Ukraine premier’s pro-Nazi version of World War II: USSR invaded Ukraine, Germany

“US marionette” Yatsenyuk upending history on Germany’s ARD network.  (TGP YouTube screen grab)

By Lena Sokoll
WSWS.ORG

[dropcap]In a recent broadcast[/dropcap] of “Tagesthemen”, the main newscast of Germany’s ARD public television channel, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk grotesquely distorted the history of World War II, accusing the Soviet Union of having invaded Germany and Ukraine.

Remarkably, this brazen and thoroughly calculated falsehood, designed to promote the myth of a joint German-Ukrainian struggle against a Soviet-Russian aggressor, went unchallenged by the presenter. It has not been denounced by the broadcaster in retrospect. (Please see YouTube video below)

 

Deutschland+Russland

The interview, conducted with Yatsenyuk during his visit to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on January 7, consisted largely of anti-Russian ranting. Presenter Pinar Atalay’s innocuous and unfocused questions remained unanswered, and only amounted to brief interruptions to Yatsenyuk’s castigation of Putin, Russia and the Soviet Union.

Yatsenyuk said, “Russian aggression in Ukraine is an attack on world order and order in Europe. All of us still clearly remember the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany. That has to be avoided. And nobody has the right to rewrite the results of the Second World War. And that is exactly what Russia’s President Putin is trying to do.”

Atalay made no comment on this scandalous historical lie, i.e. that the Soviet Union—not Nazi Germany—had invaded Ukraine. The television station responded to a complaint about the programme from the Public Committee for Public Service Media, remarking that the quality of the simultaneous Russian-German translation was too poor for the presenter to question the statement during the ongoing interview. In fact, however, the “Tagesthemen” news item was a recording of the interview, and there was no critical response to Yatsenyuk’s lie from the programme’s director or ARD.

Five days after the interview, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper attacked not Yatsenyuk and ARD, but the Russian foreign ministry, which vehemently rejected the Ukrainian prime minister’s account, citing the proceedings of the Nuremberg Trials.

“As to the Second World War,” wrote Russia correspondent Kerstin Holm in the newspaper, “the thinking of the Russians is set in concrete … But disabused countrymen remember that Russia, in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, was an aggressor in World War II and was responsible for the Katyn massacre”.

Holm also claims that “Liberation could at best be said to apply to the expulsion of the Nazis, but not to the Sovietisation of reconquered areas”.

The German government did not distance itself from Yatsenyuk’s remarks or comment on his statements. Foreign office spokesman Martin Schäfer said: “Like anyone here in Germany—politicians, citizens or sports celebrities—the Ukrainian prime minister has the right to tell the German media whatever he deems appropriate. That is part and parcel of our extremely important right to freedom of expression”.

Thus, the results of the Nuremberg Trials and the denial of German guilt in the Second World War are declared to be matters of opinion. In fact, the German Wehrmacht (army) and Waffen-SS waged a war of extermination in Ukraine, whose barbarism still stands out among the countless atrocities and crimes of the Nazi dictatorship and the world war that it wanted and started.

On June 22, 1941, German Wehrmacht troops stormed across the borders of the USSR without any declaration of war, aiming to engulf the enemy in a Blitzkrieg and push them far back into the interior of the country. While the northern and central sectors of the army had orders to capture Leningrad and Moscow, the southern army sector marched on Kiev. It was supported in this by two battalions of Ukrainian nationalists, code-named “Nachtigall” and “Roland”, marching in German uniforms and under German army command.

These Ukrainian battalions were recruited from the rabid anti-Semitic and anti-Communist Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) under the leadership of Stepan Bandera. After the invasion and with the approval of the German occupiers, they took over management of police stations and launched pogroms. In late June 1941, the German occupiers incited the first major pogrom, in the Galician city of Lviv, which was carried out with the active support of the OUN. The public hunting down of Jews claimed at least 4,000 lives.

Many massacres and pogroms followed. The largest single extermination took place shortly after the sacking of Kiev on September 29-30, 1941 in the ravine of Babi Yar. Approximately 33,000 Kiev Jews were killed, including elderly people, women and children who had not been able to flee from the advancing army. The massacre was one of the crimes prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials. Approximately 850,000 Jews were murdered in the German war of extermination in Ukraine.

Judaism and Bolshevism were synonymous in the propaganda of the Nazis and the OUN. The murder of Jews was seen and propagandised as equivalent to the anti-Soviet struggle. The brutal terror waged against the Jews and the determination to destroy particularly the Jewish people in occupied Ukraine flowed from the German Reich’s resolve to annihilate the Soviet Union and the impact of the world’s first socialist revolution.

The Wehrmacht’s conquest of Ukraine not only entailed a deep incursion into Soviet territory. It also cut off the rest of the USSR from Ukraine’s fertile agricultural land and large coal reserves. While the USSR was weakened by hunger, Nazi Germany exploited Ukraine’s resources, deporting over a million Ukrainians to work in German industry and agriculture as slave labour.

The German occupiers were therefore unwilling to tolerate any notion of an independent Ukraine. When the OUN proclaimed Ukraine’s independence in Lviv on June 30, 1941, Bandera was taken into “protective custody” in then Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This was not the end of collaboration between the German occupiers and Ukrainian fascists, however.

OUN supporters remained active in administration and as an auxiliary police force in the organisation of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Tens of thousands of them served as volunteers in SS divisions, directly aiding the Nazis in combat against the Red Army.

The current Ukrainian leadership, which was backed by Germany in the coup d’état that brought it to power last spring, stands unashamedly in this bloody tradition of Ukrainian nationalists and fascists. They extol Stepan Bandera as a national hero and rely on an alliance with Germany against Russia as the basis of their political power.

