This article is dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Weber (1949-2024). He participated in the preparation and discussion of this article prior to his death last year.

To mark the 85th anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the traveling exhibition Rift through Europe: The Consequences of the Hitler-Stalin Pact opened last August at the Berlin-Karlshorst Museum (formerly the German-Russian Museum). A companion book of the same title was published the following month.

In this museum of all places—located at the historic site where the German Wehrmacht surrendered to the Red Army in May 1945—the new exhibition distorts the history of the Second World War, rewriting it to align with Germany’s current war aims in NATO’s proxy war against Russia.

The traveling exhibition, developed in cooperation with Professor Anke Hilbrenner, the Chair of Eastern European History at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, is modest in size, occupying only a side room of the museum. Nevertheless, it is designed to reach a wide audience through various channels. It has already been displayed in the German cities of Düsseldorf and Lüneburg, and the Federal Agency for Civic Education plans to make it available digitally as a resource for schools. In early 2025, the exhibition moved on to Ukraine. It has received government funding, including support from the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Claudia Roth (Greens), and the Ministry of Education in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

In Berlin, the exhibition was initially presented in German and English, but from the halfway point onward, only in Ukrainian and English. There was no Russian-language presentation, despite the fact that the museum is otherwise German- and Russian-speaking. This exclusion is part of the broader assault on Russian culture promoted by German media and institutions since the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Ukrainian flag now flies prominently outside the museum, and its former name—the “German-Russian Museum”—has been officially changed.

Two of the editors of the exhibition volume—Anke Hilbrenner and museum director Jörg Morré—are members of the German-Russian History Commission, which suspended its activities in February 2022. The German side of the commission also includes prominent right-wing militarists such as Jörg Baberowski (Humboldt University Berlin) and Sönke Neitzel (University of Potsdam).

The exhibition is the latest component in a broader campaign of historical revisionism that has been underway for years. Its purpose is to advance a right-wing narrative of the Second World War, tailored to the current escalation of war in Eastern Europe and internationally.

The exhibition focuses on the Non-Aggression Pact signed on August 23, 1939, between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist leadership in the Soviet Union. Also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, after the foreign ministers who signed it, the agreement facilitated the Nazis’ preparations for their long-planned campaign in the East. The Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and the Red Army occupied eastern Poland on September 17.

Less than two years later, in June 1941, German tanks rolled towards Moscow. Under the code name “Operation Barbarossa,” the Nazi regime waged a war of extermination against the USSR that cost the lives of more than 27 million Soviet citizens and dramatically accelerated the Nazis’ machinery of murder. In the years that followed, 6 million Jews and millions more people were gassed by Hitler’s henchmen in concentration and extermination camps, executed in mass shootings and systematically starved and abused.

The Holocaust, the Nazis’ campaign of extermination across Europe and the devastating consequences of war and aerial bombardment remain deeply ingrained in the collective memory of the international working class. The Karlshorst Museum has addressed some of these crimes in its permanent exhibition and individual events, such as those on the Leningrad Blockade, the liberation of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland and the mass murder in Ozarichi in Belarus in 1944.

The traveling exhibition Rift through Europe seeks to replace the working class’s memory of fascist crimes with a nationalist narrative promoted by Eastern European and Baltic states. It falsely presents this as the collective memory of entire societies. In reality, it reflects the “culture of remembrance” of right-wing and fascist forces that glorify and trace their heritage to those who collaborated with the Wehrmacht and SS in their campaigns against the Soviet Union, and in the mass murder of Jews and other national minorities in their respective countries.

The historical revisionism revolves around two main axes:

First, the Hitler-Stalin Pact is used to invert historical guilt. Because the Soviet Union signed the pact and, according to the secret protocol, occupied parts of Eastern Europe, it is now blamed for starting the Second World War and its consequences. The New York Times unabashedly spread this lie over a year ago to strengthen far-right Ukrainian nationalism in the NATO proxy war against Russia.

The exhibition argues that the Soviet Union was an aggressor driven by imperialist and colonial ambitions no different from those of the Nazi regime. In several passages, it even suggests that the communists were more brutal and more dangerous than the Nazis.

If one follows this logic to its conclusion, it leads to a new version of the infamous historical lie that Nazi Germany waged a preventive or defensive war. If the Soviet Union is cast as the imperialist aggressor and instigator of war in 1939, does this not provide the rationale to claim that Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union two years later was merely a defensive move? Was Operation Barbarossa, then, a justifiable preemptive strike against an alleged “enemy in the east”?

The preventive war thesis has been repeatedly invoked since Hitler’s time to revise the historical fact that the Nazi regime waged a deliberate and premeditated war of aggression—the principal charge at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. Although the thesis has long been discredited by serious scholarship and is not explicitly endorsed in the exhibition, the falsification of the Hitler-Stalin Pact ultimately leads to the same conclusion and follows a definite political logic.

Germany’s current aggressive militarism is sold to the population as a defensive and preventive policy. The ruling class is disguising its geopolitical and economic interests in the Ukraine war behind a supposedly necessary “defence” against the dangerous aggressor in Moscow. For this, it needs to secure its position on the “historical front.”

Second, there is a deliberate trivialisation and suppression of Nazi crimes. The Holocaust is relativized at key points in the exhibition volume. The Nazi war of extermination is largely ignored, and the “General Plan East”—the blueprint for the war—is not even mentioned.

While German politicians and journalists are now justifying the Israeli regime’s ongoing genocide in Gaza with cynical references to the Holocaust, they are simultaneously supporting the relativization of Nazi crimes, which has been made socially acceptable in recent years.

In 2018, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alexander Gauland, claimed that Hitler and the Nazis were just “bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.” What has long been advocated by the AfD and right-wing extremist ideologues in their milieu has reached lecture halls and museums in recent years.

A key figure is the history professor Jörg Baberowski from Berlin’s Humboldt University, who declared in 2014 in Der Spiegel that Hitler was “not vicious” and equated the Holocaust with mass shootings in the Russian Civil War. According to Baberowski, Stalin and the Red Army imposed the war of extermination on the Wehrmacht. In doing so, he took up the extreme right-wing positions of Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte, who had been rebuffed by scholars in the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) of the 1980s.

Around the same time as Baberowski’s initiative, the German edition of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by the right-wing American academic Timothy Snyder was published. Snyder has played a prominent role in providing ideological justification for the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, Snyder argues that the crimes of National Socialism were a response to the atrocities committed by Stalin in Soviet Ukraine during 1932–33. He portrays the Hitler-Stalin Pact as an alliance between two equally imperialist and predatory regimes. The exhibition volume relies heavily on Snyder’s framework and lists Bloodlands among its “relevant publications” in the first footnote.

While Germany was ideologically preparing for new wars, it backed the right-wing coup in Ukraine in 2014. This provoked a civil war that, even before the outbreak of open war with Russia in 2022, had already claimed over 14,000 lives.

