Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). One only has to open the newspapers these days to grasp the historical dimension we are once again in. Take for instance the Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, covered with abuse by an ambassador accredited in Berlin, whose country openly cooperates with National Socialists, because the consequences of the war of the German Reich against the Soviet Union have been recalled. The Federal President addressed this as it was in accordance with historical facts. There is a more than important reason, appropriate and well overdue, to remember.
Eighty years ago that year, on June 22, 1941, the German Reich attacked the Soviet Union. The toll in blood exceeded anything that could be imagined until then. What does “responsibility” mean, if not this fact and the lasting consequence for German politics, if this can be articulated as “German politics” at all. Everyone takes it for granted that the consequences of the past are permanently binding on the State of Israel. It is all the more incomprehensive when a policy has been pursued towards Russia and the successor states of the former Soviet Union for almost ten years that makes mockery of this responsibility. It is precisely “Moscow” and above all the people in Russia who approach Germans and Germany in an unusual and downright shameful open and friendly manner. It is a shame how official Germany has responded to this since the beginning of the last decade.
Draw consequences? In what other way should that look and be designed than through understandable German politics? Anyone who wants to know can judge German and Western policy towards the outgoing Soviet Union and today’s Russia. The reunification of Germany was still on the brink in the spring of 1990, when in a now published telephone conversation between the then American President George HW Bush (RP) and Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) both were of the opinion that NATO was no longer suitable to be a means of ensuring European security. Weeks later, the NATO summit in the summer of 1990 insisted on changing the character of NATO by dispensing with the military component. In this way, Washington, Bonn and the others wanted to ensure cooperative security, including Moscow, in Europe and beyond. President Bush was still in office when the “deep American state” led by Paul Wolfowitz and others began to flip the switches again to confront Moscow.
Draw consequences? In the long run, taking into account the prohibition of German participation in any war of aggression is downright the ultimate obligation. It is not acceptable to ignore the topmost obligations of German politics when those who implemented their ideas of order through the Second World War demand the exact opposite of us Germans for reasons of a forced alliance. The war against Yugoslavia was the full maturity that Germany and the government of the time failed to pass. All the efforts of NATO and the EU do not help to rewrite history. In the spring of 1999 it was an ordinary war of aggression against Yugoslavia, for which the trio Gerhard Schröder (SPD), Joseph Fischer (Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen) and Rudolf Scharping (SPD) gave the orders to attack.
Draw consequences? On Saturday, February 13th, 2021, all you have to do is read Mr. Durs Grünbein’s text in the Süddeutsche Zeitung to know what is needed in Germany. It is not only the fact of a selective view of history for the period between 1933 and 1945 that Mr. Grünbein rightly complains. It is also the fact that the years between 1919 and 1933 or between 1870 and 1914 are officially faded out. Alexander Sosnowski and I pointed out the fateful role of “Versailles 1919” in the non-fiction book “And again and again Versailles – A century in a burning glass”. And that in two respects: even the Allied participants in the conference in Versailles assumed that this would lay the foundation for the next war a generation later. In terms of foreign, economic and social policy, this inevitability was “cleverly” conceived in Versailles, only to set things in motion domestically in Germany a little later by the American government in support of the then downright politically falling and failing Adolf Hitler (NSDAP). When Walter Rathenau (DDP) – due to his policy of cooperation with Moscow – was murdered, Mr. Hitler, being anti-Russian and anti-Semitic, was pampered in order to achieve in domestic politics what was put on its way at Versailles. Without Versailles there would be no Herr Hitler and without Herr Hitler there would be no war against Poland in 1939.
Draw consequences? Two years ago, with a gap of six months, it was the Presidents of Russia and France, Waldimir Putin (United Russia) and Emmanuel Macron (The Republic on the Move!) who drew attention to this fact in an almost spectacular way only to reap state ignorance in Berlin. What is the reason? One can only guess in a country like Germany. Only through the image of history imposed by Berlin can one put the German people on the curb when it comes to proceeding against Russia again in the interests of those who have made themselves heard publicly for years. According to this, everything has been done in Washington since the establishment of the German Empire on January 18, 1871 to thwart cooperation between Russia and Germany. Those who take part in NATO and EU policy against Russia today are obviously not allowed to know the historical processes in Germany because they would then refuse to face the new fate.
