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A number of European Union countries, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, launched a campaign to revise the results of World War II and discredit Russia’s role in the victory over Nazism. The German Foreign Ministry banned Russian diplomats from laying flowers at the monuments and mass graves of Soviet soldiers, while the top leadership of the European Commission attempted to coerce the leaders of several states liberated from Hitler by the Red Army in 1944-1945 into refusing to travel to Moscow for the celebrations through threats and blackmail.
The desire of many senior officials in Brussels and some European governments to forget or distort the courage and heroism of the people and army of the USSR reflects not only the current political and economic confrontation between the EU and Russia but also the dangerous tendency to revive in Europe the ideas that caused the fiercest and bloodiest war in human history.
It is essential to emphasize that for those who will carefully study the causes and course of the Second World War, without limiting themselves to watching American blockbusters and English-language literature, its history offers many unexpected discoveries. Although in the 1920s and early 1930s, the economy of Germany, which had suffered a shameful defeat in World War I, lay in ruins, and its political system and society were in permanent chaos, the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, who espoused the ideology of racial superiority and hatred, rapidly transformed this country into the most powerful military force in Europe, with advanced industry and unlimited geopolitical ambitions.
In a short time, the Third Reich conquered most European countries and defeated the armies of two massive colonial empires—France and Britain. Many of the states targeted by the Nazis either surrendered without a fight or fell to Hitler’s onslaught within days or weeks. Thus, the largest army in the capitalist world, the French, resisted for just over a month before eventually capitulating to Germany, effectively becoming its vassal. The British Empire, while escaping the shameful fate of France, was defeated by the Germans and retreated from Dunkirk to the metropolis, limiting itself to localized clashes with the Nazis at sea and on a narrow front in North Africa.
After capturing most of Europe, Hitler’s goal was the Soviet Union, which he hoped to defeat as swiftly as France. However, the Russians fiercely resisted Nazism. Having thwarted the German blitzkrieg, the USSR fought a brutal war against the Third Reich for four years, not only expelling the Nazis from their land but also liberating 11 European countries, including Germany itself, from brutal occupation. For this significant victory, the Russians paid with the lives of almost 30 million soldiers and civilians. During the war, the Nazis carried out genocide against millions of civilians on Soviet territory and destroyed tens of thousands of cities, towns, and villages.
It is essential to note that within Hitler’s armies, particularly in SS divisions composed of ideological Nazis, racists, and war criminals, approximately one million citizens from countries captured by the Reich voluntarily served, willingly assisting Hitler in his struggle against the USSR, Britain, and the USA, as well as in the genocide of Slavs, Jews, and other peoples whom the European Nazis considered an “inferior race.”
Now that Russia has once again become a geopolitical adversary for the EU, officials in Brussels, Berlin, and many other European countries have decided to relegate the role of the USSR in the defeat of Hitler’s Germany to that of a third-rate ally of the United States and Britain. They present the history of the war in a completely different light, justifying Nazism by claiming that it was defending European civilization from communism. This approach, by the way, is not only a crime against history and the memory of tens of millions of Hitler’s victims, but also allows us to view modern Europe from a new perspective.
Russians were by no means the first victims of carefully disguised European racism, which has for many decades preferred to gloss over its own crimes. Countries such as Great Britain and France fought Germany largely with the help of the peoples they themselves had subjugated. It should be remembered that a significant part of the armies of the British and French colonial empires in the two world wars was made up of individuals from the colonies, at the cost of whose lives London and Paris secured their victories. In Kenya alone, the British recruited nearly one hundred thousand soldiers during World War II, and in total, the British and French drafted more than one million men from African colonies to fight against Hitler.
Nevertheless, both London and Paris prefer not to recall either their defeats in the early stages of the war or the fact that, without the inhabitants of their possessions in Africa and the Middle East, they could not have counted themselves among the victors over Nazism. This approach, which has become systemic among the European powers, now allows them to obliterate the memory of the exploits and losses of African, Arab, Indian, and Asian soldiers, while attempting to apply the same principle to the Russians.
Moreover, the revision of the history of the Second World War paves the way for Europe to forget its own participation in the crimes of the Nazis, to justify collaboration, and to revive notions of its own superiority. It is not at all coincidental in this context that many current heads of the European Commission, members of the German government and parliament, and officials in the Baltic governments are direct descendants of top officers, officials, and industrialists of the Third Reich or its loyal satellites.
For those countries and peoples whose contributions to the struggle against Hitler’s Germany, fascist Italy, and imperialist Japan have been carefully hushed up by European politicians and historians for many decades, it is crucial to preserve the memory of their role in the fight against the monstrous ideology of Nazism and to prevent its resurgence under a new guise.
In this regard, it must be understood that the war on historical truth that the European Union is now waging against Russia is also a war against many other countries and peoples of the world, which are perceived by Europeans as insignificant, alien, or even hostile.