Today, historical revisionism is taking place in the midst of war. Thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians are being massacred in the trenches. In Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinians have fallen victim to the Israeli government’s genocide.

The editors themselves explicitly situate the exhibition volume within the context of the current war. It was developed, they write, under the impact of “Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine since 2014.” Throughout the volume, parallels are repeatedly drawn between the USSR and present-day Russia, which is accused of pursuing “imperial policies” that threaten Eastern European countries.^[1]

The book’s contribution on Ukraine ends with an appeal for war:

But this time Ukraine and other parts of East and Central Europe will not be a “sphere of interest” again. The European countries have hopefully learned the historical lesson and support Ukraine in its struggle for independence.^[2]

In fact, Ukraine and the other countries in the region have long been a “sphere of interest” for the NATO powers, for whom they serve as a base of operations against Russia. They will remain highly indebted and correspondingly dependent for decades to come. Specialist publications have long been speculating about the plundering of the country’s enormous lithium and other raw material deposits. In March 2024, the Federal Agency for Civic Education published a detailed analysis of the “strategic importance” of raw materials in Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a reactionary response to its encirclement by NATO, which Moscow saw as an existential threat. Unable to appeal to the Ukrainian and international working class, Putin’s oligarchic regime hoped to persuade NATO to give in. But the Kremlin miscalculated. NATO—and Germany in particular—used the attack as a welcome pretext to escalate the war against Russia and arm itself to an extent not seen since Hitler. They even accept the risk of nuclear war.

Historical revisionist narratives are being promoted at the highest levels of politics, academia, and culture to ideologically legitimize Germany’s current war policy.

Equating the Nazi and Stalin regimes and relativizing the Holocaust

A central instrument of this historical falsification is the campaign for the “European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and National Socialism,” held on August 23, the anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. This commemoration serves the political purpose of rewriting the history of the Second World War by relativizing the Holocaust and shifting blame for war crimes onto the Soviet Union. Since it was introduced by the European Parliament in 2009, efforts have been underway to institutionalize this day of remembrance in all EU member states.

This is also a key focus of the exhibition project on the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The exhibition panels and the accompanying volume focus on the consequences of the pact for Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Finland and Romania, but largely reproduce the nationalist view of history that is widespread in these countries.

The crimes of Stalinism are taken as a starting point to defame the Soviet Union per se and to glorify the re-establishment of the nation states after 1991 as a great step towards “freedom” and “democracy,” which culminated in the countries’ accession to the EU and NATO.

In summary, the final panel states that the European memory of the Pact is divided into “two large communities of remembrance.” Western Europe remembers above all the Nazi crimes, while East Central Europe remembers the Stalinist crimes. “There, the Hitler-Stalin Pact is seen as the trigger for the Second World War,” it declares. “Responsibility for the war is attributed equally to both Germany and the Soviet Union. With the accession of the Central and Eastern European countries to the European Union (EU) in May 2004, this contrast reached the European political stage.” The establishment of Remembrance Day on August 23 is the “most visible result” of the efforts of these countries to stand up for the “recognition of their historical experiences.”

After visiting the exhibition, the SED [Socialist Unity Party, the former Stalinist state party in East Germany] Victims’ Commissioner of the Federal Government, Evelyn Zupke, declared that the commemoration day of August 23 was a “good starting point to bring the Stalinist and communist crimes ... much more strongly into a common European consciousness!” Not a word was uttered about Nazi crimes, however.

Beginning with the foreword to the exhibition volume, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and Germany is placed on the same level. While Hitler had been pursuing an “aggressive foreign policy” for years, the Soviet Union had “consolidated under Joseph Stalin into a power-hungry state.” The “interests of both dictators aligned” in the Hitler-Stalin pact with the aim of expanding their borders.

The editors then explain that they wanted to emphasise the “experiences of the countries of East Central Europe” in the years 1939 to 1941 in their exhibition project:

While the singular atrocity of the Holocaust is the focal point of remembrance in Western Europe, including the consequences of German occupation, the memory in East-Central European countries centres on the decades of Soviet domination, particularly the crimes of Stalinism. In contrast, the relatively brief period of German occupation, which also temporarily pushed back Soviet rule, is of little significance. The perception of the Holocaust and its consequences for East-Central Europe did not have the same intensity as the pain of lost national sovereignty. The European Union attempted to address this by establishing August 23 as the “European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism” in 2008.^[3]

The preliminary draft of the volume before it went to press, which was made available to the WSWS for a review, still spoke of the “terrible consequences” of the Holocaust for East Central Europe. For the book publication, the editors deleted the adjective “terrible.” This correction is an example of how the Nazi crimes and the German occupation are deliberately downplayed. The latter is succinctly described as a “short phase” that meant “pushing back Soviet rule,” (!) which is obviously seen as a positive achievement of the Wehrmacht.

With their assertion that “the pain of lost state sovereignty” allegedly developed a greater force than the “perception of the Holocaust,” the authors adopt the radical right-wing nationalism that is widespread among many members of the Eastern European elite. However, there were no democracies in any of the Eastern European states before the so painfully experienced loss of state sovereignty. Dictatorships or authoritarian police state regimes modelled on Poland under Józef Piłsudski ruled everywhere from 1933/1934 at the latest. This fact is hardly taken into account in the exhibition and the accompanying volume.

The far-reaching relativization of the Holocaust is made possible by postmodern methods. The main idea is to “tell the story from multiple perspectives,” according to the introduction to the exhibition volume. Behind this flowery formulation lies a rejection of a scientific and objective analysis of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The concrete historical circumstances are dissolved into various narratives and cultures of remembrance in Western and Eastern Europe and replaced by a supposedly nationally uniform “memory” and “perception” of the population in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe that stand above the classes. This or that right-wing narrative is not critically analysed, but—on the contrary—declared a scientific fact.

The political agenda behind Remembrance Day is made clear in the introductory chapter to the accompanying volume: “Decolonizing the European memory of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement? Pacts of memory and oblivion.”

The author, Ana Milošević, a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Criminology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, wrote her doctoral thesis on the politics of remembrance in the EU and the Balkans and was a guest researcher at the foreign policy think tank German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in 2015.

Her contribution is entirely focused on justifying Remembrance Day as a step in the “decolonisation” of the former Soviet republics. “The ‘liberation’ by the Soviets in this region effectively amounted to colonisation, as one totalitarian regime replaced another, and one occupation gave way to another,” she writes.

Milošević links topics such as “anti-colonialism” and “national self-determination,” which are historically associated with “progressive” politics, with filthy anti-communism in order to make them attractive in certain circles. This campaign is also fuelled by the Green-affiliated taz Panter Foundation, which launched the “Decolonisation: East” project this year.