Members of Yatsenyuk’s government maintain close relations with fascist elements and place them in key positions.

Interior Minister Arsen Avakov appointed the fascist, Vadim Trojan, chief of police for the Kiev region in November 2014. Trojan was commander of the extreme right-wing Azov volunteer battalion, some of whose members wear helmets with swastikas and SS runes in the fighting against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Another commander of the Azov battalion, Andrij Bilezki, told the British Telegraph newspaper: “The historical mission of our nation in these crucial times is to lead the white races of the world in the final crusade for their survival”.

The installation of such violently reactionary forces in power in Kiev and the support given to them by the imperialist powers of NATO requires the rewriting and falsification of history. This is the significance of Yatsenyuk’s statements to ARD, and the silence of authorities in Germany on them.

SELECT ORIGINAL COMMENTS

• Doom Sternz • a day ago

  Meet Ukraines mass murderer Dmitriy Yarosh……..

  Is the founder and head of Ukraines racist-fascist Nazi party the right sector. He also co founded the fascist Social National Party, renamed to Svoboda by the CIA (meaning freedom) to make it more acceptable to Americans.

  Dmitriy Yarosh has been training paramilitary troops for almost 25 years and his divisions are constantly growing all over Ukraine. These divisions carry out the most violent operations for the CIA in Ukraine (including the coup) and most of the country now lives in fear of him, even the nations President has had public threats made against him by Yarosh.

  It was Yarosh’s divisions that were responsible for the massacre in Odessa and it is his divisions that commit attrocities in the Donbass, crimes against humanity, ethnically cleansing the Eastern federations.

  Yarosh hires only proud far-right mercenaries paid by him from funding provided by US government agencies and wealthy contributers.
•  

  

  Terry Lawrence • a day ago

  You get some idea of the kind of neo-Nazi lunatics running Kiev every time they open their mouths.

  In the latest statement, the “Prime Minister” hand picked by US State Department European Affairs head Victoria Nuland and put into power by the US and German backed coup a year ago, claims that the USSR started WW II by invading Germany and Ukraine in the summer of 1941!!

  In reality, Germany and five other countries attacked the USSR on June 22nd, 1941, with over three million troops and thousands of tanks and aircraft in the largest invasion in world history, killing over 27,000,000 Soviet citizen, millions of them in the Ukraine, which being on the USSR’s western frontier was the first area to be invaded and occupied by Nazi troops, and the last to be freed as the advancing Red Army drove the Nazi armies back to Berlin. The war ended when the Red Army captured Berlin and Hitler committed suicide.

  For this Nazi a$$hole to go to Germany at the invitation of the German government and claim that the USSR invaded Germany, and even more bizarrely, Ukraine, which was a province of the USSR at the time, is outrageous enough, but for Merkel and the German government to refuse to repudiate this neo-Nazi reversing of history is a disgrace that shows their utter lack of even a shred of integrity or honesty. It would appear that Merkel is a closet Nazi herself. If she were not, she would be honour bound to repudiate this brazen lie and state the facts.

  This is the sort of falsified “history” being taught in schools in western Ukraine, and along with the Nazi torchlight parades, brownshirt thuggery, and demands that schoolchildren with Russian names change them to Ukrainian names might help you understand why the 90 percent Russian speaking eastern and southern Ukraine are in a civil war with the north-western provinces run by the US appointed Nazi’s in Kiev.

  Ukraine, a Russian word which means “border region”, was a province of Russia and later the USSR for hundreds of years and never existed as an independent state until the break-up of the USSR in 1991, when the various provinces of the USSR declared themselves to be independent countries. Since 1991, as Nuland has proudly stated, the US has poured over $5,000,000,000 into funding right-wing political parties and neo-nazi militias primarily centred around the city of Lvov in north-west Ukraine, an area speaking a somewhat different language akin to Polish with a different alphabet than the Russian speaking majority in the south and east.

  During WW II this was the area the where Nazi Germany raised the Galacian Nazi SS division of Ukrainian fascist volunteers under Stefan Bandara who sent over 100,000 Ukrainian Jews and ethnic Russians and Poles to Nazi death camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Since 1991 it is the area where the US and Germany Intelligence services like the CIA have been recruiting the fascist militias which were used to seize power in the coup in Kiev a year ago. These neo-nazi militias form the spearhead of the assault against the Russian speaking people of eastern and southern Ukraine right now.

  The fascist militias were also used to form the new “National Guard”, a volunteer semi-private army funded by the US and Ukrainian oligarchs and separate from the regular Ukrainian army, much like the Nazi SS in Germany was created by the Gestapo to carry out atrocities the regular German army might refuse to do. The National Guard is the organization doing most of the shelling of cities in eastern Ukraine as it carries out a terror campaign of “ethnic cleansing”, trying to kill or drive Russian speaking people out of Ukraine.

  see more

• 

  Pietro • 12 hours ago

  Vasily Grossman was a writer and journalist, born in Berdichev Ukraine, who reported as an eyewitness, the events of Stalingrad, Kursk and was the first correspondent who revealed to the world the horror of Treblinka. He avoided capture by the Nazis in 1941 by minutes when Burdichev was captured.. When he returned to that city in 1944, he went looking for his mother and learned that she had been murdered in November 1941 along with about 20 000 Jews from the town. The crimes committed by the Nazis and their collaborators were many but to suggest that the Soviet Union, of which the Ukraine was a part, invaded the Ukraine is to further compound those crimes and atrocities. An interesting this was that the SS tried to recruit in Poland but found it very difficult while they recruited easily and widely in the Ukraine.

   

  

  voltaire1964 • a day ago

  For those interested, the following link connects to a 25 minute video on the History of Ukraine and the birth of a national identity in the XIX century. It is the third of a series of videos on the overall History of Ukraine.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?…