When we ask why
historical responsibility, or why German historical responsibility, I
want
to begin from the universal point of view.
I’m not
coming to you as an American saying “we’ve understood our past and
therefore everything is going well in our country.” On the contrary, I
think it’s very important for all of us, whether things are going well
or things are going badly, whether we’re Americans or Germans or
Russians, to be humble about our various weaknesses in dealing with our
past and above all to be realistic, to be sensitive and concerned about
how our failures to deal with our own national past can have
surprisingly great and immediate and painful consequences for the
present and the future.
So when we ask as
the ambassador did, quite rightly: “Why should we be discussing
historical responsibility just now, why, when Russia has invaded and
occupied a part of Ukraine, why when Brexit negotiations have just
begun,
why when a whole series of elections between populists and others is
being carried out across Europe, why, when the Constitutional system of
the USA is under threat from within, why in this moment should we talk
about historical responsibility?”
My answer is that
it is precisely for those reasons that one must talk about historical
responsibility. There are many causes of the problems within the
European Union and there are many causes for the crisis of the rule of
law in the United States, but one of them is precisely the inability to
deal with certain aspects of history.
So I am not coming to you from the position that Americans have figured this out. On the contrary, let me begin talking about Germany by talking about the United States.
In some significant measure, it is because we Americans have failed to take historical responsibility for certain important parts of our own history.
How can we have a president of the United States in 2017, who is irresponsible on racial issues? How can we have an Attorney General in 2017, who is a white supremacist?
Because we have failed to deal with important questions of our own past. Not just the history of the Second World War. It might not come clear from this distance how radically the current Presidential Administration is revising the American attitude towards WWII.
When we commemorate the Holocaust without mentioning the Holocaust involved Jews, when the presidential spokesman says that Hitler only killed his own people, we’re in a very different mental and moral world than we were just a few months ago.
But it’s not just that. We also have a Presidential Administration where the President wonders aloud why we fought the civil war, why it was after all that there had to be a conflict in America about slavery.
I’m not just mentioning this because -- as Marti Beck alluded to -- I take every opportunity now to involve myself in the domestic politics of my own country, but rather because this question of slavery, precisely this question of what a colony is like, of what an empire is like, leads us directly to the blind spot -- what I take to be the blind spot in German historical memory.
As you all know, the American frontier empire was built largely by slave labor. As we don’t always remember, it was precisely that model of frontier colonialism, of a frontier empire built by slave labor, that was admired by Adolf Hitler. When Adolf Hitler spoke about the United States, it was generally, before the war at least, with admiration. And it was a question for Hitler: who will the racial inferiors be? Who will the slaves be in the German Eastern empire?
The Ukrainians were to be at the center of a project of colonization and enslavement. The Ukrainians were to be treated as Afrikaner, as Neger, the word was very often used, as those of you who read German documents from the war will know, by analogy with the United States.
The idea was to create a slavery-driven, exterminatory colonial regime in Eastern Europe with the center in Ukraine.
Now, you have been told many times what results from this, so let me just briefly summarize.
The purpose of the second World War, from Hitler’s point of view, was the conquest of Ukraine. It is therefore senseless to commemorate any part of the Second World War without beginning from Ukraine. Any commemoration of WWII which involves the Nazi purposes, the ideological, economic, and political purposes of the Nazi regime, must begin precisely from Ukraine.
Now this is not only a matter of theory, this is a matter of practice. German policies, the policies that we remember, all of them focus precisely on Ukraine: The Hunger Plan, with its notion that tens of millions of people were going to starve in the winter of 1941; Generalplan Ost, with its idea that millions more people will be forcibly transported or killed in the 5, 10, or 15 years to follow, but also the final solution, Hitler’s idea of the elimination of Jews, all of these policies hung together in theory and in practice, with the idea of an invasion of the Soviet Union, the major goal of which would be the conquest of Ukraine.
