MYTH OF “CLEAN’’ WEHRMACHT AND EMERGENCE OF NEO-FASCISM AND RUSSOPHOBIA IN GERMANY
ILLUSTRATIVE IMAGE
by Dr. Leon Tressell
The Western media and political classes have lost their minds with their hysterical Russophobia since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin is denounced as a modern day Hitler, who according to the cognitively challenged US president, is carrying out acts of genocide in Ukraine.
The Western media and political classes, who are beholden to the interests of the merchants of death in the Military industrial complex, rant and rave about Russian war crimes. Yet they ignore the resurgence of neo-fascism in Germany a country which has a genocidal history of killing tens of millions of people.
This neo-fascist movement in Germany is trying to resurrected the myth of the ‘clean Wehrmacht’. In the 2021 general election Alternative for Germany won 4.7 million votes giving it 83 seats in the Reichstag about 11% of total seats. It has substantial representation in the state parliaments of Germany and is the largest party in states of Saxony and Thuringia. This emerging neo-fascist party is central to the revisionist history which is popular in Germany. It denies the responsibility of the Wehrmacht for killing over 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union and puts it all down to formations such as the SS.
Alexander Gauland, co-founder of the AfD and one of its leading lights in the Bundestag, has commented how, “Germans should be proud of “the achievements of German soldiers” during World War 2. Gauland has gone further and praised the ‘bravery of German soldiers’. According to Gauland millions of German soldiers served with distinction and should take no blame for the criminal policies of the Nazi dictatorship.
This represents yet another attempt to rewrite history and perpetuate the myth of the ‘Clean Wehrmacht’ whose reputation was ‘unblemished’ by the military campaigns that it fought on behalf of Hitler’s genocidal regime.
This myth that was firmly rooted in large parts of the German population was first challenged by the hugely controversial exhibition “War of Annihilation Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944″ that toured 33 cities in the mid to late 1990s. It was received by a deluge of criticism and ‘massive protests’ to such a degree that it was suspended and later re-released after some ‘editing’.
The current conflict in Ukraine is bringing back to the surface how many in German society really feel about Russians. On one of Germany’s most watched talk shows commentator Florence Gaub recently stated: “We should not forget even if Russians look European, they are not European. In a cultural sense. They think differently about violence, or death. … They have no concept of a liberal, post modern life. A concept of life each individual can choose. Instead, life can simply end early with death. Russian life expectancy is quite low, you know, its 70 for men. That’s why they treat death differently, that people simply die.’’
Where have I heard a German speaker dehumanize Russians before?
In 1943 Joseph Goebbels said of Russia: “It would be mistaken to evaluate it by the standards of Western Europe….The people of the Soviet Union live at a level of brutish primitiveness that we can hardly imagine.’’
Western media outlets and the entire political classes have completely ignored the many war crimes committed by the Ukrainian army in the Donbass since 2014. The most infamous of these war crimes is the Odessa massacre on 2 May 2014 that left over 100 Russian speakers dead at the hands of the neo-Nazi Right Sector.
Over the last eight years the incessant shelling of civilians settlements in Donetsk and Lugansk by Ukrainian forces has led to the deaths of over 10,000 with thousands more wounded and hundreds of thousands driven from their homes.
Every day civilian settlements around Donetsk city are bombarded by Ukrainian artillery causing many casualties amongst civilians. One impartial source for these attacks comes from the daily video reports provided by American journalist Patrick Lancaster. All you have to do is to go to his YouTube channel.
By ignoring these war crimes it suggests that the West condones such attacks on Russian speaking civilians.
The growing neo-fascist movement in Germany and its attempts to whitewash the country’s genocidal past should be a warning to the world. It brings to mind the famous warning that the great Bertolt Brecht gave to German workers after the Second World War:
“For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
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