Milošević even speaks of “communist slavery” and claims that the war for the Baltic states began with the Soviet invasion of 1940, which led to “decades of subjugation under the Soviet colonial regime.”^[4]

Proceeding from her anti-communist construct of Soviet “colonialism,” she calls for the “decolonisation of European memory,” i.e., the consideration of the nationalist culture of memory of the alleged colonial victims in Eastern Europe.

This alleged “decolonisation” provides Milošević with the framework for an open trivialisation of the Holocaust:

In West Germany, the 1980s saw the Historikerstreit, a contentious debate among leading historians, questioning the comparability of totalitarian regimes and the uniqueness of the Holocaust or Shoah. Meanwhile, for many in East-Central Europe, the crimes of Stalinism and the experiences stemming from Soviet-communist occupation during and after the Second World War held equal, if not greater, significance in their individual and collective memories compared to the Holocaust. During the late 1980s, August 23 emerged as a pivotal date for independence movements in Eastern Europe, tapping into the personal recollections of countless individuals.^[5]

This paragraph is in many ways a prime example of how old historical lies are presented in new guises—this time in the guise of an alleged “history of memory and experience” that does not consider it necessary to provide scientific arguments.

The actual content of the “historians’ dispute” is not mentioned here. The far-right historian and Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte triggered the controversy in 1986 by presenting Auschwitz as a legitimate and understandable response to the Gulag, i.e., by establishing a “causal nexus” between the crimes of the Nazis and the Soviet Union. It was not the scientific comparison of the regimes, as Milošević suggests, but the legitimisation of Nazi violence as a reaction to the violence of the Bolsheviks and Stalinism that was Nolte’s concern. He was decisively refuted by renowned scholars.

Milošević attempts to support Nolte’s position by claiming that “many” in East-Central Europe in the 1980s felt that the “Soviet-communist occupation” was “equally grave, if not more so,” than the Holocaust. What statistical survey of whose “feelings” is she basing this on? How “many” are we talking about? What and who is behind the “collective memory?” What were the political views of the “feelings” of these people?

Have the few survivors of the once huge Jewish communities in Poland and other Eastern European countries who lost their entire families in the gas chambers been asked? Or does “personal memory” not count here, as most of them were murdered, driven into exile and erased from the history and culture of their countries of origin?

Milošević’s relativization of the Holocaust at this point is particularly perfidious because it invokes an “individual and collective memory” that is largely determined by the Nazi mass murder. It was precisely in these regions that entire generations were wiped out and whole villages burned to the ground. The Nazis took great care to ensure that as few people as possible were left who could remember the horrors of Auschwitz. In Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, they murdered almost all the Jews who had lived in the country in 1939: in Poland 3 million out of 3.4 million, in Lithuania 145,000 out of 150,000 and in Latvia 70,000 out of 93,500.^[6]

And finally, Milošević “substantiates” her far-reaching statements with a footnote that provides no evidence at all. She refers—without giving a page number—to the study The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War (London 2019) by French political scientist Laure Neumayer. First of all, it is dishonest to try to substantiate a specific claim by referring to a 230-page book without specifying an exact passage or at least a chapter. This makes it difficult for the reader to check the source.

However, if one investigates and reads Neumayer’s foreword, one realises that her book stands in contrast to Milošević. Neumayer critically examines the “anti-communist memory entrepreneurs” in the EU and the revival of totalitarianism theory since the 1990s. In her introduction, she also unequivocally opposes Nolte’s Nazi apologetics.

Furthermore, Milošević uses the claims of Soviet “colonialism” and “discourse on colonial trauma” in the Baltics to legitimise the aggressive nationalism of the regimes there. She writes:

The concept of “decolonisation” implied the establishment of an ethnic democracy, where citizenship was granted primarily to pre-Soviet occupation residents and their descendants, predominantly ethnic Balts.^[7]

This concept differs little from that of the Nazis and their fascist collaborators, such as the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), who dreamed of an “ethnically pure state” created through the mass murder of minorities and Jews. Moreover, the term “ethnic democracy” is a contradiction in terms, as “ethnic purity” in multi-ethnic regions such as Eastern Europe is completely incompatible with democracy.

The example of Estonia is very revealing in this respect. In line with Milošević’s introductory chapter, the contribution on Estonia in the book is a nationalist tract, co-financed by the Estonian State Research Council. It trivialises the Nazi war of extermination and glorifies a post-Stalinist Estonia in which only people who can prove that their ancestors possessed citizenship before 1940 are automatically entitled to it.

The author Kristo Nurmis writes right at the beginning,

[T]he Pact and the subsequent treaties effectively eradicated Estonia’s sovereignty and left it vulnerable to Soviet whims, placing it at the mercy of an unpredictable totalitarian state. The unprovoked Soviet annexation occurred a year before the outbreak of the Nazi-Soviet war, and the ensuing sequence of occupations and conflicts cost Estonia a quarter of its population.^[8]

The phrase “outbreak of the German-Soviet war” conceals the criminal nature of the Nazi war of aggression, whose crimes are conflated with Stalinist rule under the term “subsequent occupations and wars” in order to relativize the responsibility of the Nazi regime. The approximately 80,000 Estonian collaborators who fought alongside the Nazis against the Red Army are not mentioned in the article, which is not surprising. As recently as 2012, the Estonian parliament honoured the voluntary Estonian members of Hitler’s Waffen SS as “freedom fighters” and “fighters against the communist dictatorship” in a resolution.

Nurmis writes of the citizenship policy after 1991:

Domestically, Estonia pursued strong state restitution, denying automatic citizenship to individuals whose ancestors were not Estonian citizens before the Soviet annexation in 1940. This policy aimed not only to restore historical rights but also to safeguard Estonian political culture from the influence of recent Soviet migrants who were perceived as lacking the commitment to independence and the shared experience of local national tragedies (new citizens were required to pass a language exam and a test on the constitution).

A quarter of the population—the size of the Russian-speaking minority—have been discriminated against and disenfranchised for years on the basis of this chauvinist policy. Nurmi’s article ends with a plea for continued support for the war in Ukraine and warns of “Western war fatigue.”^[9]

In Estonia and other Eastern European countries, right-wing historical revisionism has been promoted for years, for example in exhibitions and school textbooks. Since the early 1990s, museums have emerged that propagate the “double genocide paradigm,” as the researcher on Yiddish culture and history, Dovid Katz, puts it. This refers to the equation of the crimes of the Nazi and Stalin regimes, which is accompanied by the discrediting of Jewish victims, the heroisation of Nazi collaborators and perpetrators and the denial or trivialisation of local voluntary participation in the Holocaust.^[10]

Some examples are the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, Lithuania (1992), the Museum of Occupation 1940-1991 in Riga, Latvia (1993), the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary (2002), the Museum of Occupation in Tallinn, Estonia (2003) and the Museum of Victims of Occupation Regimes (Lonzki Prison) in Lviv, Ukraine (2009).

