This humorous continuity, or historical parallel that there’s been so many of lately caught my eye on the TopWar site. So, without further ado, here is a translation that tries to preserve the wit of the original.
Guten morgen, mein lieber grandson! I am infinitely glad that you decided to continue “Drang nah Osten”. The Russians have a lot of good fertile land. But for some reason they cling to, and do not want to give it to us, the Aryans. After all, only we are able to administrate this wild land and the barbarians that inhabit it.
A few weeks ago Poland made an official demand of Germany for the reparations for damages incurred during WWII. That, despite the fact that all reparations had already been settled after the War.
At the same time Poland had the audaciousness to say that they are considering a similar claim for reparations from Russia. That, despite Poland being one of the main benefactors from the USSR in the Soviet block.
So I do hope Russians won’t try to whitewash the truth, when and if it comes out! Russians in the past whitewashed the crimes of others to keep peace in the family, so to speak, including the Poles, as well as Latvian, Finnish and German Nazis, and Bandera ukro-nazis after WWII. This led to the current situation! Better painful truth right away than a major problem years from now.
And indeed, Poland enjoyed Russian leniency and whitewashing of the “brotherly nation” after the war to a great extent. Just how great, and who should pay reparations to whom is explored in the article that I want to translate today. It was published on the 29th of September in “Argumenty i Fakty”:
The word “reparations” in Poland is gradually acquiring the character of a national sacrament. This time, President Andrzej Duda decided to talk about the reparations from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly. The object of the claim this time was Russia.
After Gorbachev’s passing, a lot can be said about his deeds and legacy. Little of it will be positive.
At best, he’s remembered as a bumbling fool, who started reforms that he was in no position to bring to a positive fruition.
At worst he – along with Yeltsin – is remembered as a malicious traitor to the Russian world, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people as the result of the demolition of the USSR, which started several years before the fateful events of 1991.
As a middle-ground, I would recommend Scott Ritter’s article in Consortium News SCOTT RITTER: Mikhail Gorbachev, a Vector of Change
My today’s translation takes a look at Gorbachev’s legacy from a different angle – from the perspective of the reunification of Germany. It was in 2014 that first read a short comment about the German counter-historical stance on the reunification of Crimea in light of the prior reunification of Germany. Back then it was just that – a comment in some other discussion. Yesterday I came across an article at the Federal News Agency site that makes a much deeper , and more passionate dive into the matter. And article, a translation of which I am presenting below.
In Germany, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is very much loved. Much more than in Russia and many former Soviet republics. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was even called “the best German” because he did a huge historical thing for the German people. He united a divided Germany.
The demilitarisation of Ukraine (and the Greater Ukraine – that is NATO) is going to switch into another gear in a few days, and it will hopefully be concluded to a satisfactory degree some time in the next year.
This brings to the fore the other objective – denazification of the former Ukraine. Here, one must draw on the experience of the denazification of Germany done after the conclusion of WWII – in fact on the outcomes of two different approaches to the denazification. I am presenting below a translation of a historical work, that was published on Lenta.ru, with a back-up re-publicationon Cont. The article gives an excellent retrospective of the process. One thing that it should have mentioned is the process of denazification on the Banderite-festered territories of the Western Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and in the Blatic states. Sadly, after Hrushev came to power, he undid much of the effort to prosecute the Bandera Nazi collaborators, pardoning all of them. The majority settled in the city of Kharkov, which is one of the explanations why Kharkov of all cities had such an unexpectedly large concentration of the neo-Nazi Bandera followers – the descendents of those insufficiently denazified banderites.
The denazification project. How did the USSR and the West arrange the denazification of Germany after World War II?
8th of April 2022
by Alevtina Zapolskaya
The trial of Nazi war criminals at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. Photo: AP
Denazification is named among the main goals of the Russian special operation in Ukraine. But unlike demilitarization, which methods and goals are quite clear, few people are able to say what exactly lies behind the concept of “denazification” today. According to Moscow’s official position, its meaning is to abolish all laws and institutions that discriminate against citizens on the basis of language and nationality. And it’s time to turn to history in order to determine how this work should be carried out in practice. After the Second World War, Germany underwent a complex and multi-stage process of denazification. This gave her the opportunity to build relations with her neighbours from scratch and eventually become part of the world community. However, Moscow’s experience in this regard differed from the approach adopted in the zones controlled by the allied forces of the United States, Great Britain and France. What was the difference between the two approaches to denazification, why did USSR achieve the best results and how applicable this experience is today, — was analysed by Lenta.ru.
