The Second World War

Comment: guilt and responsibility

Also a man’s age after the beginning of the German Attack on the Soviet Union, this war is not forgotten. From the historical guilt of responsibility for the present, at the same time gives Felix Steiner says.

The German soldiers cemetery in the Russian Sebesh, close to the border with Latvia

It is not so, that the war against the Soviet Union in the memory of the German would be present, only because the political memory is now occupied, narrower and less prominent, as in many other historical anniversaries. Because there are virtually no large German family, in which not at least one member in Russia would be killed.

And as long as the Generation of the front-line soldiers lived, was this war a subject of Discussion in every family. Me as posterity, will remain, for example, the Hands of my great-uncle Richard unforgettable: a crippled Hand with only two fingers – froze the other in the Russian Winter of 1941.

Patchy memories of a tradition of the witnesses

The Problem with all of this family memory tradition: it was never complete. She focused on our own suffering, in war and captivity. That this war was different than the field trains in the West, the North and the South of Europe – a wanted criminal, hardly any of the time discusses witnesses. They were not talking about the systematic Confiscation of livestock and grain, which meant the certain death of the civilian population, and not the literal dead of millions of Soviet prisoners of war.

DW editor Felix Steiner

And yet, these gaps are closed in the collective consciousness of the German long: not a history book for higher schools, in the “Commissar order” of the German Wehrmacht, a clear break of the war, international law, addressed, and would be printed. And also, that from the 22. June 1941 is not alone a war against a political System or a country, but against every single one of his “sub-humans” classified as residents was conducted, know, every reasonably educated German.

Against this historical Background, it seems, even after more than 25 years, is still a miracle that the former Soviet Union in 1990, the Association gave their blessing to the German again. A clear no would have been human more than understandable. It probably had a lot to do with confidence that the two leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl, to each other had passed. Two men who had lived through this war even as a youth, and therefore knew what responsible politicians must do this to your peoples, never again.

Keeping the memory alive, right care

From the German history of responsibility – who of politicians from all parties in this country don’t know that? For one thing, the responsibility, the memory of the historical injustice to keep awake. To contact other Victims of the German Aggression, always in the awareness and Knowledge of the slaying. Because the same scars, the beat of this war in German families, there are, logically, also in Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian families – and even to a much greater extent. And exactly why is demolition of the German side of the thread of conversation to Moscow never. Because political solutions have to be found on the conference table and not on the field of battle.

Historical responsibility does not mean, however, an open breach of the law, such as the annexation of Crimea and provocation in Eastern Ukraine, or andeswo to take a stand, because it is historically in debt. No, so much should have learned the German from the Nazi era: breaking the law to fight immediately and not only when it is too late. And pure Appeasement does not prevent war. It moves it only.

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