Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday praised Soviet soldiers for ending the “total evil” of Auschwitz on the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Nazi death camp.
Auschwitz was the largest of the extermination camps and has become a symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million European Jewish people, one million of whom died at the site between 1940 and 1945, along with more than 100,000 non-Jewish people.
Soviet troops found 7,000 survivors when they arrived on January 27, 1945, the first Allied troops to enter the camp.
“We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this terrible, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history,” Putin said, according to the Kremlin.
“We will do everything to defend the right of people to ethnic, linguistic and spiritual identity, and to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism, Russophobia and other racist ideologies,” he added.
The Russian leader often credits the Soviet Union with defeating Nazi Germany in his speeches, especially in the context of Russia’s offensive in Ukraine.
Putin has regularly accused Ukrainian and Western officials of “Nazism” and “Russophobia”, using this as a pretext to launch the assault in February 2022.
Russian officials were not invited to the commemorations in Poland for the third year running since the Ukraine offensive began, after organisers said their presence would be “cynical”.
– Leningrad blockade –
State television news on Monday focused coverage instead on the 81st anniversary of Russia breaking the Siege of Leningrad, during which around a million inhabitants starved and froze to death.
Putin said in televised comments that the siege, which began in 1941 and was only fully broken in 1944, was an atrocity of the same order of magnitude to the Holocaust.
Putin, born in 1952, is a native of the city, which was renamed to Saint Petersburg.
On Monday, he laid flowers at a mass grave where his brother Viktor — who died in the siege as a child in 1942 — is buried.
“It’s absolutely clear that the siege of Leningrad ranks alongside such monstrous crimes against humanity as the Holocaust, the death camps and punitive actions by Nazi henchmen against peaceful civilians,” Putin said at a commemorative concert.
“The siege carried away more than one million lives,” he said.
Teaching of history in the Soviet Union and Russia has always focused far more on the vast losses among Soviet soldiers and civilians in what is known as the Great Patriotic War than on Nazi extermination of Jewish people.
And aspects such as the secret Nazi-Soviet pact that gave Adolf Hitler the green light to start the war and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Poland, are taboo — either downplayed or ignored in official narratives.