The background to the Hitler-Stalin Pact

The historical revisionism surrounding the Hitler-Stalin Pact is primarily based on equating the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. Both were aggressors, imperialists and perpetrators of violence who jointly and equally crushed the small states in East Central Europe, so the claim goes.

However, this equation distorts the historical facts and ignores the different interests and starting points of the two regimes. While Hitler needed a war of aggression and had prepared for it for a long time, Stalin wanted to avoid war at all costs and postpone it.

Hitler represented the interests of German imperialism, whose hunger for markets, raw materials and “living space” (Lebensraum) in the East could only be satisfied through violent expansion. For him, the pact with Stalin was merely a tactical move to gain time to deal with Britain and France and then invade the Soviet Union.

The future “Führer” had already committed himself to the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union as the central axis of his foreign policy in his inflammatory book Mein Kampf. “The right to land can become a duty if a great nation appears doomed without land expansion,” he wrote. “Germany will either be a world power or cease to exist. To be a world power, however, it needs the size that gives it the necessary importance and life for its citizens in today’s world.” He continued, “But when we speak of new land in Europe today, we can only think primarily of Russia and the peripheral states subject to it.”^[11]

After coming to power in January 1933, Hitler concentrated his entire military, economic and foreign policy on preparing the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. The pact with Moscow was only one step towards this goal.

Stalin, on the other hand, did not pursue any imperialist expansionist goals. He represented the interests of the privileged bureaucracy, which had usurped Soviet power from the working class and abandoned the programme of world socialist revolution. Whereas Lenin and Trotsky were committed to overcoming the isolation of the Soviet Union through successful proletarian revolutions in other countries, after Lenin’s death Stalin professed the doctrine of “building socialism in one country.” It corresponded to the conservative interests of the bureaucracy, which had a parasitic relationship with socialised property and feared uprisings by the international working class because they would have shaken its own rule.

At the international level, Stalin pursued a wild, zigzagging course. In Germany, at the end of the Weimar Republic, he prevented the Communist Party (KPD) from forming a united front with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) against the Nazis, even though the SPD still had a mass base in the working class at the time. He justified this with the absurd argument that Nazis and Social Democrats were “twins,” and the latter were “social fascists.” The paralysis of the working class by the SPD and KPD paved Hitler’s way to power.

When the extent of the catastrophe could no longer be denied, Stalin made an abrupt U-turn. He no longer based the defence of the Soviet Union on the mobilisation of the international working class, as Lenin and Trotsky had done, but on alliances with “democratic” imperialist powers—especially France and Great Britain.

In the name of an anti-fascist “popular front” with bourgeois parties, the Communist International strangled the proletarian revolution in France and Spain. In the Soviet Union, where Stalin feared an uprising of the working class against his despotic rule, he decapitated the Red Army and the Communist Party in the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, rendering the Soviet Union virtually defenceless. Hundreds of thousands of devoted communists and experienced officers died under the execution squads of the Stalinist secret police.

But the alliance with the “democratic” powers soon proved to be a dead end. There were strong forces in both Paris and London who hoped that Hitler would destroy the Soviet Union without waging war against the West at the same time. When Britain and France handed over Czechoslovakia to Hitler in the Munich Agreement of 1938, Stalin was compelled to conclude that he could not rely on London and Paris. Moscow negotiated an alliance with Britain and France until the very end, but they played for time until Stalin finally threw himself into Hitler’s arms. Despite the cynicism, brutality and ruthlessness with which he proceeded, from Moscow’s standpoint the pact had an essentially defensive character.

Stalin’s real crime was that he completely demoralised the communist workers and anti-fascists with this humiliating manoeuvre.

Leon Trotsky commented:

Nobody else rendered such support to Hitler as Stalin. Nobody else created such a dangerous situation for the USSR as Stalin.

During a period of five years the Kremlin and its Comintern propagandised for an “alliance of democracies” and “people’s fronts” with the aim of preventive war against “fascist aggressors.” This propaganda, as witnessed most strikingly in the example of France, had a tremendous influence upon the popular masses. But when war really approached, the Kremlin and its agency, the Comintern, jumped unexpectedly into the camp of the “fascist aggressors.” Stalin with his horse-trader mentality sought in this way to cheat Chamberlain, Daladier, Roosevelt, and to gain strategic positions in Poland and the Baltic countries. But the Kremlin’s jump had immeasurably greater consequences: not only did it cheat the governments but it disoriented and demoralised the popular masses, in the first place in the so-called democracies. With its propaganda of “people’s fronts” the Kremlin hindered the masses from conducting the fight against the imperialist war. With his shift to Hitler’s side Stalin abruptly mixed up all the cards and paralysed the military power of the “democracies.” In spite of all the machines of destruction the moral factor retains decisive importance in the war. By demoralising the popular masses in Europe, and not solely in Europe, Stalin played the role of an agent provocateur in the service of Hitler.^[12]

Even in terms of military strategy, the Hitler-Stalin Pact was a catastrophe. The secret additional protocol sealed the liquidation of Poland. The German Wehrmacht was now far to the east, directly on the Soviet border, and no longer had to overcome a buffer state in order to invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. As part of the economic agreements, the Nazis were able to obtain urgently needed raw materials from the Soviet Union for the German arms industry and wage the blitzkrieg against the Western powers without opening a second front in the East at the same time.

The Russian historian Oleg Budnitzky, who was the only person to make an evidence-based scholarly contribution to the exhibition volume, answers the question “Who benefited from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact?” unequivocally: not the USSR, but Germany.

With the occupation of several European countries with around 1.9 million square kilometres and 122 million inhabitants, Germany almost doubled its economic potential and gained important raw materials. Above all, imports of petroleum products from the Soviet Union were essential for the German economy. The USSR, which had been extremely weakened by the Great Terror, occupied a much smaller area (460,000 square kilometres with around 23 million inhabitants), which was significantly less important.

The increase in arms expenditure and the promotion of heavy industry also put a strain on the Soviet population. “The Soviet-Finnish war and the Soviet supplies of fuel and food to Germany contributed significantly to the supply crisis of 1939–1941” (Budnitzky). The Wehrmacht’s rapid advances in the summer of 1941 demonstrated how poorly the Stalinist regime had prepared the country politically and militarily for war. The Red Army suffered some 600,000 fatalities and wounded during the first weeks of the war.^[13]

Stalin’s crime was therefore not that he pursued a policy of imperialist expansion, like Hitler, but that he systematically sabotaged, disoriented and demoralised the resistance to fascism.

