Published January 27,2025
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Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday praised Soviet troopers for ending the “total evil” of Auschwitz on the eightieth anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Nazi loss of life camp.
Auschwitz was the biggest of the extermination camps and has turn out to be an emblem of Nazi Germany’s genocide of six million European Jewish folks, a million of whom died on the website between 1940 and 1945, together with greater than 100,000 non-Jewish folks.
Soviet troops discovered 7,000 survivors once they arrived on January 27, 1945, the primary Allied troops to enter the camp.
“We will always remember that it was the Soviet soldier who crushed this terrible, total evil and won the victory, the greatness of which will forever remain in world history,” Putin mentioned, in response to the Kremlin.
“We will do everything to defend the right of people to ethnic, linguistic and spiritual identity, and to prevent the spread of anti-Semitism, Russophobia and other racist ideologies,” he added.
The Russian chief typically credit the Soviet Union with defeating Nazi Germany in his speeches, particularly within the context of Russia’s offensive in Ukraine.
Putin has usually accused Ukrainian and Western officers of “Nazism” and “Russophobia”, utilizing this as a pretext to launch the assault in February 2022.
Russian officers weren’t invited to the commemorations in Poland for the third yr operating because the Ukraine offensive started, after organisers mentioned their presence could be “cynical”.
– Leningrad blockade –
State tv news on Monday centered protection as a substitute on the 81st anniversary of Russia breaking the Siege of Leningrad, throughout which round one million inhabitants starved and froze to loss of life.
Putin mentioned in televised feedback that the siege, which started in 1941 and was solely absolutely damaged in 1944, was an atrocity of the identical order of magnitude to the Holocaust.
Putin, born in 1952, is a local of the town, which was renamed to Saint Petersburg.
On Monday, he laid flowers at a mass grave the place his brother Viktor — who died within the siege as a toddler in 1942 — is buried.
“It’s absolutely clear that the siege of Leningrad ranks alongside such monstrous crimes against humanity as the Holocaust, the death camps and punitive actions by Nazi henchmen against peaceful civilians,” Putin mentioned at a commemorative live performance.
“The siege carried away more than one million lives,” he mentioned.
Teaching of historical past within the Soviet Union and Russia has at all times centered way more on the huge losses amongst Soviet troopers and civilians in what is named the Great Patriotic War than on Nazi extermination of Jewish folks.
And points similar to the key Nazi-Soviet pact that gave Adolf Hitler the inexperienced gentle to begin the warfare and the next Soviet invasion of Poland, are taboo — both downplayed or ignored in official narratives.
Source: www.anews.com.tr