ts. “The womb he crawled from is still going strong,” once the German Marxist poet Bert Brecht formulated his warning against the possible resurgence of the National Socialist spirit in post-war Germany. Today’s anti-Russian agitation from the United States and the United Kingdom obviously feeds not only on anti-communist and anti-Soviet reflexes in West Germany. Already in the imperialist German Reich a general anti-Slavic climate was cultivated, shaped by the All-German Association. The National Socialists were masters in agitating against the Slavs, who were dubbed subhuman and inferior subjects. Hitler planned the construction of huge concentration camps behind the Ural Mountains for the extermination of tens of millions of Russians. 27 million Russians were murdered by the Wehrmacht and the SS – an unimaginably large number. By comparison, the U.S. lost “only” 400,000 men to the Nazis, hardly any civilians, unlike Russia. Voices like those of the NATO and WEF woman Florence Gaub and a U.S.-affiliated Inozemtsev are also heard in Russia. What will trigger such statements? The invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the subsequent planned physical extermination were preceded by years of agitation, contempt and dehumanisation. What is the purpose of contempt today?
One is well advised to remember what the Russians – and many Ukrainians too! – had to suffer by the SS and the Wehrmacht. As an innocuous source, let Wikipedia serve: “Before the attack on the Soviet Union, several orders were issued according to which the population in the conquered territories was completely deprived of rights, including the ‘Barbarossa Decree’ of May 13, 1941, according to which collective reprisals against the civilian population were permissible, and the “Commissar Order” according to which captured political officers of the Red Army were to be shot immediately. Newsreels showed images of Russians that contemporary Germans perceived as ‘ugly, underdeveloped ... faces like monkeys, with giant noses, ragged, dirty.’
Soviet prisoners of war were grouped together in collective camps and often left to starve; of 5.7 million prisoners, 3.3 million died, mostly from hunger or disease. The Wehrmacht was expected to feed itself out of the country, and the death by starvation of the civilian population was accepted in the siege of Leningrad. In the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, several hundred thousand people therefore starved to death in the winter of 1942/43. The ‘General Plan East’ adopted in 1941 envisaged the expulsion of 31 million ‘Fremdvölkische’ (foreign races) as the first stage of the Germanisation of Russia. The Slavic population was to be kept away from education and medical care and supplied only with liquor, tobacco, and contraceptives, to prevent their reproduction. Those who were able to work were often deported to the ‘Reich’ for forced labour. In internal disputes, the supporters of a policy of consistent plundering and repression, such as Himmler, Göring and the ‘Reich Commissar for Ukraine’, Erich Koch, prevailed in the Nazi apparatus against Alfred Rosenberg, who, as head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, now pursued the goal of turning the conquered territories into satellite states. The Nazi terror drove many Slavs, who initially welcomed the Wehrmacht invasion as liberation from communism, into communist or nationalist partisan resistance.”1
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