As the Russian sociologist Vadim Rogovin writes, Stalinism, with its “anti-socialist domestic and foreign policy, undermined the moral influence that the Soviet Union and the international communist movement had gained throughout the world.”^[14]

Leon Trotsky, who led the Left Opposition against the Stalinists, described Stalin as Hitler’s “quartermaster.”^[15] Trotsky fought for a political revolution within the USSR, i.e., the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy by the working class. He criticised the pact because it endangered the fate of the Soviet workers’ state and undermined a revolutionary uprising in other countries that could have stopped fascism.

The criticism of the Pact that is being voiced today by right-wing bourgeois politicians and academics has a completely opposite purpose and class orientation. The pact is used as a pretext to demonise the Soviet Union—and “communism” as a whole—and to justify NATO’s current war policy against Russia.

At the same time, the aim is to prevent workers and young people from turning to socialist ideas again in the face of the deep crisis of capitalism. To this end, Stalinism is equated with communism and the left-wing alternative represented by Leon Trotsky is hushed up. Yet it is crucial for a scholarly understanding of the Hitler-Stalin Pact that it was a result of the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and stood in opposition to the perspective of world revolution. But this fact is ignored in the exhibition project.

The anti-communist politics of remembrance: Remembrance Day of August 23

Instead, the exhibition focuses on an anti-communist politics of remembrance that became increasingly influential after several Eastern European countries joined the EU in 2004. An initial high point was the introduction of Remembrance Day on August 23 in 2009, following a campaign that began in the 1980s and gathered pace in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was driven by dissidents and nationalist groups in and from Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.

On June 3, 2008, European politicians adopted the so-called Prague Declaration on the Conscience of Europe and Communism, which called on the EU to introduce Remembrance Day. Among the initiators and first signatories were politicians from the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Sweden and Britain, as well as the former head of the Stasi Records Office, Joachim Gauck, who was appointed German Federal President four years later and heralded the change in Germany’s foreign policy and militarisation.

The authors of the declaration explicitly refer to the “Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism” on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945, and call for the victims of “totalitarian regimes” to be commemorated in the same way as the victims of the Nazis.

Behind this was an attempt at an official reversal in the politics of remembrance, which in previous decades had focused on Nazi crimes. The Austrian historian Heidemarie Uhl therefore described the new day of remembrance as the “antithesis” of Holocaust remembrance:

August 23 is associated with a conception of history that negates the recognition of the Holocaust as a central point of reference for a European historical consciousness, namely by equating the victims of National Socialism and Communism and thus putting the two systems on an equal footing.^[16]

The Prague Declaration also called for the establishment of a corresponding European museum and institute and the “adjustment and overhaul of European history textbooks so that children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes.”^[17] In 2011, the EU project “Platform of European Memory and Conscience,” based in Prague, was created in this context.

This therefore by no means concerns purely symbolic postulates, but a concrete historical revisionist program that is intended to reach the general public through museums, events and schools.

The Prague Declaration was immediately taken up by the European Parliament. In a resolution in September 2008, the introduction of Remembrance Day was proposed and finally officially established in a further resolution on April, 2, 2009.^[18]

The motion was introduced by several political groups in the EU Parliament: the right-wing UEN (Union for a Europe of Nations), which existed until 2009 and also included Polish, Baltic and Slovakian parties as well as the far-right Italian Lega Nord, the EPP (European People’s Party, Christian Democrats), the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) and the Greens/ALE (European Free Alliance), including the German Green politician Gisela Kallenbach. A large majority of 553 MEPs voted in favour, only 44 against (with 33 abstentions).

The proposers justified their initiative with a broad definition of totalitarianism, which includes today’s Russia. The Estonian Christian Democrat and co-signer Tunne Kelam openly trivialised the Nazi regime in the parliamentary debate: “The oligarchy in Russia is a Frankenstein dictatorship worse than any others, Hitler included.”^[19]

What is remarkable in this EU resolution is how the falsification of history is methodologically justified. It states that historians agree that “fully objective interpretations of historical facts are not possible and objective historical narratives do not exist,” even if they use “scientific tools to study the past.”

Instead of objective historical facts, the subjective feelings and opinions of the victims or contemporary witnesses are taken as a yardstick. Thus the demand to commemorate all victims of totalitarian regimes “together” is justified by noting that “from the perspective of the victims it is immaterial which regime deprived them of their liberty or tortured or murdered them for whatever reason.”

Such an approach makes it possible to tear events out of their historical context and replace scientific criteria with moral abstractions. Can an SS officer with the blood of thousands of Jews, communists and Soviet citizens on his hands now also be honoured as a “victim” because he was “robbed of his freedom” and executed by Red Army soldiers? Or perhaps a fascist collaborator of the Ukrainian OUN? Should their names appear alongside those of the Jews who died an agonising death in the gas chambers?

In fact, this seems to have been the intention. In Ukraine and the Baltic states, monuments to the victory of the Red Army, to the millions of people who fought against the Nazis and gave their lives by the thousands, have been torn down in recent months and years and new ones erected—this time for fascist and nationalist collaborators such as Stepan Bandera in Ukraine.

The picture above, which is presented in the exhibition Rift through Europe, shows demolished sculptures for the Red Army in Lviv. The caption of the picture says:

The Russian attack of 2014 changed the perception of World War II in Ukraine. The Ukrainians broke away from the narrative of a Soviet defensive war between 1941 and 1945. Today they remember the pact as an expansion of the Soviet occupation of the country. At the same time parallels are drawn to the present situation.

Whether this reassessment corresponds to the historical facts or not is apparently irrelevant. Instead, the narrative is evaluated according to the extent to which it is politically useful.

Periods of war require new war myths: the memory of the heroic fight of the Red Army soldiers and partisans against the Nazis is to be erased and instead the far-right nationalists and collaborators of that time are to be stylised as role models in order to legitimise today’s fascists, such as the Azov Battalion in the Ukrainian army.

It is not “immaterial” whether a Red Army soldier captured a Wehrmacht soldier or, conversely, the Wehrmacht captured a Soviet soldier. This war threatened the conquest of the Soviet Union by a fascist dictatorship. If Hitler had won the war against the Red Army, the already high death toll of 27 million Soviet citizens and 6 million Jews would have risen immeasurably and the whole of Europe would have remained under the Nazi yoke.

The “perspective of the victims” is only a pretext here. The aim is to conceal the objective differences in the political character and goals of the two regimes and thus to relativize the extent of the Holocaust and the Nazis’ war of extermination. The method of the history of experience and memory is systematically misused to manipulate people emotionally and to exploit their justified sympathy for the thousands of victims of Stalinist crimes for an anti-communist revision of history.