Goals and objectives
Battles were still raging on the fronts of the Second World War, while the allied countries were already thinking about what peaceful life would be like after the defeat of the Third Reich. Everyone understood perfectly well that the post-war settlement should also be political. It was necessary not only to destroy the German war machine, but also the regime itself, which unleashed the largest war in world history.
The title of the article is a quote. These are Hitler’s words, spoken on June 30, 1941. Recorded by Franz Halder. An amazing hit, isn’t it?
Looking at the contented, well-fed, and most importantly – never repenting faces of the captured Nazis of Azov, shuddering at the sight of the Russian cities of Donbass being shot from NATO guns, turning away from the monitor screen when viewing the mockery of the “them-Europeans” (translator note: the reference to Ukrainians after the slogan “Ukraina ce Evropa” – “Ukraine is Europe”) over prisoners and civilians, you suddenly realize that you have already seen it all before.
We, the generation born in the 60s, read in textbooks and books, watched in newsreels and Soviet feature films. We knew all this so well, as if the War ended just yesterday, in the early 80s, when we graduated from schools and universities. “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten!” – we repeated it at school lessons of courage, at the meetings with living veterans and at the monuments to the fallen. “This must not happen again!” – sounded from TV screens and tribunes, starting from the most modest rural recreation center and to the presidium of the Party Congresses.
Commemorating the 22nd of June 1941, I am reposting Lada Ray’s powerful open letter and a call to remembrance. Indeed, the game of assigning blame is ever so much on in the West, as I wrote only a few days ago: A case study of projection and blame-shifting. But as long as the Truth is remembered, the world has a chance of surviving…
I fully agree with Lada that at times the urge to give up and throw the towel just creeps in. At these times it is actually the words of a British writer that come to mind. The writer who departed from this world all too early and who shone the torch of truth through satire. I am thinking of Terry Pratchett, and the quote here comes from a novel for young readers “The Wee Free Men”:
Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.
WHERE THE MAJORITY DRANK THE COOLAID OF NEO-LIBERALISM,
WHERE IT WAS EASY TO DESIGNATE RUSSIA AS THE PERPETUAL ‘BAD GUY,’
WHERE THE OLD GAME OF ASSIGNING BLAME TO WHITEWASH THEIR OWN SINS
HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY PLAYED FOR CENTURIES.
Still, I decided to write it, because there are a few who do hear and pay attention! Who do care about the truth and who calibrate high enough to see the world for what it is!
In the title I mentioned “The White Rose” which was a heroic anti-fascist underground youth movement in the Nazi Germany. More about them, their fate, and the unexpected “Russian connection” in a translation coming after the materials from Alina Lipp – you will see why there is such a pronounced historic parallel.
⚡️The German government is fighting against freedom of speech. I am a free journalist who covers the special operation in Ukraine. They are going to sentence me now to 3 YEARS IN PRISON for telling the truth⚡️
According to current German law, it is only allowed to publish one-sided information that benefits the authorities. Anything that goes against this unwritten law is punished by the biased judicial machine.
But: The independent blogging community is ready to resist censorship in the West.
👉 I continue to work in Donetsk. If you are interested in the special project I mentioned, email me at: wombator2022@mail.ru
The German authorities have frozen the journalist’s and her father’s bank accounts.
“When the Nazis came to take away the Communists,
I kept silent since I was not a communist,
When they imprisoned the Social Democrats,
I kept silent since I was not a social democrat,
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not protest since I was not a trade unionist,
When they came to take the Jews away,
I did not protest since I was not a Jew,
When they came for me
there was no one else who could protest.”
Incidentally, there may be a positive side-effect from the trial and the publicity surrounding it. I recall an episode of the murder of Simon Petljura in Paris in 1926, a ruthless bandit leader from Western Ukraine and an ideological “teacher” of Stepan Bandera and the present-day ukro-Nazis, responsible for many mass murders (incidentally, Ukraine glorified Petljura in 2005 and in 2008 one of the streets in Kiev was renamed after him, which tells you all you need to know about Ukraine after the USSR collapse, when it switch to the USA’s payroll). The murderer of Petljura was found not guilty after the numerous accounts of the atrocities against the Jews were presented in the court. And even though it later turned out that NKVD was behind the organisation of the murder, the fact remains – those testimonials that freed the executioner of Petljura were very much real and substantiated by facts.
Below is a translation of a major historical article from Cont.
Dozens of German schools and streets bear their names. They are national heroes and idols of several post-war generations in Germany. Hans and Sophie Scholl, Alexander Schmorel, Christoph Probst — leaders of the student anti—fascist organization “White Rose” – became one of the main symbols of the resistance movement in the Third Reich.
