PERSPECTIVES: Apologies and forgiveness (06/12/05)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Apologies and forgiveness

Observing the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder apologized for the suffering Germans inflicted on Ukrainians during World War II and, on behalf of his compatriots, asked forgiveness.

Lord knows, there's a lot to forgive. In three years of German occupation, Ukraine's population declined by 9 million. More than 7 million were killed in the devastation that convulsed the length and breadth of the country from June 22, 1941, when the Nazis invaded until they were finally driven out. Two million were shipped to Germany to work as slaves.

In retrospect, the Nazi catastrophe should not have been a surprise. For Adolf Hitler, Germans were the master race, destined to rule the world. To accomplish that, Germany's population had to grow and its borders expanded to provide "Lebensraum," or living space, where Ukraine's fertile steppes were a lucrative prize. Another essential element to Hitler's plan was the "purification" of the German "race." That meant the physical elimination of Jews, many of whom lived in Ukraine.

Hitler laid it all out in "Mein Kampf." Since few people had actually read the book, the invasion surprised everyone - no one more than Joseph Stalin, who in 1939 had forged a partnership with Hitler to divide Europe between them.

When the Germans first crossed the border into Ukraine, Ukrainians were greeted as liberators. And why not? Less than a decade earlier, they had endured the genocidal Famine-Holodomor, which killed more of their countrymen in a single year than all the soldiers who died during four years of trench warfare in World War I. Stalin also ordered the murder of poets, priests, scholars and every category of leader and intellectual - the total number will never be known.

As it turned out, Hitler was just as evil as Stalin. Had Ukrainians read his book, they would have discovered he considered them and all other Slavs to be "Untermenschen" - subhuman. And so, perceiving Ukrainians as less than human, the Nazis treated them accordingly, seizing people, grain, livestock, minerals, even the soil itself. Mile-long trains of hopper cars shipped Ukraine's legendary black soil, chornozem, to the fatherland.

Nazi brutality in Ukraine knew no bounds. Villages were ravaged and burned; POWs from the Red Army starved to death; Jews machine-gunned in ravines, sent to concentration camps. With no option but to fight back, people joined the ranks of the Red Army or the partisan Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The Nazis retaliated by executing a hundred Ukrainians for every German soldier killed by "bandits." Helping Jews also was punishable by death. In the end, 7 million Ukrainians were killed: the majority of them civilians.

Ponder the enormity of it all: in less than 15 years Ukrainians endured two catastrophes of Biblical proportions. How could Germany and Russia, with such brilliant cultural legacies, give rise to the consummate evil of Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's Communism? How could societies that provided the structure for geniuses like Luther, Goethe, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy degenerate into giant insane asylums that organized murder on an industrialized scale? Nothing can explain, justify or excuse what happened. So Chancellor Schroeder offered no answers. He simply apologized.

When the war ended, Germany, in utter defeat, severed all links to its Nazi past. War criminals were hanged, middle functionaries imprisoned and the general population walked through the camps to see what they had done. Subsequent generations relive the shame in documentary films about the Third Reich and the death camps the country built at Hitler's command. No wonder Chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees at the Holocaust Memorial in Warsaw.

Today, Germany is prosperous, productive and free. The world feels secure that the Nazi horror will never threaten the world again. Unfortunately, neither Vladimir Putin - the KGB agent turned president - nor the people who surround him, offer the same feeling. Unlike Chancellor Schroeder, President Putin won't apologize for Stalin's crimes or even acknowledge they occurred. Bristling at the word "occupation," Mr. Putin insists the Baltic peoples invited the Red Army into their countries. His government blocks access to files on the 1940 Katyn Massacre where the NKVD murdered 21,768 Polish military officers, intellectual leaders and clergy.

When asked about the Famine, Russia's ambassador to Ukraine has nothing to say. Blame Georgia, he suggests. All the while, Russian diplomats work the U.S. Senate to block the Famine Resolution because of the word "genocide." And on and on it goes: Mr. Putin tells the world that the fall of the Soviet Union was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century," the Yalta Agreement was a good thing; he restores Stalin's national anthem, interferes in his neighbors' elections, curtails the media, abolishes the election of governors, carpet-bombs Grozny.

Psychiatry describes President Putin's mindset as denial: refusing to recognize reality. It's dangerous for individuals and even more so for countries with nuclear arms. With people parading Red Square with Stalin's portrait, it's clear that many Russians share Putin's malady.

Stalin and Hitler - partners and soul mates - both offered people a shining future. Hitler's was based on "the final solution to the Jewish question." Stalin's on "the liquidation of the kulaks as a class." In either case, millions of innocents died. The German people have come to terms with their past and offered humble apologies - over and over. Once is not enough; a million times is not too much.

When Chancellor Brandt knelt in sorrow and shame at a monument to Holocaust victims in Warsaw, he demonstrated uncommon dignity and strength. When President Putin opted for a military parade, complete with goose-stepping soldiers, to commemorate the world war Stalin helped to start, he showed how small he truly is.

Had he instead apologized for the Holodomor, for the Hitler-Stalin Pact, for Katyn, the occupation of the Baltic States, for Yalta, the gulag, for a whole host of other crimes, the world and the Russian people would have been better off. Apologies, of course, cannot be forced. That's what the KGB used to do. So instead, let's continue to remind Mr. Putin why we look at Russia's past with trepidation, trusting that someday a Russian leader will fall to his knees in remorse and in doing so, rise to the level of Germany's post-war leaders. Forgiveness will follow.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is: [email protected].

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