Historian Jürgen Zarusky, who has also effectively refuted Timothy Snyder’s historical falsification of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, explains the implications of the new day of remembrance:

The commemorative function of August 23 is highly questionable, especially from a comparative dictatorship perspective. … It threatens to obscure the fact that for Hitler the pact was a transitory stage for his central project, the conquest of “living space in the East” in a historically unprecedented war of extermination. Stalin’s regime reached the peak of its terrorist exercise of power with forced collectivisation, starvation and the Great Terror between 1929 and 1938. There was no talk of a Hitler-Stalin Pact at that time. The Nazi regime, on the other hand, experienced the highest degree of radicalisation with the attack on the Soviet Union. Mass murder and starvation by the millions were planned here, and the invasion of the USSR was also the immediate prelude to the Holocaust. The basis for this new stage was not the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but its breach.^[20]

In September 2019, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, the European Parliament called on all member states to commemorate Remembrance Day in a further resolution. The resolution stated that World War II was started as an immediate result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which brought together “two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest” and “carried out mass murders, genocide and deportations.”^[21]

According to historian Uhl, “The aim of this historical-political resolution” was “to place part of the blame for the Second World War on the Soviet Union and to equate the crimes of communism with those of National Socialism—both described as equally totalitarian—and in particular the Holocaust.” Several associations of concentration camp survivors subsequently protested against “historical revisionism” and the “falsification of historical truth.”^[22]

Since then, attempts have also been made in Germany to publicise Remembrance Day—albeit with little success so far. This was acknowledged in 2023 by the Bundestag’s (Federal Parliament) Research Service, which published a dossier on the “Discussion in academia and implementation of the European Parliament’s demand in the EU member states.” A few events at German Democratic Republic memorial sites in eastern Germany were listed, including the notoriously right-wing Hohenschönhausen memorial site. Against this background, the current traveling exhibition must be seen as an important step in the dissemination of Remembrance Day in Germany.

The Bundestag dossier presents the positions of the opponents and advocates of Remembrance Day. The opponents are predominantly historians from the field of Holocaust research, including Yehuda Bauer, the recently deceased emeritus professor of Holocaust studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and director of the memorial in Yad Vashem until 2000.

He protested against the EU resolution of 2009 with a multi-page memo in which he warned against “a mendacious revision of recent world history” and corrected key historical facts about the role of the Soviet Union. Even though both regimes were totalitarian, they were completely different, Bauer emphasises.

The greater threat to all of humanity was Nazi Germany, and it was the Soviet Army that liberated Eastern Europe, was the central force that defeated Nazi Germany, and thus saved Europe and the world from the Nazi nightmare. In fact, unintentionally, the Soviets saved the Baltic nations, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Czechs, and others, from an intended extension of Nazi genocide to these nationalities.^[23]

Bauer also rejected the attempt to blame the USSR for the start of the Second World War, noting that the resolution

also implies that the war was initiated by both regimes equally, and that they therefore bear equal responsibility for the death of some 35 million people in Europe alone (if one adds the war in Asia, the total is, according to a number of historians, about 55 million). This is a total perversion of history.^[24]

In the summer of 1939, Stalin was much more interested in avoiding a war. “He knew very well that his army was disorganised by the purges, and that the USSR was in no condition to withstand a German onslaught alone,” he continued, adding:

World War II was started by Nazi Germany, not the Soviet Union, and the responsibility of the 35 million dead in Europe, 29 million of them non-Jews, is that of Nazi Germany, not Stalin. To commemorate victims equally is a distortion.^[25]

He also addressed the role of collaborationists, writing:

There was massive collaboration in the persecution and murder of the Jews in Lithuania and Latvia especially, and most Jews were killed, under German supervision, by Lithuanians and Latvians. Baltic police battalions, recruited by the Germans, including Latvian ones, were a very important part of the German murder machine murdering Jews in Belarus, and even in Poland and the Ukraine.^[26]

In his criticism of the EU Remembrance Day, historian Thomas Lutz, head of the Memorials Department at the Topography of Terror Foundation until 2023, noted that the collaboration of far-right forces in the occupied territories is being downplayed in favour of a nationalist historiography:

National myths and taboos continue to be cultivated under the cloak of the Europeanisation of remembrance, especially with regard to the involvement of one’s own society in the crimes. A critical reappraisal of history, which on the one hand argues sympathetically with the victims, and on the other investigates the collaboration with the occupying regimes and the question of responsibility, does not take place.^[27]

The advocates of historical revisionism

While some of the main critics of Remembrance Day have died in recent years, including Uhl, Bauer, Zarusky and Wolfgang Benz, those academics who are in favour of Remembrance Day have been promoted and courted in the media, including Karl Schlögel and Claudia Weber.

The retired history professor and ex-Maoist Karl Schlögel, a close colleague of Jörg Baberowski, criticised the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation in 2023 for not wanting to hold a commemorative event on August 23. In a guest article for the Märkische Allgemeine, he lamented the fact that “most Germans” were aware of September 1, 1939—the day the Nazis invaded Poland—and June 22, 1941—when Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union—but not the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact and “the fate of the peoples of Eastern Europe who came under dual domination.”

This feigned concern for the “peoples of Eastern Europe” once again serves to elevate the crimes of both regimes to the same level (“dual domination”) and to justify rearmament against Russia.

Last autumn, Schlögel advocated in the Welt am Sonntag that Germany and the West take even more aggressive action against Russia and supply weapons that can hit the Russian hinterland. The next German government must have the courage to make it clear to the German population that the “new era” (Zeitenwende) in foreign policy is a long process, he said.

The most prominent representative of a revision of history in relation to the Hitler-Stalin Pact is Claudia Weber, professor at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) and co-author of the exhibition volume. Weber belongs to the same right-wing academic ranks as Baberowski, habilitated under him and, like him, joined the far-right “Academic Freedom Network,” which was founded in 2021.

Weber and the editors of the exhibition volume also refer to the British historian Roger Moorhouse, whose 2014 book on the Hitler-Stalin Pact ends with a plea for the EU’s commemoration day. In the words of the renowned historian Richard J. Evans, it is a “deeply problematic book.” He explains,

In both the book and the declaration, Stalinism comes out as being far worse than nazism. This reflects the post-communist mood in the Baltic states, where SS veterans are hailed as “freedom fighters” against the Russians and are allowed to parade unhindered through the streets of Tallinn.^[28]

In 2014, Weber wrote a book about the Katyn massacre, the mass shootings of Polish officers by the Soviet secret service in the spring of 1940. The first sentence reads: “In September 1939, the Second World War began with the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union and the ‘Third Reich.’” Weber describes the two years of the Hitler-Stalin Pact here as a “German-Soviet campaign of extermination.”^[29]

Both statements are hair-raising historical falsifications that amount to portraying the Soviet Union as the perpetrator and cause of the Second World War. Weber wants to revise the fact that the war began with the German invasion of Poland and that the campaign of extermination was launched by the Nazis.

Her contribution to the current anthology is largely based on her book Der Pakt. Stalin, Hitler und die Geschichte einer mörderischen Allianz 1939–1941 (The Pact. Stalin, Hitler and the History of a Murderous Alliance 1939-1941), which was published in 2018 and republished by the Federal Agency for Civic Education for use in schools and universities.

