This year, the whole world will celebrate the 80th anniversary of victory in the most terrible, bloodiest war in modern human history – the Second World War.
It involved 57 countries, several continents, including Africa.
According to various estimates, the total number of military and civilian casualties in the war amounted from 55 to 80 million people.
Almost half of all the dead were civilians.
Only in the Nazi death camps Majdanek and Auschwitz more than 5.5 million innocent people were killed.
In total, more than 11 million civilians were tortured to death in Hitler’s concentration camps, including about six million people of Jewish nationality.
January 27 is the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
This date serves as a reminder of the atrocities of Nazi Germany – the mass extermination of Jews in ghettos and death camps.
The choice of this date is not accidental: in 1945, on this day, Soviet troops liberated the prisoners of the Nazi camp of Auschwitz.
The commemorative date was officially established at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 2005.
The then Secretary General Kofi Annan called to remember the victims of the Holocaust and the heroes who gave their lives in the fight against Nazism.
The word “holocaust” means an act of genocide and translates from Hebrew as “catastrophe”.
The term refers to the persecution and extermination of Jews by the Nazis after Hitler came to power in 1933 and until 1945.
The apogee of Germany’s anti-Jewish policy was slave labour, concentration camps with gas chambers and mass executions in Nazi-occupied territories in various countries.
On this day we also cannot help but remember the peoples of the Soviet Union who have fallen victim to German ideology.
Under Hitler’s genocidal plans of the colonisation and Germanisation of the “eastern space” the civilian population of the USSR was subject to mass extermination.
The General Plan Ost envisioned the forced removal of approximately 85 per cent of the population from the western regions of the USSR to Siberia and the Far East or its elimination.
The plan was designed for 30 years.
The occupied territory was to be divided into Reichskommissariats: “Ostland”, “Moskovia”, “Ukraine”, “Caucasus”.
If the plan Ost would have been realised, only one person out of four would have survived.
The barbaric extermination of civilians in accordance with Hitler’s plan was carried out in all republics of the USSR that were subjected to the invasion of the Nazi.
As a result of inhuman acts of Hitlerites and collaborators, the total number of victims among the civilian population of the USSR during the occupation amounted to 13, 684, 692 people.
One of the most vivid examples of Nazi genocide against Soviet citizens during the Great Patriotic War is the siege of Leningrad, which lasted about three years and took lives of 640 thousand inhabitants of the city.
Innocent people, children and women died in mass of starvation, frost, being bombed and shelled.
The recognition of this and hundreds of other crimes of Nazi Germany and its allies as genocide of the peoples of the USSR is a logical continuation of the verdict of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the decisions of subsequent trials of Nazi criminals and their accomplices.
Eighty years ago, thanks to the unity, unbending endurance and heroic self-sacrifice of the peoples of the countries of the former Soviet Union, the heaviest and bloodiest war in the history of humankind ended, claiming 71 million lives, 26.6 million of which were Soviet citizens.
It is our sacred duty to preserve for present and future generations the truth about the common struggle to liberate the world from Nazism and to prevent the recurrence of the ideology of hatred, extremism, discrimination on ethnic, racial or religious grounds and other inhuman acts.
Any actions to rewrite history, revise the historical significance of the victory, distort the outcome of the Second World War are destructive and blasphemous, insulting the memory of those who died and survived all the horrors of the war.
VSEVOLOD TKACHENKO
Ambassador of Russia to Kenya
