The State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation considers it fundamentally important to give a judicial and legal assessment of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 by the German authorities, its armed forces, including the SS troops, their accomplices – armed units formed on territories of Belgium, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland and other states, individual volunteers from Austria, Latvia, Poland, France and the Czech Republic, as well as traitors from among the inhabitants of the occupied territories who swore allegiance to the Nazi regime.
The decisions adopted in recent years by the courts of St. Petersburg, the Republic of Crimea, the Krasnodar and Stavropol Territories, the Bryansk, Leningrad, Novgorod, Oryol, Pskov and Rostov Regions unambiguously qualify the criminal acts of the Nazis and their accomplices as the genocide of national, ethnic and racial groups that constituted the population USSR, the peoples of the Soviet Union. These judgments are a logical continuation of the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the decisions of subsequent trials of Nazi criminals and their accomplices, during which, in particular, persons were convicted, whose fault was to supply the Nazi troops with deadly weapons.
At present, when the causes and results of the Second World War are turning from an object of historical and memorial research into an instrument of geopolitical confrontation, such court decisions are especially in demand. These are unequivocal warnings to political revenge-seekers who have not benefited from the lessons of the past. The history of Russia is full of heroic pages, and any aggressor has always received a worthy rebuff, no matter how strong the multinational armies that conquered almost all of Europe before the attack on our Fatherland, fought, for example, under the command of Napoleon or Hitler, may seem.
Particularly cynical are the attempts by the current German authorities to promote the false thesis of the alleged joint responsibility and identity of Nazi Germany and the USSR, as well as the desire to shift the blame of Germany for unleashing the largest and bloodiest conflict in the modern history of mankind onto our country. One of the clear examples of this is the adoption by the Bundestag on November 30, 2022 of an anti-historical Russophobic act – a resolution recognizing the mass famine in the territory of the Ukrainian SSR in 1932 and 1933 as “genocide of the Ukrainian people.” Any arguments about the non-selectivity of this tragedy, which occurred not only in Ukraine, but also in large areas of the Volga region and Kazakhstan, are rejected in favor of the political situation.
At the same time, the German authorities cynically evade any steps to perpetuate the memory of millions of peaceful Soviet citizens who became victims of its “total war” on the Eastern Front, and consistently refuse to make compensation payments to residents of besieged Leningrad.
Western politicians prefer not to remember that the civilian population of the USSR, according to the plans of Hitler’s colonization and Germanization of the “eastern space”, was subject to mass destruction. The barbaric extermination of civilians in accordance with the General Plan “Ost” was carried out in all the republics of the USSR that were invaded by the Nazi invaders. As a result of their inhuman acts, the total number of victims among the civilian population of the USSR during the occupation amounted to 13,684,692 people (people who were deliberately exterminated, died in forced labor in Germany and died from the deliberately cruel conditions of the occupation regime).
The increasing involvement of NATO and the countries of the collective West, led by the United States, in the anti-Russian crimes of Ukraine and their activities in support of the Ukrainian armed formations, including increasing the supply of high-powered offensive weapons, accelerated training of personnel of Ukrainian militant units, providing intelligence information, sending foreign mercenaries to participate in hostilities, the planning and implementation of military operations and sabotage, such as blowing up the Crimean bridge, make it imperative to state that the responsibility for the further deterioration of the military-political situation in the conflict zone and on the Eurasian continent as a whole lies not only with the puppet Kiev regime, but also on those who supply it with deadly weapons, finance militants and terrorists, are ready to fight Russia in a revanchist frenzy “until the last Ukrainian soldier”.
The State Duma, taking into account the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations of June 26, 1945, the Charter and the judgment of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948, the Convention on the non-applicability of the statute of limitations to war crimes and crimes against humanity dated November 26, 1968, recognizes the criminal acts of the Nazi invaders and theiraccomplices against the civilian population of the USSR by the genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union.
Chairman of the State Duma
Federal Assembly
Russian Federation