We commemorate the invasion of the Soviet Union, which was intended to realize the geopolitical goals of German imperialism and the ideological goals of German fascism. For the planned world conquest, the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, held a special place. At stake were the USSR’s raw material reserves, the wheat fields and agricultural products of Ukraine’s Black Earth region, the oil and gas deposits in the Caucasus, iron ore, and the industrial capacities in the western Soviet Union. In the “Operation Barbarossa” plan, these resources had already been factored in as essential for waging the war against the USSR at all.
The million-strong army advancing eastward was to sustain itself from the supplies of the local population, thereby depriving the people living there—who were regarded as “Slavic subhumans”—of their means of subsistence. To this end, the SS Reich Security Main Office and other parts of the fascist administration drafted several planning outlines before the war began, immediately after the invasion, and in June 1942 the final “General Plan East.” It described in concrete terms the deportation and extermination of the local population as well as the plundering of the invaded territories.
Moreover, it was an ideologically motivated war of extermination against the “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy. The “Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia” state: “This struggle demands ruthless and vigorous action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews, as well as the complete elimination of all active and passive resistance … “The Asian soldiers of the Red Army, in particular, are inscrutable, unpredictable, treacherous, and callous.” This racist order did not come from Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry, but from the German Wehrmacht high command.
The “Commissar Order,” signed by Wehrmacht General Wilhelm Keitel, was also criminal. It stipulated that the “political commissars” in the Red Army were not to be treated as prisoners of war. They were to be killed at the front. If they were discovered later, they were sent to concentration camps for liquidation. At Buchenwald concentration camp alone, the SS murdered over 8,000 Soviet prisoners in the execution facility known as the “Horse Stable” on the basis of the “Commissar Order.”
Military units from Hungary, Romania, Italy, Bulgaria, and even from fascist Spain (“Blue Division”) were involved in the invasion of the USSR, as Bolshevism was considered the common enemy of the Axis powers. Of course, the spoils were also at stake, with all participating states hoping for a share after the “final victory”—for example, Romania, which sought to incorporate the Moldavian Soviet Republic into its “Greater Romania.” At the same time, German fascism relied on nationalist collaborators from this multi-ethnic state in its fight against the USSR: Baltic nationalists, Ukrainian Bandera units, and militias from the Caucasus, who not only hoped to get their own slice of the “pie,” but also joined the anti-Bolshevik struggle as volunteers in SS units.
But we must not forget the heroic struggle of the soldiers of the Brest Fortress, who in June 1941 successfully blocked the military advance of an entire German division for a full week and continued to sabotage German military infrastructure in the vicinity of the fortress for weeks afterward. In 1965, this site was awarded the honorary title “Hero Fortress.” In 1991, delegates to the FIR Congress held in Moscow honored this achievement by jointly participating in the commemorative ceremony on site.
On the occasion of the 85th anniversary, it remains a historical and political duty to keep alive the memory of the war of annihilation and all its victims, but also of the great achievement of the Red Army, which bore the main military burden of liberating the European continent from fascist barbarism. And this applies not only to the most historically well-known events, such as the defense of Moscow in 1941, which halted the German advance, the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, which marked a military turning point in the war, the nearly three-year struggle for survival against the Siege of Leningrad, or the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp on January 27, 1945. It concerns in particular the Soviet armed forces’ liberation efforts, which were accompanied by heavy casualties and only came to an end with the liberation of the Reich capital Berlin and the military surrender in May 1945.
This makes current trends in historical revisionism all the more scandalous. Ukraine recently “repatriated” the remains of the collaborator Andrei Melnyk (UPA) with state pomp, while in Berlin, state politicians are attempting to delegitimize the liberation effort and the associated memorial sites. The FIR points to international treaties under which the Federal Republic of Germany has committed itself to maintaining memorial sites dedicated to the liberation and the liberators in a dignified condition. This must not be called into question by election campaign noise and media campaigns.
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