(The white taped-over field in the upper left corner carries the text: “I am the St.George ribbon. I’ve been forbidden.”)
The marches of the “Immortal Regiment” took place all over Europe, but especially vividly in Germany
May 9, 2022, 16:20
Photo & text: Marina Khakimova-Gatzemayer
Frankfurt-am-Main
“I am an American. I go to your Russian rallies.” This unexpected meeting took place in Germany, where the Russian residents of this country held one of the numerous marches of the “Immortal Regiment” around the world. One of the participants of the action, a correspondent of the newspaper VZGLYAD, described her emotional impressions of what was happening.
– Last year there were so few of us at the march of the “Immortal Regiment” in Frankfurt that I had to carry the portrait of my grandfather in one hand and the shaft of our banner in the other. There was no one to take it. And now, look how many of us there are! – my friend Galya tells me, happily looking around at the people gathered at the Frankfurt “Immortal Regiment”. We have become friends with Galya in recent months – at rallies and demonstrations that the Russian-speaking population of Germany holds almost every week.
May 8 in Germany is officially the day of the end of the war. May 9 is a normal working day on which processions are prohibited. So our patriots had to celebrate the Victory over fascism on the eighth. Frankfurt is flooded with sunshine and packed with Ukrainian flags, pro-Ukrainian posters, portraits of Zelensky with the face of a martyr, anti-Russian street installations. We are already used to feeling like outcasts here.
They were preparing for the march for a month, texting, calling up, sharing news: “The government will ban the Immortal Regiment,” “No, it will only ban the Victory Banner,” “Military songs, anthems, marches are prohibited. Will we sing ditties about Hitler?”, “We were allowed only flowers and portraits of veterans, but the shaft on the portrait should not be more than a meter!”, “Maybe we should dress in the colour of the St. George ribbon?”, “In German social networks they write that everyone who comes to the “Immortal Regiment” will be evicted from Germany by force”, “Take your passports with you, everyone who celebrates Victory Day will be checked for German citizenship!”, “Where to buy a Russian banner?”
I wanted to make a simple and poignant commemoration of the 9th of May celebration in these difficult times, when Russia once again is fighting against Nazism – and not just in the Southern Russian lands, currently known as Ukraine (Ukraine is just a battlefield, where, after 8 years of genocide of the Russian population, it was said, “enough is enough”), but also on the wider, so far, diplomatic front against the resurgence of the Nazism in the whole West. When the West is cancelling and banning the commemoration of the Victory Day – both in the birthplace of the 20th century Nazism – Austria, and in the hotbeds of Nazi SS punisher battalions, like Latvia.
Then I came across the post by the VGTRK journalist Andrei Medvedev. Facebook twice blocked his account for this cry of the sould, which is a badge of honour in itself! Incidentally, Andrei Medvedev produced the investigative documentary, which I translated and now re-uploaded: The Great Unknown War. A must-see documentary about the WWII prelude. By Andrei Medvedev
“If I had to speak in the Bundestag like the boy Kolya, then I would probably say these words:
– Dear deputies. Today I saw a miracle. And this miracle is called Germany. I walked to you and looked at the beautiful Berlin streets, at the people, at the wonderful architectural monuments, and now I’m standing here and looking at you. And I understand that all this is a miracle. That you were all born and live in Germany. Why do I think so? Because considering what your soldiers did in our occupied territories, the Red Army soldiers had the full moral right to destroy the entire German people. To leave in place of Germany a scorched field, ruins and only textbook paragraphs would remind that there was once such a country. You probably don’t remember all the details of the occupation, but it’s not necessary. I’m just going to remind you of what the Wehrmacht and SS soldiers did to Soviet children.
They were shot. Often in front of parents. Or vice versa, first they shot at mom and dad, and then at the children. Your soldiers raped children. Children were burned alive. They were sent to concentration camps. Where their blood was taken from them to make serum for your soldiers. Children were starved. Children were eaten to death by your sheepdogs. Children were used as targets. Children were brutally tortured just for fun.
Or here are two examples. The Wehrmacht officer was prevented from sleeping by a baby, he took him by the leg and smashed his head against the corner of the stove. Your pilots at the Lychkovo station bombed the train on which we tried to take the children to the rear, and then your aces chased the frightened kids, shooting them in a bare field. Two thousand children were killed.
Just for what you did with children, I repeat, the Red Army could destroy Germany completely with its inhabitants. It had a full moral right. But it didn’t.
Do I regret it? Of course not. I bow to the steely will of my ancestors, who found some incredible strength in themselves so as not to become the same brutes as the soldiers of the Wehrmacht.
