By Andrew Malekoff
In a recent Angry Planet podcast, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum historian Dr. Edna Friedberg cautioned against the opportunistic use of abstract Holocaust analogies.
“The Holocaust has become shorthand for good vs. evil. It is the epithet to end all epithets,” Friedberg said. “It is all too easy to forget that there are many people still alive for whom the Holocaust is not ‘history,’ but their life story and that of their families.”
Nevertheless, on Feb. 24 Russian President Vladimir Putin used this rhetorical device when he announced his intention to “denazify” Ukraine.
Putin’s propaganda choice is not a surprise. After all, he needs to fill the gaps where he stifled free speech and blocked access to key foreign news outlets and social media.
Anyone spreading “fake news” about Russia invading Ukraine or even referring to it as a “war,” as opposed to a “special military operation,” faces up to 15 years in prison.
How do we put Putin’s use of “denazification” to justify his unconstrained attack against Ukraine into some historical perspective?
Ukraine was the homeland and spiritual center for most European Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants who migrated eastward to Slavic lands after the Crusades in the 11th to 13th centuries. Czarist Russia restricted Jews to Western Ukraine where there were about 2.5 million just prior to World War II.
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, it activated Einsatzgruppen shooting squads to execute any and all Jews. Hitler’s government then followed suit in June 1941, when it launched Operation Barbarossa – code name for Nazi Germany’s ultimate betrayal and invasion of the Soviet Union.
Einsatzgruppen mobile shooting squads were re-activated to eradicate Ukraine’s Jews. Their mission, with the help of local collaborators, was to shoot to kill all Jews regardless of gender, age, disability or religious belief.
In all, they shot and killed 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine. Although all Jews were primary targets, Jews were not the only victims of the Einsatzgruppen. Also killed by bullets were Roma and Russian POWs, among others.
The Einsatzgruppen serial killing frenzies ranged from shooting small groups of Jews to launching mass operations like the Babi Yar massacre, where in September 1941 the squads shot and killed 33,771 Jews in two days, in one of the largest mass slaughters at a single site during World War II. Babi Yar, located just outside of Kyiv, is now a memorial site in Ukraine.
While there were Ukrainians who collaborated with Nazi Germany, they were a minority and a subset of far-right nationalists who hated Jews and Soviets.
Many more non-Jewish Ukrainians fought against the Germans, risking their lives to provide safety for Jews during the Holocaust. In fact, there are more than 26,000 Ukrainians recognized among the Righteous Among Nations by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
Putin’s use of “denazification” today is intended to evoke and reinforce a sense of collective trauma and sacrifice that originated during WWII —— and now to justify the genocide he has authored in Ukraine.
By conjuring the past and creating a twisted narrative about the present, Putin would like the world to think “we Russians kick the ass of Nazis to keep the world safe.”
“It is especially dangerous to exploit the memory of the Holocaust as a rhetorical cudgel,” said Friedberg. “We owe the survivors more than that. And we owe ourselves more than that.”
Putin’s true aim, barely obscured, is to delegitimize the idea that Ukrainians can determine their own destiny and to kill as many of them as he can along the way.
Denazification? Hardly.
Putin had not anticipated in his wildest dreams that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Jew who lost family in the Holocaust, would become a symbol of Ukrainian patriotism and leading voice for national unity.
As for the temptation to refer to Putin as a modern-day Hitler, his own special place among world history’s genocidal tyrants is already reserved.
Hitler need not be evoked to explain Putin.
Putin now can stand alone.