Statement of the State Duma of the Russian Federation ”On the Genocide of the Peoples of the Soviet Union by Germany and its Accomplices during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945“.
The State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation considers it of fundamental importance to give a judicial and legal assessment of the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 by the authorities, the armed forces, including the SS troops of Germany and its allies – Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Croatia, their accomplices – armed units constituted in the territories of Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and other states, individual volunteers from Austria, Denmark, Latvia, Poland, France, the Czech Republic and Estonia, as well as traitors from among the inhabitants of the occupied territories who swore allegiance to Hitler's Nazi regime.
The decisions adopted in recent years by the courts of St. Petersburg, the Republic of Crimea, the Krasnodar Krai and Stavropol Krai, the Belgorod, Bryansk, Leningrad, Novgorod, Oryol, Pskov and Rostov Oblasts unequivocally qualify the criminal acts of the Nazis and their accomplices as genocide of national, ethnic and racial groups that represented the population of the USSR – the peoples of the Soviet Union. These court decisions are a logical continuation of the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the decisions of subsequent trials of Nazi criminals and their accomplices, during which, in particular, persons who were guilty of supplying Hitler's troops with deadly weapons were convicted.
Under today's prevailing circumstances, when the causes and outcome 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 relevant. They serve as unequivocal warnings to political revanchists who have not benefited from the lessons of the past. The history of Russia is filled with heroic pages, and any aggressor has always been met with a worthy rebuff, no matter how strong the multinational armies that conquered almost the whole of Europe before they turned on to attack our Fatherland, who fought, for example, under the command of Napoleon or Hitler, viewed themselves to be.
The attempts of today's German authorities to promote a false thesis about the alleged joint responsibility and indistinguishability of Hitler's Nazi Germany and the USSR, coupled with the desire to shift Germany's blame for unleashing the biggest and bloodiest conflict in the modern history of mankind onto our country, are particularly cynical. One illustrative example of this is the adoption by the Bundestag on November 30, 2022 of an anti-historical Russophobic act in the form of a resolution recognizing the mass famine on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR in 1932 and 1933 as a ”genocide of the Ukrainian people“. Any arguments about the indiscriminate nature of this tragedy that affected not only Ukraine, but also significant territories of the Volga region and Kazakhstan, are rejected for the sake of political conjuncture and expedience.
As if this is not enough, the German authorities cynically do all they can to evade any steps or actions that are meant to preserve and perpetuate the memory of millions of peace-loving Soviet citizens who fell victim to Germany's so-called ”total war“ on the Eastern Front and consistently refuse to make compensation payments to residents of the-then 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 an all-out annihilation. The barbaric extermination of civilians in accordance with Generalplan Ost was carried out in all the republics of the USSR that were invaded by the Nazi German invaders. It is the inhumane acts of these barbaric plunderers that resulted in the total number of victims among the civilian population of the USSR during the occupation reaching 13,684,692 people. These were people who were deliberately exterminated, who died in forced labour in Germany, and those who died from the deliberately cruel conditions of the occupying regime.
The increasingly active participation of NATO and the countries of the collective West, led by the United States, in Ukraine's anti-Russian crimes and their activities in support of Ukrainian armed formations, including increasing the supply of high-power offensive weapons, the accelerated training of personnel of Ukrainian militant units, the provision of 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, all make it imperative to declare 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 with those who supply it with deadly weapons, finance militants and terrorists, and are ready to fight Russia in a revanchist frenzy ”to the last Ukrainian soldier“.
The State Duma, having carefully reviewed the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations dated June 26, 1945, the Charter and Verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide dated December 9, 1948, the Convention on the Inapplicability of the Statute of Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity dated November 26, 1968, hereby recognizes the criminal acts of the Nazi German fascist invaders and their accomplices against the peace-loving population of the USSR as genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union.
