Thirty years ago, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Allied landings, I conducted a long interview with a Serbian-French resistance fighter who had survived eighteen months in the Neuengamme camp and miraculously survived an English bombing of the ship on which the SS had imprisoned the deportees in the last days of April 1945. He passed away today, but he gave me the following advice: “Never forget that it was the Russians and the Red Army who liberated us from National Socialism. Not the British or the Americans.”
A statement that could still be heard in the 1990s from the mouths of the surviving GIs of Omaha Beach, who knew that they owed their lives to the Soviet fighters who died on the Eastern Front to prevent Hitler from bringing his divisions back to Normandy. The figures speak for themselves: 37,000 Allied casualties in the Battle of Normandy contrasted with more than 178,000 dead and 600,000 wounded on the Soviet side in the parallel Russian Operation Bagration during the same period.
Who remembers this today? Almost nobody in the West, because we are so often told, under the influence of NATO propaganda, that it was the Americans who won the war.
Between ‘The Longest Day’ (Darryl F. Zanuck, 1962) and ‘Saving Private Ryan’ (Steven Spielberg, 1998)1, the cinematic narrative made in the USA has prevailed in the European psyche and everything else, i.e. the most important things, have been interpreted away.
Needless to say, for Russians who do not forget the 15 million dead in the conflict (26 million in the whole of Soviet Russia), this ‘forgetting’ is worse than an affront: it is an outrage that is crowned by the refusal to invite Vladimir Putin to Normandy and at the same time roll out the red carpet for Zelensky as a bitter cherry on a spoilt cake. And if, in order to tie the wreath, the Germans are invited to the victors’ banquet as if they were innocent victims, while those to whom the victory is owed are excluded, one can seriously question the sincerity and honesty of this approach (even if one is of the opinion that the Germans of today are not to blame for the criminal mistakes of their ancestors in 1945).
For it cannot be repeated often enough that although the Ukrainians and the other now independent republics that formed the USSR at the time also shed their blood to liberate Europe from fascism – including Zelensky’s grandfather, a hero of the Red Army who is probably turning in his grave today – many of them largely collaborated with the Nazi invaders. Who remembers that of the 300 murderers in the Treblinka death camp, thirty were Germans and all the others were Lithuanians and Ukrainians? Who remembers that Simone Veil recently denounced on French television the active involvement of the Banderites, who are now Zelensky’s allies, in the Holocaust by shooting in Ukraine? To invoke the famine of 1932 to justify collaboration with the SS in 1943, as one hears all too often from the mouths of those who support Ukraine, is a shameful sophism. When the Estonian President proudly displays her memorial to the victims of communism while at the same time erasing the memorials to the victims of Nazism and denying the existence of the local collaborators who took part in the extermination of some of her fellow citizens, she is doing nothing other than rewriting history in a way that can only provoke nausea.
Historical revisionism is at work everywhere. You can make fun of the Russians who practise theirs and denounce them when they rewrite their history books and march through the streets with St. George’s ribbons and portraits of their grandfathers who died in battle. But we do the same, if not worse. When Ukrainian school textbooks summarise the Second World War as a valiant fight of the Banderites against two evil foreign dictators, Hitler and Stalin, who wanted to occupy their territory, then you have to ask yourself questions.
Whatever one thinks about the current war and the responsibilities of one side or the other, one cannot deny the facts, twist history and replace the truth with a lie. Ultimately, the credibility of what you claim to be defending is called into question. Those who claim to be defending democracy and civilisation in Ukraine should remember this. •
1 Two US war films about D-Day from 1962 and 1998 (editor’s note).
(Translation Current Concerns)
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