Now, Russians suffered in WWII in a way that is unthinkable to West Europeans, in a way that is unthinkable even for Germans. But nevertheless, when we think about the Soviet Union, the place of Soviet Ukraine is very special, even by comparison to Soviet Russia. In absolute numbers, more inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died in WWII than inhabitants of Soviet Russia. In absolutre terms. And these are the calculations of Russian historians. Which means in relative terms, Ukraine was far, far more at risk than Soviet Russia during the war. In other words, it is very important -- as Marieluise Beck precisely and correctly formulated -- to think of the German Vernichtungskrieg [war of extermination] against the Soviet Union, but at the center of that Vernichtungskrieg, precisely, is Soviet Ukraine.
So if we want to talk about German responsibility for Russia, very good -- but that discussion must begin with Ukraine. Ukraine is on the way to Russia, and the greatest malicious intention and the greatest destructive practice of the German war was precisely in Ukraine.If one is going to be serious for German historical responsibility for the East, the word “Ukraine” must be in the first sentence.
This also goes for the longest and the most earnest, and I think the most important discussion having to do with German responsibility in the East, and that is German responsibility for the mass murder of the Jews of Europe. That is another discussion that makes no sense without mention of Ukraine.
As I was walking to this Parliament building, I passed on the street the famous picture of Willy Brandt kneeling, famously, before the monument to the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
[... image ...]This is an
important turning point in the history of German self-recognition, of
German responsibility. But I ask you to think back not to Willy Brandt
in Warsaw 1970, but think of Jürgen
Stroop in
Warsaw in 1943. Jürgen Stroop, the German police commander who put down
the Warsaw ghetto uprising, who issued the orders for his men to go
with flamethrowers from basement to basement to murder the Jews of
Warsaw who were still alive.
When Jürgen
Stroop was asked: “Why did you do this? Why did you kill the Jews who
were still alive in the Warsaw ghetto?” his answer was: “The Ukrainian
breadbasket. Milk and Honey from Ukraine.” [Die ukrainische Kornkammer. Milch
und Honig von der Ukraine].
Even in 1943, while killing Jews in Warsaw, Jürgen Stroop was thinking of the German colonial war in Ukraine.
The Holocaust is organically connected to the Vernichtungskrieg of 1941, and is organically and integrally connected to the attempt to conquer Ukraine. This is true in three ways:
What does this mean? It means that every German who takes seriously the idea of responsibility for the Holocaust must also take seriously the history of the German occupation of Ukraine.
Or to put it a different way, taking seriously the history of the German occupation of Ukraine is one way to take seriously the history of the Holocaust.
Now, how do we evaluate the question of German responsibility? What about the Ukrainians themselves? Shouldn’t Ukrainians themselves be carrying out discussions about what happened in occupied Ukraine during World War II? Isn’t Ukrainian nationalism also a theme that should be discussed?
Of course it is.
I made my entire career writing about Ukrainian nationalism. That’s why
I can be introduced as a professor at Yale University -- because I
wrote
about Ukrainian nationalism, about Ukrainian nationalists and the
ethnic cleansing of Poles in 1943. Because I published the first
article in a Western language about the role of the Ukrainian police in
the Holocaust and how that led to the ethnic cleansing of Poles in 1943.
Ukrainian
nationalism is a real historical tendency and it ought to be studied
judiciously, as some members of the audience here have done better and
more recently than I. But if we are speaking not in Kyiv, but in
Berlin, if we are speaking of German historical responsibility, we have
to recognize that Ukrainian nationalism is one consequence of the
German war in Eastern Europe. Ukrainian nationalism was a relatively
minor force in interwar Poland. It was paid by the German Abwehr.
Ukrainian
nationalists in Polish prison were released precisely because Germany
invaded Poland in 1939. When Germany and the Soviet Union jointly invaded Poland in 1939, destroying
the Polish state, this also destroyed all the legal political parties,
including the legal Ukrainian parties, which up until that point were
much more important than Ukrainian nationalists.
However, I’ve probably spoken long enough on that theme. It’s very important that when we speak about Ukraine, we’re not only speaking about nationalists. Nationalists are a relatively small part of Ukrainian history, they’re a relatively small part of the Ukrainian present.