On the buckles of German soldiers it was written “God is with us.” But they were a product of hell and brought hell to our land. The soldiers of the Red Army were Komsomol members and Communists, but the Soviet people turned out to be much bigger and more cordial than the inhabitants of enlightened religious Europe. And they did not take revenge. They were able to understand that hell cannot be defeated by hell.
You should not ask us for forgiveness, because you personally are not to blame for anything. You cannot be responsible for your grandfathers and great-grandfathers. But I will be honest – for me the Germans are forever an utterly alien people. It’s not because you’re personally bad. It’s the pain of the children burned by the Wehrmacht that screams in me. And you will have to accept that at least my generation – for whom the memory of the war is in my grandfather’s awards, his scars, his front-line friends – will perceive you this way.
What will happen then, I do not know. Perhaps mankurts will come after us who will forget everything. And we have done a lot for this, we have foiled a lot ourselves, but I hope that all is not lost for Russia yet.
Of course we need to cooperate. Russians and Germans. We need to solve problems together. Fight ISIS and build gas pipelines. But you will have to accept one fact: WE WILL NEVER REPENT for our Great War. And even more so for the Victory. And even more so in front of you. Anyway, I repeat, my generation. Because back then we saved not only ourselves. We saved you from yourself. And I don’t even know what’s more important.”
In the pencil drawing on the right, the shadow of the old woman standing her ground is the iconic “Motherland Calling” poster of The Great Patriotic War. Here is that drawing in a greater resolution:
UPDATE: the minute granny has become a powerful living legend. Here is another, artistic, rendition of her image:
UPDATE 2: In Reutov, near Moscow, huge graffiti was created with a Ukrainian grandmother, who was mocked by the radicals of Ukraine because of the flag of the USSR. The author is reportedly a local artist. Earlier, images with the old woman appeared in the Murmansk and Belgorod regions. View the video of the painting process.
UPDATE 3: A video with comments from the foreign viewers embedded towards the end, to the “Sacred War”, the anthem of the fight against Nazism during the Great Patriotic War. It was great that the concern for her safety was raised at the UN level.
The video below made the headlines. It is quite heart-wrenching to watch as the Ukrainian soldiers are making a mockery of the elderly Ukrainian pair. I am writing a transcript below the video, and if it gets removed from YouTube, I’ll re-upload it to Odysee.
I finally pinned down what the Bucha massacre staged by the UkroNazis reminded me of! The very same thing was done by the Germans in Germany in the last months of WWII. As the Soviet troops were advancing, Hitler issued an order that all civilian Germans must evacuate westwards. anyone disobeying and staying would be considered a traitor to the Third Reich and no longer be seen as a true German. Naturally, quite a large number of people decided that they did not want to abandon their homes, and continued going about their business.
As the ebb and flow of the battles went, some town changed hands between the German and the Soviet troops. The Nazis staged false flag provocations in some towns, temporarily abandoned by the Soviet troops. The UkroNazis are nowhere as thorough as their German Nazi “colleagues” were, so today we see a lot of plot holes in the UkroReich narrative. Back in 1945, the Germans used converted, now collaborating, Russian POWs, dressed in Soviet uniforms to do the killing (promising those POWs freedom), but then executing them on the spot to make a picture of a battle, where the Soviets would have seemingly killed the civilians, only to be killed by the Germans. And then the “indignant civilised West” in the face of the Red Cross observers would be invited to witness and document the false flag, thinking it was for real.
Such episode is depicted in the Soviet semi-documentary film “Confrontation” from 1985. Here is the entire film:
At 2:50:00 is the documentary footage of the German atrocities on the Soviet soil, coupled with the footage of the tribunal conducted in Krasnodar over the Nazi collaborators.
At 2:55:16 the main antagonist, a Soviet PoW who completely switched to the German side, is instructed on plan for the false flag, and how to eliminate his Soviet-clad former co-prisoners once the deed is done.
At 3:00:00 the diversion group is formed – unbeknownst to them, none of them would be left alive after the mission.
At 3:01:21 is where the Germans accompany a Red Cross delegation to the scene of the would-be “Soviet brutality” against the civilian German population.
At 3:02:53 the Soviet-clad bodies of the soldiers are presented as evidence that it was they who killed the civilians.
At 3:03:16 is the documentary footage with the “indignation propaganda” feeding off the false flag with the words of “terror against terror” and promising to punish the guilty (guess who Goebbels meant); demanding to take all the German people to that town and let them see for themselves (EU delegation, anyone?)
