How many Russian civilians died in the war remains a matter of dispute. The investigations appear to be timed to coincide with next year’s 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, known as Operation Barbarossa, which was launched on June 22, 1941, and broke a 1939 non-aggression pact struck by Adolf Hitler and Stalin. He said the probes were aimed also at challenging those who try to rewrite history. Only the memories of eyewitnesses can accurately reconstruct the details of the criminal activity.”įILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with veterans after the the Victory Day military parade marking the World War II anniversary at Red Square in Moscow, May 9, 2017. Irrespective of whether they are alive or not, we must name those names. Summonses have been sent to veterans throughout Russia, according to press reports.Īlexander Bastrykin, head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency earlier in the year that investigations were being set up to “establish, identify and name all the guilty Nazis, whether they are alive or not.” He added: “Nuremberg did not convict all those responsible.
The Volgograd prosecutors’ office told the paper that such summonses had been sent to at least 80 veterans in the region. “Why not just come to his house for a chat?” “We just couldn’t believe that the prosecutors would summon a frail old man to their offices during the coronavirus outbreak using such a strict tone,” the veteran’s grandson Denis Chistyakov told the newspaper. The family of a 94-year-old veteran complained to The Moscow Times of receiving a formal summons from the prosecutor’s office in Volgograd, a city in southern Russia previously known as Stalingrad, the site of arguably the most important of any Second World War land battle. Russian investigators intend to question as many as 1,000 Red Army veterans, nearly all very frail, according to Russian media. Putin has asserted Western popular culture overlooks Soviet sacrifices and focuses more on events such as the Normandy landings of 1944.
The Russian leader and former KGB officer has complained that the Soviet Union’s huge wartime role and its losses have been distorted and downplayed for political purposes by Western politicians and historians. The new war crime investigations are being linked by observers to President Vladimir Putin’s renewed interest in historical memory and his determination to shape how the world remembers Soviet leader Josef Stalin and especially the Soviet Union’s contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Russia prosecutors are summoning Red Army veterans to recall their battlefield experiences to help identify Nazis and their collaborators who carried out Second World War atrocities in the Soviet Union.
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