Remembering Means Forgetting

The liberation from Hitler fascism commemorates its 80th anniversary:
Up to 90% of all German military losses were caused by the Red Army.
Remembrance is only made in ways that serve the interests of the Federal Republic; the leading role of the Soviet Union in the fight against Hitler fascism is forgotten, the mechanisms that led to the rise of National Socialism remain intact, and the cause of fascism is sought in individuals — not in capital.

Reminder: The words highlighted in red are links leading to relevant Kritikpunkt articles.

---

At the start of the war in 1939, the German Wehrmacht comprised around 4.6 million soldiers.
The peak strength of troops was reached in 1943, with about 9 million German soldiers in combat simultaneously.
Combining all war years and divisions, 5.3 million soldiers of the Third Reich fell during World War II – 4.7 million of whom died on the Eastern Front.

This means at least 85 percent of all fallen German soldiers can be attributed solely to combat with the Red Army on the Eastern Front.
Depending on estimates, including soldiers who died in Soviet captivity and uncertainties about the Battle of Berlin, up to 5.2 million German military losses were caused by the Red Army or aimed at its defense – representing 98% of all German casualties.
Even considering the most controversial estimates of German casualties by other Allies (e.g., James Bacque), in all other Western theaters of war (France, Italy, North Africa, West Germany), a maximum of 500,000 German soldiers fell.
Between January and March 1945 alone, 500,000 German soldiers fell on the Eastern Front (about 200,000 German casualties per month, according to Arnulf Scriba).

Including all losses related to the Eastern Front—direct combat, casualties in Soviet captivity, and underreported final battles of 1945—a figure of approximately 90% of German military losses can be considered a scientifically justifiable estimate of Soviet war victims.

During the war of annihilation against the East, Nazi Germany murdered 14 million Soviet civilians, including 3 million in extermination camps, through starvation and massacres.
2.6 million of the 6-6.3 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust came from the Soviet Union.
Just the blockade of Leningrad (1941–44), which cut off 2.5 million city residents from their homeland, forced about one million civilians into starvation and freezing death on Hitler’s direct orders.

A large part of the war crimes against Soviet civilians was never addressed in the Federal Republic; research projects like the 2016-established German-Russian-Ukrainian “Violence against Civilians on the Eastern Front of World War II”—a collaboration between Heidelberg University, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and Moscow State University of Economics—investigated the horrors of Operation Barbarossa prior to the invasion of Ukraine:
“An important topic is the occupied territories, where until now only an approximate number of at least 20,000 (murdered Roma, the ill and disabled) is known, and I would now say: it was certainly much higher, based on the initial analysis of the new files accessible in Ukraine,” says Professor Tanja Penter of Heidelberg University regarding Eastern European history, speaking to Deutschlandfunk.

The project uncovered, among other things, the murder of 144 children with illnesses and disabilities in the southeastern Ukrainian town of Preslava on the Sea of Azov:
“The first thing that didn’t surprise me but did shock me was that this crime has never been investigated in the Federal Republic. That perpetrators there have never been brought to justice, that it has never been publicly addressed.”
The access to Ukrainian archives has recently been complicated by (Russian and Ukrainian) history laws, which “for example, stipulate that the reputation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army must not be damaged.
This essentially means that one is not allowed to deal with their involvement in Nazi crimes.”

The at least 16 million Soviet civilians murdered by National Socialism constituted 68% of all civilian deaths outside the Pacific theater.
The Red Army liberated the main camps of Majdanek, Riga-Kaiserwald, Gross-Rosen, Ravensbrück, Stutthof, and the largest ever concentration camp Auschwitz, including its main camp Birkenau, Monowitz, and 50 subcamps:
“It was not a guard’s nightmare; a living corpse stood before me. Behind him, in the foggy darkness, dozens of other shadowy figures could be guessed—living skeletons. The air reeked unbearably of excrement and burnt flesh. I had no idea where I was. I thought of a few thousand dead—not Zyklon B and the end of humanity.” (Jakow Wintschenko, soldier of the Red Army)

It would be wrong to claim that the liberation from Hitler fascism was achieved solely by the Red Army:
The material support of the USA through the Lend-Lease program, which supplied the Soviet Union with thousands of tanks, aircraft, and trucks, stabilized the Soviet economy and enabled the maintenance of its heavy industry.
The British bombing raids on German industrial centers tied down significant parts of the German air defenses.
The Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944 forced Germany to open a second front and tied down important troop contingents in the West.
The Allied campaign in Italy weakened Germany’s position in the Mediterranean.

However, it is a fact that the military and civilian losses of the Soviet population during the Eastern campaign were by far the largest in the fight against Hitler fascism.
Nine out of ten soldiers of Hitler fascism fell to shots from Soviet guns.