I want to present a translation of an article by Alexander Rodgers, published on the 27 of March 2022. The topic of the article echoes closely the blooming support of racism and Nazism in the West, to the point of condoning such dark practices in the Baltics and in Ukraine. The roots of this can bes seen in the not so recent and in the recent history, where the idea of the crusades against Russia (in search of resource and land) always found hold in the Western society. A related documentary in this context is: The Great Unknown War. A must-see documentary about the WWII prelude. By Andrei Medvedev
Now is the time to talk about the justification of Hitler and Nazism in general. It has been going on for many years, one might even say decades. And in this very Europe, it began during Hitler himself, in the thirties of the last century.
How did it happen? The formula “Stalin is worse than Hitler” and “the Bolsheviks are worse than the Nazis” was used, telling about the terrible Bolshevik threat, repression, totalitarianism, the terrible GULAG and so on.
According to the reports from Donetsk, the warhead of Tochka-U missile was loaded with 50 cassettes of clustered charges. After the interception, fragment of the rocket fell on the city not far away from the target, and one cluster exploded, causing death of the civilians, including women and a child. Shortly before that, a fake invitation was placed on the social media, asking women to gather in the center of the city, reportedly to get information about the state of their men fighting at the front, thus luring victims to the point of attack. If it were not intercepted, the death toll would have been in the order of hundreds of people.
“The Alley of Angels. To the memory of the killed children of Donbass.”
20 people were killed and 36 more were injured on Monday after a Ukrainian Tochka-U tactical ballistic missile exploded in the heart of the Donetsk People’s Republic’s capital. The Russian Foreign Ministry characterised the attack as a “crime against humanity” and warned that it would “not go unpunished.”
Moscow is disappointed over Western silence in the wake of the 14 March attack on Donetsk civilians, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov has said.
“We are very, very disappointed that European leaders, my colleague [White House press secretary Jen] Psaki, her boss, US President Joe Biden, the leaders of international organisations, the leadership of NATO, have not said anything yesterday or today about Donetsk, or those civilian residents who died from the missile launched by the Ukrainian military,” Peskov said, speaking at a briefing with reporters on Tuesday.
“I will not give any personal assessment on this matter. I just want to state this and urge everyone to pay attention to this fact,” Peskov added.
A Ukrainian Tochka-U ballistic missile equipped with cluster munitions was shot down over the centre of the city of Donetsk on Monday, killing 20 civilians and injuring 36 others.
Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov suggested that the shelling of the Donetsk People’s Republic using such illegal cluster munitions was evidence that Ukrainian forces were seeking to kill as many civilians as possible, and said a decision on the Tochka-U’s use would require approval from the Ukrainian military leadership in Kiev.
“Future generations will acknowledge their debt to the Red Army as unreservedly as do we who have lived to witness these proud achievements.”
— Winston Chirchill
At the end of last year the heads of CIS (sans Ukraine) held a summit in St.Petersburg, during which President Vladimir Putin raised a very important of keeping the record of the pre-WWII years straight, especially in light of the EU and the collective West trying to reverse polarities and paint the victim – the USSR – as an aggressor. Like in the caricature below:
Quite a few documents were taken out of the archives and made available to the public for the first time, presenting unrefutable evidence of how Germany was armed by the West for an attack on the USSR, and how the USSR tried every thinkable peaceful venue to stop the war at the bud.
This initiative resulted in, among other things, a documentary film “The Great Unknown War”, which I newly translated. The President also published an article in The National Interest, called The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II with great insights of that not so distant past for the Western “amnesiaside” audience.
Here I want to draw everyone’s attention to Mr. Putin’s speech during that summit, with a few fragments quoted below.
This year marks the 75th Anniversary of victory over the Western-neutered Nazism in Germany. But more than that, it marks the full reawakening of Russia when it finally says, enough of the history rewriting, enough of painting white as black, enough of selective amnesia in the West, enough of trying to spare the feeling of the Eastern-European “brothers” when uncomfortable for them truths were swept under the rug.
No one’s forgotten. Nothing’s forgotten.
The suspiciously-timely COVID-19 pandemic was seemingly going to falter this reassertion and stop the Parade. But the events unfurled in an unfathomable way and allowed to push the day of the Parade further in time, to the 24th of June, the day, when the very first Victory Parade was held on the Red Square. The dark forces tried to demolish memory by demolishing the memorial, like it was done in Prague in May, but all they did was to awaken the sacred wrath.
And so it commenced…
This is a parade, where memories and history are reaffirmed with a detachment of the legendary T-34 tanks and soldiers in WWII uniforms
and the present-day Russias commitment to the defence of peace is reasserted
These images are from the following two RT reportages:
