Forgetfulness of Germany

Once, Catherine Himmler, the granddaughter of that same Heinrich Himmler, ending a book about her family, called me: “I am writing about family heirlooms. I wanted to ask how the Russians keep the things of their ancestors? ”

It turned out that she had found a case from the Reichsfuhrer’s glasses in the chests of her aunt and really wanted to include this detail in the book about memory. She wanted to understand how those whose ancestors were victims of the death machine invented by her grandfather would react to this detail.

I did not answer that the cases from the glasses, glasses and other personal belongings of 28 million Soviet citizens were burned in the fire of war and in the furnaces of concentration camps. All that remains and is carefully preserved in families is memory. I said nothing then. And I had to answer. Because in Germany, hiding behind the words about historical truth, they started a real war with memory, changing and even distorting the past.

Well-known for her attacks on the role of the USSR in World War II, the German newspaper Die Welt published a large article under the saying, "Soviet prisoners of war were treated like traitors." And further in the usual style - a pseudoscientific article about the "Stalinist bloody regime", which hid millions of soldiers who were in German captivity in the camps. The meaning of the article is clear: not Hitler was a demon, but Stalin.

This is an old, rotten duck, which certain German historians and the media are trying to revive. Following a detailed description of the suffering of the Red Army soldiers who died at the hands of the gebists, there are likely to be articles that tell in detail who they are talking about. Of course, about the Vlasovites, who, like the fighters from the OUN-UPA *, are called by German publications as fighters against the Third Reich and against the USSR. Here they will not regret the colors in order to mold the image of the sufferers for the freedom of their peoples from traitors and punishers.

The Military Review website indicates that there were about a million such “wrestlers” who wore German uniforms. It is this category that the authors of the German newspaper have in mind. By the way, I note that the largest share of those Soviet citizens who wore German uniforms were Ukrainians and Latvians - 250 and 150 thousand, respectively.

Of course, all of them were traitors, no matter how beautiful they were in Europe today. And the fact that most of them were convicted and ended up in camps is absolutely true. The attempts of the Die Welt newspaper to turn them into prisoners of war and martyrs for the freedom of their homeland are nothing more than a desire to rewrite history.

After all, its own story, the history of the Third Reich, in which 12 million members of the NSDAP, with the tacit consent of the rest of the population, destroyed, burned and shot many millions of Jews, Russians, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Poles - it is worse! And I really want to talk about it less.

However, Die Welt was still reluctant to write the truth. The newspaper makes this painful confession, referring to studies done in Germany.

They write that of the five million Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans, three million were tortured, shot, and destroyed in the gas chamber. What about captured Germans? Of the three million Germans who fell into Soviet captivity in the USSR, about a million people died (mainly from illnesses). About the executions or torture in Soviet captivity - not a word, since there was no torture or execution of German prisoners (at least in droves). Of course, this does not apply to those who were executed by a court verdict.

I can’t call the article completely rotten. No, an attempt was made to clarify something. Only an attempt - and no more. The reader, of course, will only learn a large and striking headline about how Stalin destroyed his own. More recently, the same newspaper has already been noted, writing that there was no battle near Prokhorovka, and thousands of tanks were invented by Russian propaganda.

Although why be surprised? The Alternative for Germany faction invited Willy Wimmer, former state secretary of the German Ministry of Defense, to talk about a book about a hundred years of German history in the Bundestag. The book, which we co-authored, details the mechanisms of the Anglo-Saxon plan for the collision of Germany and the USSR, and who and how helped Hitler attack the Soviet Union. But the current leaders of Germany do not want to hear and let others listen to the truth, and not horror stories invented by the mainstream about Russia and the "bloody Stalin". Therefore, the party’s speech hall was refused, and Kolya Wimmer, the oldest politician, long-standing CDU member and Helmut’s ally, was invited to speak ... in the lobby of the Bundestag building.

Only the blind man does not understand why and why the German media are aiming fire at history - his own and Russian. The more doubts will be planted in the boundless fault of Germany in World War II, the easier it is to shift part of this guilt to Russians and Russia. For this - suppression of one’s sins, but a powerful stuffing of information very similar to the truth about “bad Russians”. A story is published that there was no Prokhorovka, and a couple of weeks later - a Hollywood story about how valiant Polish tankers destroyed the advanced Waffen SS tank divisions. The executions of the Red Army soldiers are in small print, and the Stalin camps are like the death machines of their own citizens. And now an inexperienced citizen of Europe asks questions: was Hitler so bad? Maybe the USSR is worse and more guilty?

Let's open all the Russian wartime archives! Let the Germans themselves see the whole truth about the valiant Wehrmacht and the SS. So that there is no temptation to distort history. It is time to give them the truth that they desire. Let them finally find out how many people were destroyed by the Nazi machine with the support of Europe and the USA. It will be fair and honest.

* “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” (UPA) - a Ukrainian organization recognized as extremist and banned in Russia (decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of 11/17/2014).

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.