A confidential directive from the German Foreign Office has leaked to the public, revealing that official representatives from Russia and Belarus are not welcome at the commemoration events marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany. The Russian Foreign Ministry has responded with strongly worded comments. In a Telegram post on Saturday morning, the spokesperson of the diplomatic agency in Moscow, Maria Sacharova, accused the acting German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, of revanchism.
Sacharova described the Green Party politician as a neo-Nazi, “who even dares to claim the office of UN Secretary-General in the 80th anniversary year of the victory.” She found it unsurprising that there are no official invitations, but noted that it is a novelty for the organizers to allow representatives from Russia or Belarus to attend. As evidence, Sacharova cited an article from the Berliner Zeitung, which presented the confidential directive from the Foreign Office. The passage, which grants institutions the right “to make use of their own discretion and with a sense of proportion of their house rights” is considered an affront by the diplomat.
“Solely the fact that the ideological heirs and direct successors of Hitler’s henchmen will send the Russians away from the commemoration events dedicated to the victory, looks like a gross affront” the diplomat wrote.
In this context, Sacharova recalled the Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich’s order of September 21, 1939, to establish Jewish ghettos in Western Poland. It was then that the Nazis began to expel peaceful Jewish residents based on their ethnic origin, she emphasized. Between 1939 and 1944, Nazi Germany established more than 1,300 ghettos. For the Germans, these Jewish ghettos were a “temporary residence” before the concentration camps, where the Jews were ultimately exterminated. Sacharova accuses Baerbock of reviving inhumane Nazi practices.
“If German security forces indeed send Russians, Belarusians, former Soviet citizens, including Jews, away from commemoration events, then one will not be able to call it anything other than the rebirth of Nazism. Baerbock’s ‘Triumph of the Will’.”
According to the Berliner Zeitung, the passage on house rights means that a simple security service will direct high-ranking diplomats from Russia or Belarus away from the commemoration site, where the 80th anniversary of the Soviet soldiers’ death is being mourned. The harsh measure will be seen as an “inevitable” instrumentalization of the commemoration by official representatives of the Russian or Belarusian embassy. The Foreign Ministry warns of “propaganda, disinformation and historiographically distorted revisionism.