When we think about the German occupation of Ukraine, we have to remember some very simple banal points that often escape our attention. Like for example, there was no particular correlation between nationality and collaboration. Russians collaborated, Crimean Tatars collaborated, Belarusians collaborated. Everyone collaborated; there is no, as far as we can tell, correlation between ethnicity and collaboration, with the partial exception of the Volksdeutsche, of course. But in general, there is no correlation between ethnicity and collaboration.
Something else to remember: the vast majority of people who collaborated with the German occupation were not politically motivated. They were collaborating with an occupation that was there, and which is a German historical responsibility. Something that is never said, because it’s inconvenient for precisely everyone, is that more Ukrainian communists collaborated with the Germans than did Ukrainian nationalists.This doesn’t make sense, and so no one ever says it, but it is precisely the case. Vastly more members of the Communist Party collaborated with the German occupation than did Ukrainian nationalists.
For that matter, very many of the people who collaborated with the German occupation had collaborated with the Soviet policies in the 1930s. These points, although they’re very basic, and they’re completely obvious, if you think about them, are typical of Ukrainian history. They’re typical of the fact that Ukraine was ruled first as part of the Soviet Union and then under an incredibly bloody and devastating German occupation. When we think about the way that occupation ended, we often overlook certain basic points, like this:
It’s not something that someone can say about, for example, France, which is why there’s no official French history of WWII and why there won’t be one even under Macron. There are some things that Macron cannot do, and one of them will be this: he will not write the official history of WWII in France, because more French soldiers fought on the Axis side than the Allied side. (OK, you didn’t consider this as funny as I did, alright).
Now, more Ukrainians fought and died on the Allied side than the French, British, and the Americans put together. Why do we not see this? Because we forget that Ukrainians were fighting in the Red Army. We confuse the Red Army with the Russian Army, which it most definitely was not. The Red Army was the army of the Soviet Union, in which Ukrainians because of the geography of the war were substantially over-represented.
So when we think about how the occupation ended, we also have to remember where Ukrainians were most of the time, that Ukrainians suffered in the German occupation, where roughly 3.5 million Ukrainian civilians, mostly women and children, were killed, and again, roughly 3 million Ukrainians died in the Red Army fighting against the Wehrmacht.
Part of the problem, as I suggested when I mentioned my own country in the beginning, has to do to with habits of mind related to colonization, wars of aggression, to the attempt to enslave another people.
The attempt to enslave another people cannot be innocent even for the generations to come. The attempt to enslave another people, a neighboring people, will leave its mark, if not directly confronted. And to make matters worse, we are not in the environment in Europe today where these discussions can always take place dispassionately.
We’re at a very precise moment where German attempts to discuss responsibility are always simultaneously parts of a discussion carried out from elsewhere about responsibility.
So when we ask: why are all these basic points not remembered?
Why is it not always remembered that Ukraine was the center of Hitler’s ideology, of German war planning, that Ukrainians were the intended slaves of Germany?
Why is it not always remembered that Ukrainians were understood racially, by Nazi ideology, that if we want to understand the Holocaust, we have to start with Ukraine?
Why is it not always remembered that 6.5 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died as a result of Soviet occupation?
There are lots of
reasons, but one of them is the mental temptations left over by
colonization, the tendency to overlook a people, which was not regarded
as a people. All of the language about Ukraine as a failed state, or Ukrainians not as a real nation, or Ukrainians divided by culture -- in the German language, that
is not innocent. That is an inheritance of an attempt to colonize a
people not regarded as a people.
Judgements
about Ukraine where Ukraine is held to other standards (not that it’s a
beautiful wonderful place, in every respect, it’s not), but the
application of terms like there not being a Ukrainian nation, or there not being a Ukrainian state, if those things are said in
German without a direct confrontation with the German attempt to
enslave Ukrainians, those words are not innocent, those words have to
be reflected historically in Germany.
