B.undespräsident Frank-Walter Steinmeier reminded the Ukraine of the German crimes in the Second World War and called for more intensive remembrance. “The locations of National Socialist crimes in Ukraine are barely recorded on the map of our memories,” Steinmeier said on Wednesday morning after visiting two memorials in Korjukiwka north of Kiev. At the same time he emphasized: “Memory is not only important to remember events, but also important to give the dead a name.” The “blind spots of our memory” should be illuminated. “We must have a common interest with the Ukrainians in sharpening our memories,” said the Federal President.
In the afternoon Steinmeier spoke at a memorial event in Babyn Yar (Indian gorge). On September 29 and 30, 1941, German units with soldiers, police officers and SS men shot and killed almost 34,000 Jewish residents of occupied Kiev. “It was Germans who committed these atrocities. Words fail before the extent of their cruelty and brutality, ”said the Federal President in his speech. He is here today, said Steinmeier, to remember. “Because we have to remember in order to recognize where unleashed hatred and nationalism, anti-Semitism and racial madness can lead: The German war of aggression and annihilation was murderous barbarism.”
Ukraine is “too pale” on the map of memory
The human crime of the Holocaust would not have started in the German death factories, said the Federal President. It had started earlier, on the campaign of conquest to the east, in forests, on the outskirts of towns. Well more than a million Jews fell victim to this Holocaust from bullets in Ukraine. “Here in Kiev, in Odessa, in Berdychiv, Lypovets, Chernivtsi, Mizocz – in so many other places. Who in my country, in Germany, knows about the Holocaust through bullets today? Who knows these names soaked in blood? All of these places have no appropriate place in our memory, ”said Steinmeier. The Ukraine is only drawn far too pale, far too shadowy on our map of memory. The Federal President had already criticized in the summer that the war victims of the peoples of the former Soviet Union were less burned into the collective memory than their suffering required.
Until the liberation of the Ukrainian capital by the Red Army in November 1943, around 100,000 people had been murdered in Babyn Yar. The gorge is considered to be the largest mass grave in Europe. More than 80 years ago – on June 22, 1941 – Hitler’s Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The country recorded the largest number of victims in Europe with 27 million deaths.
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