Remembering Means Forgetting

Since the victory over Hitler fascism, European capital has distanced itself from its guilt regarding National Socialism.
The profit-maximization logic pursued by companies such as Daimler, BMW, Volkswagen, Porsche, Opel, Bayer & BASF (IG Farben), Siemens, Krupp, Deutsche Bank, Allianz, the “Kreper Circle,” Lufthansa, and many others—who attempted to deepen their involvement through financing the Nazi regime—still exists today.
Of course, this tendency functions today by other means, not because the methods of National Socialism proved immoral but because they ultimately proved unprofitable — Nazi imperialism simply failed.

The Federal Republic, which is based on the same profit-maximization logic, has since managed to differentiate itself from National Socialism through its own form of “social market economy”.
Although the profit motive remains the same as during National Socialism.
The bourgeois democracy has proven to be a sufficiently effective form of governance to keep the interests of capital politically aligned—it no longer requires the NSDAP or an openly fascist dictatorship to protect capital from revolting workers and to push external expansion.

Hitler, in 1932, told 650 industrialists at the Düsseldorf Industry Club that “political democracy in the economic sphere is akin to communism (and that) the German state is currently in a period where these two fundamental principles are wrestling in all borders and have already begun to invade the economy (and that) one cannot assume that this wrestling will suddenly come to a halt.
No, on the contrary: this struggle will continue until a nation either sinks entirely into internationalism and democracy, falling into complete dissolution, or creates a new logical form of internal life again.”
The idea that “50 percent (communists), who only wish to destroy the state,” must be fought was agreed upon by top capital representatives;
“This speech made a deep impression on the assembled industrialists, and as a result, a number of significant contributions flowed from the sources of heavy industry into the coffers of the NSDAP (…) In the years before seizing power, large industrial associations continuously made contributions.” (Fritz Thyssen).

Same Same But Different

This mechanism, namely the connection between financial and political capital, remains intact.
There was no rupture with the mechanisms that could lead to seizure of power – all the horrors inflicted by National Socialism on the people of the world were, in the bourgeois narrative, isolated acts of racist hatred—things that happened because Hitler was a good speaker or because the Weimar system was fragile:
“The accusation against Hitler and his accomplices, which seeks to portray him as a monster and Nazi Germany as a deviation from bourgeois civilization, serves to conceal the historical continuity of this civilization, which is driven to barbarism by its own contradictions.” (Bordiga, the great alibi)

Remembering what happened there then only occurs in such a way that it also fits current needs of the capitalist state.
Since the official commemoration of Auschwitz’s liberation, representatives from Belarus and Russia have been explicitly excluded from the remembrance events, following the aggression war against Ukraine.
You have to keep this in mind; the successor states of the country that suffered the greatest military and civilian losses in the fight—including the liberation of Auschwitz—are excluded from participating in a memorial event that commemorates half of their own victims.

To make way for all Israeli officials who wanted to participate, the Polish government issued a decree on January 9 stating that “regardless of who from Israel comes, that person will be safe in Poland”—including the sought-after war criminal Netanyahu, says Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Władysław Bartoszewski.
We even agree—it’s absurd to prohibit any Jewish person from attending a Holocaust remembrance event, just as it would be absurd to forbid the descendants of their liberators from participating.

Useful but Stupid

The history of National Socialism is thus tied to current political narratives.
On May 8, 2024, during celebrations of the victory over Hitler fascism, displaying the Soviet flag as “symbolism and insignia that are suitable to glorify the Russia-Ukraine war” was completely banned in Berlin.
The guilt inherent in the German state has proven to be an extremely useful, if contradictory, means of portraying itself as a moral authority.
It claims to have shed the guilt of Hitler fascism through ” state raison“, value imperialism, and bourgeois democracy—somewhat smoothing over its past—and now uses this supposed coming-to-terms with history to carve itself as the guardian of memory.

This selective remembrance shapes history: The crucial role of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi fascism is marginalized or even defamed when it no longer fits current foreign policy enemy images.
Instead of comprehensive policies of remembrance with materialist antifascist implications, there is a manipulative history policy that secures geopolitical loyalties and bloc formations of the present.
Less than half of Germans today know who liberated Auschwitz—”a quarter believe it was the USA” (ZOiS)[1]

The result is a double distortion:
While German guilt is officially recognized, current politics show that this recognition can be reinterpreted, relativized, or redefined whenever it serves state interests.
Thus, history is not truly dealt with but managed—remembrance of the victims of fascism is not preserved but politically instrumentalized.

