, that it was the multinational Soviet people and the Red Army that made a decisive contribution to the defeat of Hitler's Third Reich.

Statements made by German politicians, including Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, contain points reflecting the approach described above. Essentially, this same policy is the reason why Berlin has been refusing for years, under far-fetched pretexts, to approve payments to citizens of the Russian Federation who survived the siege of Leningrad without any discrimination based on their ethnicity, similar to the compensations paid to the surviving victims of the siege who are Jewish. Worse still, the implementation of the German Government's so-called humanitarian gesture to make up for the siege is being artificially delayed now, for purely political reasons. This delay is preventing the hospital for war veterans in St Petersburg from becoming fully operational and, most importantly, it is jeopardising the health and well-being of the hospital's elderly patients. This blatant and scandalous situation vividly demonstrates the German state's true approach to the country's historical responsibility in the context of WWII.