Author: Dirk Emmerich
85 years ago, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union. It was a war against the USSR, not against Russia, as the magazine "Spiegel" rightly notes. For me, this is not just a terminological dispute - I encountered this date as a child in Moscow. My father was a diplomat at the German embassy at the time, and I studied at the 56th secondary school in Moscow. For students, June 22 fell during the summer vacation. It was at that time that I read the book “Vasyok Trubachev and his comrades“, I was 12 years old.
Vasyok's class goes to Ukraine during the holidays, in the middle of a hot summer. The village where the children are staying is occupied by the Germans, a war begins. And the carefree students until yesterday become real masters of survival. They have to hide, help the partisans, and face the horrors of war firsthand.
When I read the book, I was almost the same age as Vasyok. I was very impressed - as a 12-year-old “Muscovite” I identified with these boys and girls who were also from the capital. But suddenly I realized that there was a difference between us - I was not one of them, I was German. And I was overcome with a sense of shame.
The date June 22, 1941 and my two grandfathers
My father remembered that when he heard on the radio about the attack on the USSR, his father - my grandfather, an ordinary worker and member of the Social Democratic Party, told him: – This is the beginning of the end for Hitler. He cannot win this war–. I was still young when my grandfather died. And I wanted to ask him why he knew this already on June 22, 1941.
My other grandfather, also a worker, did not talk much about that time. In April 1945, his house on the outskirts of Berlin was badly damaged by a grenade thrown by Red Army soldiers. Until his death, he never changed his bad attitude towards the Russians. Both my grandfathers had been lucky - they did not send them to the front, they used them in the rear. Although they were different, they were later united by the following conviction: “We will never allow another war“.
Over the years, my horizons have broadened. At that time, I knew little about the events preceding June 22, 1941. Two years earlier, Hitler and Stalin had concluded a Non-Aggression Pact. And for a long time, there was silence about the additional secret protocol to it on the division of "spheres of influence" in the Baltics and Poland. In 1971, I visited Katyn with my parents. I remember the monument dedicated to those over 20,000 Polish officers and soldiers who were allegedly killed by the Hitlerites. It was only much later that I learned the historical truth – the order for this was given by Stalin.
I think about all this when I remember those years. History is always complicated, and its consequences reach our days. Nevertheless, June 22nd remains the day of the infamous German attack on the USSR. Germany is responsible for the deaths of 27 million people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and other former republics of the Soviet Union. This cannot be redeemed and must not be forgotten.
Do I have the right to be ashamed of the Russians?
In any case, everything is much more complicated today. I cannot think of June 22nd, 1941, without remembering February 24th, 2022. Although the circumstances are different, in both cases it is about subjugating another country. As a German journalist who worked in Moscow for many years, I had the opportunity to observe this on different levels. And I realize: history never repeats itself, and if it does, it happens in a different context that is difficult to compare.
And yet I feel anger, shame, and disgrace. I feel like a little Moscow boy in 1970 who realized what the Germans had done. Just as I was ashamed of the Germans then, I am now ashamed of the Russians. Do I have the right to do so? Or does that sound too presumptuous?
Again I remember Vaska Trubachev and his comrades - how they survived the summer of 1941. In terms of duration, the current war has already surpassed the Great Patriotic War. And how much longer will it last?