The book begins with a blunt plea for historical revisionism. It aims to counter the “fear of historical revisionism” in Western Europe and Germany in particular, because it is part of a “basic professional understanding to constantly reexamine and reinterpret the past, in short: to subject history to revision.” A glance at the footnote here reveals whose brainchild Weber is. She backs up her statement with the correspondence between the French historian and anti-communist François Furet and the German Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte.^[30]

She explicitly draws on Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands and blurs the historical differences between the—as she writes—“National Socialist and Stalinist violent actors.” As the historian Stefan Plaggenborg critically notes in a review, her interpretation “leads to the implicit thesis of the totalitarian convergence of the regimes.” The war of annihilation planned and ordered by Hitler is lost in her descriptions, “just as the German strategies are given less consideration than the Soviet ones.”

According to Weber, the pact meant an “incredible increase in power” for Stalin, ended the USSR’s foreign policy isolation and reduced the risk of war. Stalin had “left the field victorious” and had “brutally and uncompromisingly” pursued the “export of communist ideology” in Eastern Europe (p. 70).

The historical significance of the Non-Aggression Pact was that the “hostile dictatorships unleashed the Second World War in Europe with this treaty. It was the beginning of a destructive global slaughter that led to the Holocaust and set in motion a machinery of mass destruction from whose consequences Europe has still not recovered. Hitler and Stalin divided Europe and the world for decades” (p. 71).

The formulations are deliberately chosen to make both regimes responsible for the “destructive global slaughter” and the “machinery of mass destruction.” She is saying that it was not Hitler who started the carnage that led to the Holocaust and divided up Europe, but Hitler and Stalin together.

In a subsection of the book on the Pact, Weber distances herself from the preventive war thesis, according to which the German invasion of the Soviet Union merely preempted a Soviet attack—only to then reintroduce it through the back door. According to Weber, Stalin only refrained from attacking Germany first for tactical propaganda reasons:

So was Stalin planning to preempt the German invasion in the spring of 1941? Probably not, and in addition to many other good reasons that speak against this thesis, Stalin’s reluctance to break the pact before Hitler and act as an aggressor or be labeled as such was the decisive factor. He had already strictly avoided this role in September 1939, when Hitler had to wait more than two weeks for the Soviet invasion of Poland. This attitude had not changed since then, and if war was unavoidable, then it should start on Soviet soil. Unlike Stalin, Hitler cared less about such subtleties, although a Soviet attack in June 1941 would have spared him some propaganda lies (p. 207).

Behind the “preventive war thesis” lies the question of war guilt: who was the actual aggressor and bears responsibility for the outbreak of war? Although it has long been refuted by scholarship, the “preventive war thesis” was therefore repeatedly rehashed and repackaged even after the war.^[31]

After the war, war participants and criminals spread the claim of a “preventive war.” In the 1980s, it was taken up again by Ernst Nolte in the historians’ dispute. In the wake of perestroika and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some historical revisionists took advantage of revelations about Stalinism—including the publication of the secret protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Pact—to revive the preemptive war lie, including the Soviet defector and former intelligence officer Viktor Suvorov.

In 2000, historian Bianka Pietrow-Ennker emphasised the political relevance of the return of the preemptive war thesis:

It also seems essential for the political position of subsequent generations in Germany to find a clear answer to the question of war guilt, as the historical legacy also represents the foundation from which relations with European neighbours, especially Russia, are shaped.^[32]

Today, the preventive war thesis is openly advocated by AfD “historians,” such as Stefan Scheil, who was awarded the 2014 Historian Prize by the far-right Erich and Erna Kronauer Foundation for his efforts. The laudatory speech was given by Ernst Nolte. The same prize was awarded two years later to the US academic Sean McMeekin. In his latest revisionist work Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, which was translated into German as Es war Stalins Krieg (It was Stalin’s war) and published in 2023 by a far-right publishing house, McMeekin presents Stalin as the actual perpetrator and profiteer of the Second World War.

But the facts are clear: Hitler and the Wehrmacht leadership did not believe that the Soviet Union posed a threat. In view of the enormous weakening of the Red Army in the Great Terror, they were convinced that Moscow was not prepared to attack. Stalin’s entire policy up to June 22, 1941 was geared towards avoiding war, maintaining the alliance with Germany and appeasing the aggressor through concessions. Stalin did not allow any systematic military preparation of the Red Army for an attack and brushed aside all warnings until the moment of the attack.^[33]

Revision of history as a weapon of war

If the exhibition and the volume on the Hitler-Stalin Pact now talk about wanting to listen to and take into account the “experiences” and “perspectives” of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, then this is a sleight of hand. The German ruling class is not concerned with the suffering of the population in Eastern Europe or the fate of the victims of Stalinism. As in the First and Second World Wars, it is relying on local nationalist forces to dominate the region economically and militarily.

Since 2017, NATO battlegroups have been stationed in the Baltic states and Poland to encircle Russia. In 2023, the Bundeswehr (German armed forces) decided to station a combat brigade of 5,000 men permanently in Lithuania. Preparations are in full swing; it was officially launched earlier in 2025 and will be fully operational in 2027. In addition, Baltic politicians who are anti-Russian agitators have been given high positions in the new EU Commission.

At the end of October 2024, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius inaugurated a new naval headquarters in Rostock, which is responsible for so-called maritime situational awareness in the Baltic Sea area as part of the NATO war offensive against Russia.

In 2023, Finland joined NATO—the very country whose armed forces had fought in the Nazi war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and played a key role in the offensives against Leningrad and Murmansk. From November 18 to 28, 2024, a large-scale NATO artillery exercise took place there for the first time. Over the course of the year, further NATO manoeuvres aimed at Russia were held in Northern Europe.

In the exhibition volume, Finland’s accession to NATO is presented as a result of the historical memory of the Second World War. The “Finns” experienced the war as the “survival of their own democracy against Soviet aggression,” claims author Ville Kivimäki. The “Finnish narrative” runs parallel to that of the Baltic states:

The greatest threat to their national existence came from the east and Stalin was the war’s greatest perpetrator. … Underneath the surface of Finnish neutrality lived a continuous fear of the country’s unpredictable eastern neighbour. In this respect, Finland was and remains, indeed, one of the “countries of the secret protocol,” where it is commonplace to see the Hitler-Stalin Pact as the true and lasting face of Russian ambitions in Europe.^[34]

This instrumentalisation of history is of particular importance to Germany’s ruling class because it committed the most monstrous crimes in the 20th century. A renewed war against Russia, which would escalate into a Third World War, is met with rejection by the population. The historical distortion serves to confuse the population, obfuscate the historical facts and in this way break through the deeply rooted anti-war attitude.

