Historical revisionism surfaces in Germany over post-war borders

History is being rewritten in Germany, and the issue of post-World War II territorial arrangements and the displacement of German settlers (“East Germans”) is being brought back into the mainstream media.

The German Federal Parliament has banned all representatives of Russia and Belarus, successor states to the Soviet Union which liberated a large part of Germany including Berlin, from the commemoration ceremony for the 80th anniversary of the Nazis’ surrender.

On Sunday, Russia’s Ambassador to Germany was prevented from attending commemoration ceremonies held at the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps. Both concentration camps were liberated by the Red Army at the end of April 1945.

Nazi Germany had massacred 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union and approximately a quarter of the population of the Belarusian Soviet Republic. Representatives of the successor states to these countries are no longer invited to German commemoration ceremonies.

The reason given for this is that Russia is waging an “aggressive war” against Ukraine. Ambassadors from several countries that have invaded foreign countries in recent years are expected to attend the commemoration in the Federal Parliament today, which decided to launch an aggressive war against Yugoslavia in 1999.

Threat of expulsion for Belarusian and Russian representatives

The non-invitation of the Russian and Belarusian ambassadors and other official representatives to the ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the victory caused a stir in early April.

At that time, a document classified as “strictly confidential,” sent from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to federal states, districts, and municipalities, was leaked.

The document stated that “invitations should not be sent to representatives of Russia and Belarus for commemoration ceremonies organized by the federal government, states, and municipalities.”

The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs justified this decision with a warning against “propaganda, disinformation, and historical revisionism,” but a government spokesperson could not provide any examples of representatives from the accused countries engaging in such provocations at commemoration ceremonies.

The note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that if representatives of the two countries “appear unannounced,” the organizers of the respective commemoration ceremonies “can exercise their local rights.”

Thus, the ministry granted Germany the freedom to expel representatives of countries that suffered an unprecedented number of deaths as a result of the war.

“Holes” in Baerbock’s directive

In practice, the directive prepared by former Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was only partially implemented.

Russian Ambassador Sergey Nechayev was able to attend the official commemoration ceremony for the Battle of the Seelow Heights on April 16. This battle was the beginning of the Red Army’s final major offensive to liberate Berlin, and more than 33,000 Soviet soldiers lost their lives.

Nechayev also attended the commemoration ceremonies in Torgau on April 25, 1945, where Soviet and US soldiers shook hands for the first time during the liberation of Germany, but CDU State Premier of Saxony Michael Kretschmer accused Russia of committing war crimes in the Ukraine war.

Nechayev and his Belarusian counterpart were not allowed to attend the official commemoration ceremonies held at the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps on May 4. The concentration camps had been liberated by the Red Army.

Axel Drecoll, Director of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, said that the Russian ambassador’s invitation had been explicitly cancelled; if the ambassador still came, he threatened that they would “enforce our local rules in close cooperation with security forces.”

War club in full attendance at the Bundestag

The Russian and Belarusian ambassadors were also not allowed to attend the commemoration ceremony held today in the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag).

On the other hand, ambassadors from all other countries represented in Berlin were invited. These included representatives of the other victorious powers of World War II. The participation of the US ambassador is not prevented by the US having launched an invasion of Iraq in 2003. The ambassadors of France and Britain are not prevented by their countries having launched an aggressive war against Libya in 2011.

Furthermore, it is known that the German Federal Parliament, the organizer of the commemoration ceremony, approved the aggressive war against Yugoslavia in 1999, in violation of international law.

Only objection from former CDU parliamentary speaker

Criticism of Russia’s exclusion was voiced only by former Federal Parliament Speaker and current head of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Norbert Lammert (CDU).

Speaking on ZDF television, he said he was “not sure” whether government directives, such as the note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were appropriate.

According to him, in any case, the victims of the war must be commemorated, “regardless of current developments, no matter how painful, oppressive, and cruel they may be.”

Historical revisionism in German media

The exclusion of Russia and Belarus from Berlin’s commemoration ceremonies for the end of World War II goes hand in hand with efforts to reinterpret the actions of the Soviet Union during the war and after Germany’s liberation from Nazi rule.

In recent days, leading media outlets have begun to view May 8th not as the end of the war, but as the beginning of events related to the “resettlement of the German-speaking population,” especially in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

These publications, of course, do not only speak of the “brutality of the Red Army.” For example, NDR had to admit the positive role of the Red Army by saying, “even if it ultimately played a decisive role in liberating Germany from Nazi terror.”

FAZ examined territorial arrangements in Eastern Europe

Regarding resettlement, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote last week that the “power politics” plans of the Soviet Union within the “long tradition of Great Russian imperialism” were of great importance.

The newspaper argued that “sufficient compensation” for “Poland’s loss of eastern territories” as a result of the state restructuring of Eastern Europe would have been “East Prussia or Upper Silesia.”

According to FAZ, the reason for the transfer of territories further east of the German Reich to Poland was “only that Stalin achieved this through cunning and deception.”

Historian Manfred Kittel, a lecturer at the University of Regensburg, claims that the “expulsion of millions of people to a shrunken Germany” gave the “Kremlin the opportunity to create an overpopulated crisis region in the heart of Central Europe.”

According to Russian plans, the “expellees from the east were to be a source of unrest and social decay.” According to the historian, the “Russian imperial context” was “at the center of concrete diplomatic preparations and the subsequent practical implementation of the expulsions.”

Kittel adds that “Great Russian imperialism existed long before Hitler” and “continues to exist today, even without Hitler,” citing the ongoing “war of annihilation” against Ukraine as an example.

During the Cold War, West Germany did not recognize the 1950 Zgorzelec Treaty signed between the German Democratic Republic and socialist Poland, claiming to be the sole legal representative of Germany.

Moreover, especially CDU politicians had objected to the shifting of German borders “westward” after the war and the expulsion of German settlers placed in Poland and the Baltics during the Third Reich period, keeping this issue constantly on the agenda.

Forever enemy: Russia

In Kittel’s perspective of “Russian-Soviet imperialism,” cooperation with Russia is only possible during periods when Russia is relatively weak.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the Federal Republic of Germany gained access to Russia’s enormous natural gas reserves through a certain degree of cooperation with Moscow, but when Russia regained its strength, conflict with it became inevitable.

This aligns with what the new German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said about the war in Ukraine during a phone call with two Russian satirists in early February.

In this conversation, Wadephul had said, “No matter how the war with Russia ends, Russia will remain an enemy for us forever.”