There’s a particular problem with all of this, which I’m going to mention last briefly.The temptation for Germans to avoid responsibility, which is always a great temptation, is encouraged by precisely Russian foreign policy. It is Russian foreign policy to divide the history of the Soviet Union into two parts. There’s the good part, which is the Russian part, and the bad part, which is the Ukrainian part.
That is the line that they follow very consistently, and in this country, to great effect.
Because Russian foreign policy regards the German sense of responsibility as a resource to be manipulated, and the great temptation here is that Germany which has done so much and in many ways is so exemplary in its treatment of the past will fail in this centrally important area of Ukraine in part because of the temptation that Russia offers. It is so easy to confuse Soviet Union with Russland. It happens all the time. But it is not innocent. Russian diplomats do it, but no German should do it. No German should confuse Soviet Union with Russland, that simply should not ever happen.
But the way that Russia handles its memory policy is to export irresponsibility. It’s to tempt other countries into the same attitude towards Ukraine that it has itself. And this is particularly evident in its concept of Ukrainian nationalists, which is a real historical phenomenon, but it’s vastly, vastly inflated in the discourse between Russians and Germans.
Ukrainian nationalism was one of the reasons given by Stalin for the great famine [Holodomor] of 1932-1933, for the terror of 1937-1938, for the massive deportations of inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine after WWII, and for the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
[... image ...]There is a common
genealogy here, and a temptation precisely for Germans, because if the
war was all about nationalism, then why would Germans oppose it?
If the
Ukrainian government was nationalist, why should Germany do anything to
stop Russia?
The danger here is that you enter into a kind of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of the mind, where Germans agree with Russians that the evils that came from Berlin and from Moscow to Ukraine are going to be blamed on Ukrainians. It’s so easy, it’s so comfortable, it’s so tempting to say: “Haven’t we Germans apologized enough? Aren’t we the model for everyone else?”
It’s such a tempting trap to fall into, but I can say this from experience as an American: if you get the history of colonization and slavery wrong, it can come back. And your history with Ukraine is precisely the history of colonization and slavery. If the remnants of German nationalism which are still with you on the left and on the right meet up with the dominance of Russian nationalism, if you find common ground there -- that being “it’s all the fault of Ukraine; why should we apologize, why should you remember?” – this is a danger for Germany as a democracy precisely.
Now, it’s up to Ukrainians to try to take responsibility for Ukrainian collaboration, or Ukrainian participation in German occupation. It’s also up to Ukrainians to figure out the Ukrainian role in Stalin’s policies of terror, rather than claiming that they were simply Russian policies, because they weren’t, they were Soviet policies in which Ukrainians also played a role. That is historical work for Ukrainians to do.
When I was in Ukraine in September 2016, talking about Babyn Yar, when I was standing in front of millions of Ukrainian television viewers trying to talk about these things in Ukrainian, the point that I tried to make was: you don’t remember Babyn Yar for the Jews. You remember Babyn Yar for yourselves. You remember the Holocaust in Ukraine because of its part in building up a responsible civil society and, hopefully in the future, of a functioning democracy in Ukraine. That holds for them, but it also holds for me, and for you, and all of us.
The point of remembering German responsibility for the 6.5 million deaths caused by the German war against the Soviet Union in Ukraine is not to help Ukraine. Ukrainians are aware of these crimes. Ukrainians live, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation, they live with the legacy of these crimes already.
The point is not to help Ukraine, but to help Germany.
Germany as a democracy, particularly in this historical moment, as we face Brexit, as we face election after election with populists, as we face a declining and decreasingly democratic USA, precisely at this moment, Germany cannot afford to get major issues of its history wrong.
Precisely at this moment, the German sense of responsibility has to be completed. Perhaps up until now, Germany getting its history right was just a matter for Germans. Perhaps at the time of the Historikerstreit [“Historian’s quarrel”, an intellectual and political controversy in West Germany] in the 1980s, the history of the Holocaust was a matter only for Germans.
It has to be done for Germans, but the consequences are international.
Getting the history of Ukraine wrong in 2013 and 2014 had European consequences. Getting the history of Ukraine wrong now, when Germany is the leading democracy in the West, will have international consequences.