Felix Ackermann, a professor of public history at the University of Hagen, who was himself involved in the preparation of the Pact exhibition and involved students in the work on the exhibition concept, summed up this aim most clearly. In a guest article for the FAZ daily, headlined, “Russia’s blackmail: The Germans’ fear of the Third World War,” he commented in December last year:

The historical awareness of being in the immediate combat zone of an imagined Third World War has left a collective trauma in this country. This explains why the calls for peace and the calls for Ukraine’s capitulation can be heard in eastern and western Germany alike.

German politicians have so far “remained in the post-war” period, he claims, and have tried to involve Putin through negotiations. He continues:

The persistence in a post-national socialist form of temporality, which essentially binds the self-image of German society to the ongoing overcoming of National Socialism, has created the illusion of a perpetual post-war. This is an era that not only largely ignores the wars outside Europe, but also those wars that will be fought in Europe in the future. … The new epoch not only calls on us to face up to the real war in our immediate vicinity, but also to recognise a new mode of temporality in which the post-war is irretrievably over.

It is no longer the post-war period, it is wartime, Ackermann wants to say in his pseudo-philosophical gibberish. No more “post-National Socialism”—but instead a new epoch that enables a return to the methods and crimes of the Nazis. To achieve this, the historical consciousness and the fear of a third world war rooted in it must be broken through.

Ackermann chose an explosive title for his commentary, as it recalls an article by Paul Carrell in the Welt am Sonntag on October 21, 1979: “The Red Blackmail.” Paul Karl Schmidt, former SS-Obersturmbannführer and press officer to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop during the Second World War, enjoyed a dazzling career under the pseudonym Carrell in the post-war period as personal adviser to the right-wing publisher Axel Springer, informant to the Federal Intelligence Service and prominent advocate of the preemptive war thesis.

In 1979, during the debate about the NATO Double-Track Decision and the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany against the Soviet Union, he demanded in the aforementioned Welt article a change in the German armed forces’ operational doctrine in favour of a preventive “preemptive defence” and the modernisation of tactical nuclear weapons.

Ackermann is thus treading old paths. Where the old Nazis used to stir up rearmament and war hysteria against Moscow, journalists and academics are now doing the same job—with the advantage that they are not tainted with a fascist past and can pollute the talk shows and newspapers without facing any significant counter-arguments.

But despite all efforts, after two world wars and in view of today’s theatres of war in the Middle East and Ukraine, the rejection of militarism and war is deeply rooted in the majority of the population. This fact is also reflected in the reactions of visitors to the museum in Berlin-Karlshorst.

Anyone entering the small exhibition encounters a large world map with notes pinned to it at the entrance. Dozens of personal notes in German, English and Russian answer the question: “Where was my family?” They tell of flight, expulsion, murder, forced labor, deportation, families torn apart. The notes give an impression of how deep the traces left by the Second World War and especially the crimes of the Nazis have been for generations.

One note catches the eye: “Why doesn’t mankind learn anything from such wars? When will we see a world without wars?”

Another note reads: “My great-grandfather was in prison until the end of the war because he fought against the Nazis.” Another: “My grandfather’s family of origin was murdered because they were Jewish. My grandfather was able to emigrate to England. My aunts and uncles found safety in England, Canada and the USA. That’s how my family became global citizens.” And: “My maternal grandparents had to flee from the Nazis to France in 1933 and survived the terror thanks to a great deal of solidarity. An important element for dealing with refugees today.”

A note in Russian describes how a great-grandmother from Belarus was deported to Germany for forced labor and lost her husband; how her brothers went missing in the war in 1943; how the great-grandfather survived the war and returned home.

Political positions clash in the guestbook. Alongside occasional positive feedback, several contributions criticise the exhibition and Germany’s current war policy.

One Ukrainian woman writes in Russian: “I am very happy that this museum exists so that a new generation knows and remembers the horrors of war. But it makes me very sad that today’s Germany is helping to wage war between two fraternal peoples.” She thinks that the majority of the population is against the war and describes how closely intertwined the two countries are in her family: “I am Ukrainian, my husband is German (from Kazakhstan), mother-in-law Russian, father-in-law German, daughter-in-law German, grandchildren German . … I am for peace! And I want Germany to help settle this conflict.”

Another visitor criticised: “It is a positivist exhibition—the reasons for the actions and the interests, especially the economic ones, are not mentioned.” In addition, the fate of the Jews in the territories occupied by the German Reich is hardly dealt with. Instead, “above all the ‘evil’ Soviet Union” is presented in a one-sided way.

Another guest comment states: “Learning from history? Certainly not with this exhibition! Right now, the ‘iron curtain’ is being redrawn, the war is escalating, the old camp mentality is working again. German tanks are driving on old paths again. Down with the weapons!”

These reactions from visitors show, on the one hand, how topical and burning the issue of war is and, on the other, that the Hitler-Stalin Pact and its fatal consequences are still causing confusion and unanswered questions today.

An understanding of the causes, extent and continuities of the Nazi crimes in the Second World War is, however, an obstacle from the point of view of the elites in Germany, because it undermines the “war-readiness” that is demanded again today. Herfried Münkler, political scientist and government adviser, summed up this dilemma of the German imperialists in 2014 in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “It is almost impossible to pursue a responsible policy in Europe if you have the idea that we were to blame for everything.”

The more extensive and aggressive the German government’s involvement in the Ukraine war and the genocide in Gaza, the fiercer the battles on the historical front.

In 2023, two exhibitions were shown in the main building of Humboldt University that used the methods of atrocity propaganda to persuade students and lecturers to support the continuation and expansion of the bloody war in Ukraine.

It was at Humboldt—the university where the Generalplan Ost (General Plan East) for the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union was drawn up—that Herfried Münkler and Jörg Baberowski taught, the two professors who systematically rewrite Germany’s role in the First and Second World Wars.

To this day, the university management backs the right-wing extremist Baberowski, who continues to trivialise Nazi crimes through his well-funded university chair. One of his former employees and disciples, Robert Kindler, has now also taken over the second Berlin Chair of Eastern European History at the Free University. Immediately after taking up his post, he abolished the chair’s previous focus on Polish-Jewish history and the crimes of the Nazis.

One political tendency in particular is identified with the fight against this historical revisionism in the interests of German imperialism: the Socialist Equality Party (Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei, SGP) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth organisation of the SGP and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).

For more than 10 years, the IYSSE has been fighting against the transformation of universities into ideological centres for the training of militarist cadres and calling for the building of an international socialist movement against war. The political tasks facing young people, students and workers today require a historically grounded perspective.

Just as the ruling class needs historical lies to justify its war agenda, historical truth is vital for the working class to see through and break through the ideological web of this war agenda. “Scholarship not war propaganda”—this is the principle on which the socialist anti-war movement must be based.