Genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union by Germany

Vyacheslav Viktorovich Volodin

Chairman of the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation

The State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation considers it fundamentally important to give a judicial and legal assessment of war crimes and criminalities against humanity committed during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 by authorities and armed forces, including SS troops of Germany and its allies.

 The allies are: Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Croatia, and their accomplices; namely armed units formed across the territories of Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway and other states; volunteers from Austria, Denmark, Latvia, Poland, France, the Czech Republic and Estonia; as well as traitors from among inhabitants of the occupied territories who swore allegiance to Adolf Hitler’s regime.

Judgments adopted in recent years by courts of St Petersburg, Republic of Crimea, Krasnodar and Stavropol Territories, Belgorod, Bryansk, Leningrad, Novgorod, Oryol, Pskov and Rostov Regions unequivocally qualify criminal acts of Hitler followers and their accomplices as genocide of national, ethnic and racial groups representing the USSR population, namely the peoples of the Soviet Union. 

These judgments are a logical follow-up of the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal and resolutions of subsequent trials of Nazi criminals and their accomplices, convicting those accused of crimes including supplying lethal weapons to Hitler’s troops.

Currently, at a time when causes and results of the Second World War are being transformed from an object of historical and memorial research into an instrument of geopolitical confrontation, such court judgments are especially relevant. They manifest unequivocal warnings to political revanchists who have not learned anything from lessons of the past. The history of Russia is full of heroic pages; and any aggressor has always received a worthy rebuff, no matter how strong armies thereof may seem, like those that had conquered almost all of Europe before attacking our Homeland, for example, under the command of Napoleon or Hitler.

Attempts of the current German policymakers to promote the false thesis about the alleged joint responsibility and identity of Hitler’s Germany and the USSR, as well as the desire to shift to our country the blame laying on Germany for unleashing the largest and bloodiest conflict in the modem history of mankind seem especially cynical. 

One clear example of this approach is the adoption by the Bundestag on November 30, 2022, of an anti-historical Russophobic act — a resolution recognising the mass famine on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR in 1932 and 1933 as the “genocide of the Ukrainian people”. 

Any arguments about the indiscriminate nature of this tragedy, which occurred not only in Ukraine, but also in large territories of the Volga Region and Kazakhstan, are rejected for the sake of political expediency.

At the same time, German authorities cynically evade any attempts to perpetuate the memory of millions of peaceful Soviet citizens who became victims of German “all-out war” on the Eastern Front, and consistently refuse to make compensation payments to the residents of besieged Leningrad.

Western politicians prefer not to remember that, according to plans of Hitler’s colonisation and the Germanisation of the “Eastern Space”, the USSR civilian population was subject to mass slaughter.

 The barbaric extermination of civilians pursuant to the General Plan “Ost” was carried out in all the Republics of the USSR that were invaded by the Nazi German aggressors. As a result of their inhumane acts, the total number of victims among the civilian population of the USSR during the occupation amounted to 13 684 692 people (who were deliberately exterminated, died during forced labour in Germany and died from the deliberately cruel conditions of the occupation regime).

The increasing involvement of NATO and countries of the ‘collective West’, led by the United States, in Ukraine’s anti-Russian crimes and their activities to support Ukrainian armed contingents, including build-up of supplies of high-capacity offensive armaments; accelerated training of personnel of Ukrainian militant groups; provision of intelligence information, dispatch of foreign mercenaries to participate in combat; planning and implementation of military operations and acts of sabotage, such as the explosion of the Crimean bridge.

All of the above stipulate an urgent need to declare that the responsibility for any further deterioration of the military and political situation in the conflict zone and on the Eurasian continent in its entirety lies not only with the puppet Kiev regime, but also with those who supply it with deadly weapons, finance militants and terrorists; for those who are ready to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian soldier” in their revanchist frenzy.

The State Duma, taking into account provisions of the Charter of the United Nations of June 26, 1945, the Charter and Verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9 1948, the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity of November 26, 1968, recognises criminal acts of the Nazi German invaders and their accomplices against the civilian population of the USSR as genocide against the peoples of the Soviet Union.