German historian Kittel blames Stalin rather than Hitler for WW2

German historian Manfred Kittel has claimed that Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who gave the “green light” for Germany to invade Poland, was responsible for World War II.

Previously known for his “revisionist” views on the war, Kittel articulated these arguments in a full-page article published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), one of Germany’s influential mainstream newspapers.

According to Kittel, driven by the “impetus of a need for war in Europe”, the Soviet Union gave Germany the “green light” to invade Poland by signing the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 23 August 1939.

The article argues that this made it possible for Adolf Hitler’s “almost instinctive disposition” towards war to “unfold destructively”.

Accordingly, “a deliberately acting Stalin” thus became an “accomplice” in World War II.

Manfred Kittel made headlines years ago when extreme revisionist tendencies emerged under his leadership at the Berlin-based Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation Foundation.

At present, Kittel criticises Stalin’s “complicity” in the outbreak of the war in 1939 and attempts to demonstrate “plainly and clearly […] the fatal role of Russian imperialism”.

In 2025, Kittel also described Russia’s war against Ukraine as a “war of annihilation”.

Mainstreaming of “revisionism” continues in Germany

According to German Foreign Policy, Kittel began to gain wider public recognition from 2009 onwards.

At that time, he was appointed director of the Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation Foundation, which had been established in late 2008 to create a documentation centre in Berlin on forced migration.

The centre’s focus was to address the resettlement of German-speaking populations from various countries across Eastern and South-Eastern Europe as a consequence of mass crimes committed by Germans during World War II.

Kittel was appointed director of the foundation despite the thematic focus of his dissertation, published in 1993.

In his thesis, the historian argued that Nazi crimes had already been sufficiently addressed during the era of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer—namely in the early years of the Federal Republic—and claimed that anyone disputing this was paving the way for a “penitence mentality”.

He contended that trying to encourage the “broad masses of the population” to “come to terms with the past” amounted to “misguided public education”.

In 2008, under Kittel’s co-ordination, a “feasibility study” on the Nazi past of officials in refugee associations was conducted at the taxpayer-funded Munich Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ).

Regarding an SS-Obersturmfuehrer involved in mass atrocities, the author claimed that it could not be determined “whether he was inwardly a National Socialist”.

Poland viewed as “occupied East Prussia”

Under Kittel’s leadership, the Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation Foundation generated headlines on several occasions.

In the summer of 2010, it emerged that both full and alternate members of the foundation’s board held openly revisionist views.

For instance, one board member had once described a trip to north-eastern Poland (“East Prussia”) as a “journey to an occupied country”.

An alternate member suggested in a newspaper article that Poland might bear some responsibility for World War II.

The article also argued that it was Great Britain that “turned the Battle of Danzig into a global conflict”.

Exaggeration of “German suffering”

In the autumn of 2014, the foundation under Kittel’s leadership caused a final scandal by opening an exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum [German Historical Museum] in Berlin.

This exhibition served as a precursor project to the planned documentation centre focused on forced migration.

The exhibition not only disregarded Nazi mass crimes as the cause for the resettlement of German-speaking populations from Eastern and South-Eastern European countries, but it also drastically exaggerated the number of victims.

For example, the exhibition claimed that “more than two million Germans died during the forced expulsions from Poland, Bohemia, and East Prussia”.

In contrast, the German Historical Museum stated that “at most 600,000” people died during the resettlement processes between 1944 and 1947, a figure supported by scientific evidence.

Post-war German expulsions labelled “genocide”

At the time, the exhibition proved to be the final straw. Following years of protests from Polish and Czech historians, as well as the Central Council of Jews, whose representatives withdrew temporarily or permanently from the foundation’s governing bodies, Kittel was forced to resign from his post in late 2014.

Nevertheless, Kittel remained a prominent figure among representatives of displaced German communities.

Among other honours, he received the Human Rights Award from the Sudeten German Homeland Association in 2015.

He has repeatedly and openly advocated for classifying the resettlement of German-speaking populations in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe as “genocide”.

For some time, the historian has also commented more frequently on the policies of the Soviet Union and Russia.

For instance, writing in April 2025, Kittel argued that the resettlement process was supported by the Kremlin because it provided an opportunity to create “an overpopulated crisis hotspot in the heart of Central Europe” in post-war Germany.

In his view, displaced Germans from the East were intended to become a “source of unrest and social decay”, which constituted the “Russian imperial context” of the events.

Kittel stated that “Great Russian imperialism” existed long before Hitler and continued “to this day, even without Hitler”, such as in the form of the “ongoing war of annihilation” against Ukraine.

“Complicity” of the Soviet Union

Last week, Kittel went so far as to attribute “complicity” in World War II to the Soviet Union, thereby denying that Nazi Germany bore sole responsibility.

In a full-page article published in the FAZ, Kittel primarily cited historian Klaus Hildebrand.

Hildebrand had been accused of making “relativising” statements about National Socialism during the “Historians’ Dispute” (Historikerstreit) of 1986 and 1987.

According to Hildebrand, Soviet policy was dictated by the “need for war in Europe”.

Kittel wrote that through the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939, Moscow gave the German Reich the “green light”, “supported the German war effort”, and thereby enabled Hitler’s “almost instinctive disposition” towards war to “unfold destructively”.

In his personal assessment, Kittel concluded that “a deliberately acting Stalin” had made himself an “accomplice” as early as 1939.

This claim is directed at the country that suffered by far the greatest loss of life in the German war of annihilation, with approximately 27 million dead.

Kittel consistently defends the actions of the Western powers, from condoning the annexation of parts of Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement to refusing to co-operate with Moscow against the Nazi Reich.

Proposal for national memorial day against pact

Ultimately, Kittel attributes an “imbalance in the culture of remembrance” to the Federal Republic.

That is, he argues there is an imbalance between the “increasingly intense focus on the crimes of Nazi annihilation imperialism” on the one hand, and the “suppressed sins of more traditional territorial imperialism of the Tsarist or Stalinist type in Russia” on the other.

Kittel considers this an imbalance “with serious political consequences”. He notes that he “struggles to understand” why then Foreign Minister Heiko Maas insisted in May 2020 that “Germany alone unleashed the war against Poland in 1939” and therefore bore responsibility for World War II.

Kittel believes it is “‘more important than ever’ to demonstrate plainly and clearly Stalin’s complicity in the outbreak of the war in 1939 and the catastrophic, ongoing role of Russian imperialism”.

To advance his aim, Kittel wants 23 August to be declared a “national day of remembrance” in Germany as the “commemoration day of the Hitler-Stalin Pact”.

The European Parliament undertook a similar initiative in September 2019. At that time, it adopted a resolution calling for 23 August to be designated EU-wide as the “European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Totalitarian Regimes”.

The resolution asserted, among other points, that World War II “broke out as an immediate result of the notorious non-aggression treaty between the National Socialist German Reich and the Soviet Union, also known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact”.

According to the European Parliament, these two states were “totalitarian regimes (…) pursuing the goal of world conquest to an equal degree”.