Sevim Dagdelen on the 80th anniversary of the end of the war: It was a genocide

Even 80 years after the liberation from German fascism by the Allies, led by the Red Army, recognition of the Nazi genocide against the peoples of the Soviet Union through Hitler's war of plunder and annihilation in the East remains pending. For 80 years, the genocide in the Soviet Union has been negated in West Germany and the Federal Republic of Germany and systematically denied by the federal governments. Yet the facts speak for themselves. 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union, including 10 million soldiers and prisoners of war, died as a result of the German invasion in 1941 or were murdered by units of the German Wehrmacht and SS. Anyone who speaks of a war of annihilation in the East can't help but acknowledge the genocide.

The declaration of war against Russia today seems to prolong the historical enmity with the Soviet Union. The celebrations of liberation from fascism therefore increasingly seem like a forced exercise, to which people submit only because the current NATO allies, the USA, Great Britain, and France, were also part of the anti-Hitler coalition. A new spirit of historical-political defensiveness permeates German government policy, from the CDU/CSU to the Greens. There is reason to fear that Germany's own view of history is being used to prepare for war.

Not a war crime, but a genocide

Anyone willing to use a historical narrative to mobilize for a coming war against Russia will certainly not be surprised by the continued resistance to using the term genocide in reference to the mass murder in the Soviet Union by the Third Reich and its allies. Take the Siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944, in which the German Wehrmacht killed 1.1 million Russians. 90 percent of them were deliberately and systematically starved to death. The annihilation of major cities like Moscow and Leningrad was a Nazi war aim. The Slavic population in the Soviet Union was to be decimated by 30 million. But how else could one define the plan for the extermination of the Slavic population in the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany other than genocide?

The political pirouettes being performed to avoid acknowledging this are not all that surprising. In any case, even as recently as this spring of 2025, the German government insisted in its response to a question from my colleague Andrej Hunko that what happened in Leningrad was a war crime and not genocide. As early as 2017, in response to a parliamentary question from me regarding the treatment of the victims of the Siege of Leningrad, the German government defended its continued refusal to provide any compensation to the victims.

It's about the future of our country

It is sufficient to take note of the research on the Nazi Hunger Plan. It calculated that millions of Slavic inhabitants of the Soviet Union would die as a result of the theft of grain to supply the German population. This alone should bring awareness to the injustice that has not yet been atoned for. The Hunger Plan, or Backe Plan, named after Herbert Backe, the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, calculated that 30 million people would die. As a result of the failed Blitzkrieg, historian Timothy Snyder estimates that 4.2 million people in the occupied territories actually died as a result of the Nazi Hunger Plan. A combination of eliminatory racism and Nazi war economics.

And this injustice is prolonged every day by the federal government's obstructionist policies. Yet even in the Federal Republic of Germany, a shift in consciousness was still palpable at the end of the Cold War. The Wehrmacht exhibition dispelled the myths of the clean Wehrmacht. The systematic mass murder of civilians in the Soviet Union became increasingly apparent in West German society. Clearly naming the war of annihilation then became part of the self-image of all parties beyond the right wing of the CDU/CSU. What we are experiencing today in history politics must therefore be viewed as an oppressive retreat behind this enlightenment. The war myths of the Nazi perpetrators of that time are now being defended by the SPD and the Greens because they fit in with the desired declaration of war against Russia.

"In every era, an attempt must be made to wrest tradition anew from the conformism that is about to overwhelm it," Walter Benjamin once aptly put it in his essay on the concept of history. The future of our country is at stake. History creates a future, but only if it is no longer distorted. It is time to finally acknowledge the genocide in the East after 80 years. The Day of Liberation could be an occasion for this.

Sevim Dagdelen is a long-time member of the Bundestag, publicist and foreign policy spokesperson for the BSW.