This distortion creates contradictions, such as the arrest of anti-Zionist Jewish activists because they oppose the Israel remembrance project:
“If you’re curious about what real anti-Semitism looks like? Then look at how the German state, police, and media treat Jewish people in Berlin in 2024. To this day, Germany boasts the best and highest-quality anti-Semitism in the world, concealed by its empty, meaningless narratives about remembrance culture and atonement.” (Rachael Shapiros, Jewish Voice).

To come to terms with fascism in bourgeois states, its structures (the surplus value, profit, capitalist mode of production) must be ignored—the fascism and the Holocaust are reduced to the madness, hatred, and monstrosity of the crimes committed; not to the question of why they were committed.
The private individuals Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring are central to every bourgeois narrative of fascism.
These were “mentally ill” or “normal,” addicted to drugs, suffering from syphilis or “an incestuous hereditary disease, improper hypnosis, or an insufficiently treated measles infection” (Welt).

These individuals are dead; they could be overcome—everyone who has not yet been overcome was, upon the founding of the new Federal Republic, de-Nazified and reintegrated—less than one percent of those examined for their actions in Nazi Germany were ultimately convicted; the rest were allowed to continue as usual, serving the same profit interests of the new Germany.

What was not overcome was the profit-maximization logic that first brought the National Socialism to power and allowed its most brutal, reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperialist form to flourish:
“Consider, for example, that on May 8, 1945, when Thorez, the former leader of the French Communist Party, proclaimed victory over fascism in France, 145,000 Algerians—who represented the vanguard of the anti-colonial movement against imperialism—were massacred on the pretext of being fascist provocateurs; consider the responsibility of global capitalism for all these massacres—one feels a deep disgust at the vulgar cynicism and hypocritical complacency of the victorious imperialist bloc.” (Bordiga, the great alibi)

Glory and Honor

Today’s Russia is a state that operates under the same profit logic, and it is precisely from this tendency that the war in Ukraine is being fought— in the Red Army, 55 different nationalities fought, with a total of 56.4 percent of the Red Army soldiers during the fight against Hitler fascism being Russians, 20.2 percent Ukrainians, and 4.35 percent Belarusians.

The fact that the representation of these Russians today is forbidden from remembering their victims (by the successor state of the Third Reich), because modern Russia represents conflicting capitalist interests, is as absurd and mockingly ironic as banning Israeli officials from commemorating Auschwitz.

The soldiers of the Red Army liberated Berlin from Hitler fascism. “Everyone who loves freedom owes more to the Red Army than they could ever pay.” (Hemingway)
Russia is not the Soviet Union; they could be very different, yet over half of all soldiers who fell fighting against Nazi Germany were Russian.

Remembering the victims of Hitler fascism means preventing its horrors from happening again—anywhere in the world.
This can only be achieved through separating political and financial capital and abolishing profit-maximization—anti-fascism means anti-capitalism, eternal gratitude to the liberators from fascism.

---

[1] https://www.zois-berlin.de/presse/expertinnenstimme/80-jahre-nach-der-befreiung-von-auschwitz

[2] Estimates of German military losses in World War II vary depending on methodology.
Rüdiger Overmans estimates total losses at 5.3 million, with about 4.35 million (around 82%) dying on the Eastern Front.
The often cited 88–98% figures are based on calculations that also include prisoners of war and final battles like the Battle of Berlin—other historians like Jürgen Förster and Hans-Erich Volkmann estimate losses on the Eastern Front at 75–80%, considering Western and Southern fronts as well.
Michael Jones estimates 80–85%, excluding losses in Normandy and Italy.
These differences arise from varying definitions (e.g., including prisoners and postwar losses) and different methods of recording losses in 1945.
Overmans emphasizes that about 80–85% of permanent personnel losses were on the Eastern Front:
The claim that 88–98% of German military losses in WWII were caused by the Red Army results from considering all Eastern Front-related losses beyond direct combat.
The basis is data from Overmans, which is extrapolated with additional factors.
Overmans estimates that about 3.8 million soldiers fell or went missing due to direct battles on the Eastern Front, with an additional 500,000–800,000 losses in the last months of 1945 due to the dire recording situation—alone in the Battle of Berlin, 100,000–150,000 German soldiers died.
Additionally, 450,000 killed in Soviet captivity, considered immediate consequences of combat and conquest.
Adding these categories—direct combat, postwar captivity, and underreported final battles—leads to a total of up to 5.2 million losses, nearly 98% of German military dead, based on Overmans’ total estimate of 5.3 million. These extreme figures are supported by the assumption that even “Western front losses” in 1945, such as the Battle of the Bulge, ultimately served to defend against the advancing Red Army and are thus indirectly related to the Eastern conflict.
Logistical collapses, supply shortages, and mass deaths among retreating armies (e.g., Halbe pocket) are partly attributed to the Red Army, making this a complex issue.