Published 11 December 2022 at 14.17
Foreign. The German Bundestag's decision to criminalize denial of the “Ukrainian Holocaust” of the 1930s, also known as the Holodomor, is going very far. Among other things, texts from the Swedish authority Forum for living history can constitute Holocaust denial if they are spread in Germany.
Like the article på Facebook
According to the new German law, the famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933 is to be considered an intentional genocide, which is not allowed to be questioned unless one wants to be convicted of Holocaust denial.
Something you don't want in Germany, because Holocaust denial is one of the most serious crimes in German law and regularly leads to several years in prison. Historians researching the 1930s will therefore have to be careful when operating in Germany in the future.
However, the claim that the famine of the 1930s was a deliberate “Ukrainian holocaust” has very weak support among historians, although it is generally accepted, also in Russia, that the Soviet organization of agriculture at this time was one of the reasons why it went so badly.
When two years of severe crop failure hit the Soviet Union, the rules of collective farming meant that the normally fertile Ukraine lost parts of its unusually meager agricultural production, and millions of people both in Ukraine and other parts of the Soviet Union suffered severe starvation.
The claim that the famine was a deliberate revenge against Ukraine, carried out by Stalin, arose in Canada in the 1980s. There, former Nazi collaborators within the Ukrainian exile milieu were happy to compare the Ukrainians' suffering during the famine with the media-attentioned story of how German authorities persecuted Jews during the Second World War. Something that the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators were much less keen to talk about.
When the German Bundestag now recognizes Holdomor as a genocide and at the same time tightens Section 130 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibits denial of the Holocaust, it gets far-reaching consequences.
Among other things, this means that texts published by the Swedish authority Forum for living history, an authority whose task is to deal with historiography with a “point of departure in the Holocaust”, now in the German sense engage in Holocaust denial, because the authority does not unanimously recognize the famine as a genocide deliberately organized by Josef Stalin.
“A large number of processes, events and decisions, both general and specific, came to cooperate, overlap and influence each other, which in total led to the Ukrainian famine disaster of 1932-1933. This makes it difficult to explain the disaster as the result of a single-track and rectilinear historical development or as a result of one man's whims,” it says, for example, in a text that the authority has on its website.
At the same time, many Germans likely have difficulty understanding what is going on when a relatively controversial genocide in Ukraine now suddenly acquires the same status as the traditionally only indisputable historical fact, the Holocaust.
Before this year's US-led arming of Ukraine's militias began, and the European view of neo-Nazism necessarily needed to be changed, it was taboo for Germans to talk about other genocides along with the Holocaust, much like it is forbidden for Christians to have other gods besides God.
Some jurists considered and m ed that such comparisons amounted to “Holocaust trivialization” and could be punishable in themselves, and they were certainly not something the German Bundestag – made up of various more or less red and green politicians – used to engage in.