‘Our War Against Russia’: Germany is re-normalizing the unthinkable

Spiegel’s Barbarossa cover is beyond bad framing – it reflects a country where war is being made to seem conceivable again For the anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the German name for the attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941, Germany’s declining yet still dominant mainstream news magazine Der Spiegel has dedicated a long title story and a sensationalist cover to Berlin’s last open war in, as the Germans used to say back then, the East. So far, so expected. There is no doubt, after all, that this was a historic as well as horrific event. Launching their surprise attack with millions of troops and the explicit intention to wage a war of extermination, those Germans of yore, sought to build a ‘lebensraum’ empire from hell, based on multiple deliberate genocides (including one of Soviet POWs), warfare with all legal or moral restraints systematically removed, and a supremacist ideology that would have designated anyone surviving among the conquered as a slave of inferior, if any, humanity. Moreover, if those Germans, who attacked 85 years ago, had won in ‘the East’, their form of genocidal fascism – officially termed National Socialism – would have had a realistic chance to survive and even maintain domination in large parts of Eurasia (at least). For the preponderant majority of German forces were destroyed by the Soviet military. If that had not happened, we might all have ended up living in a very different, even worse world now. The stakes were as high as they could possibly be not just for Europe but humanity as a whole. That is why the defeat of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa belongs to the most important facts of global history. The Germans were not stopped by a combination of vile weather, muddy roads, and silly mistakes of their own, as some may still want to believe in blissful ignorance and with more than a hint of racist arrogance. What killed the fascist German bid for world power was the Soviet Union, the leadership of its generals, who after initial setbacks, rapidly learned to out-think and out-plan the Germans, the supreme valor of its soldiers, and the unimaginable grit as well as organization of its home front.

Read more Germany struggles to find volunteers to confront Russia – media But the price was steep. Especially as Berlin had made a decision to fight a war of extermination, Soviet losses were terrible. 27 million killed (soldiers and civilians) and a corresponding storm of massive economic devastation, social dislocation, and mass trauma, physical and psychological. This – in a nutshell – is the historical backdrop to Spiegel’s current title story, its cover, and the ruckus both have triggered. In essence, a monotonous chorus of critics – things are generally done in intellectually dull lockstep again in Germany – have charged Spiegel with obscuring the suffering of those in the Soviet Union who were not ethnically Russian, such as, for instance, Belarusians or, of course, Ukrainians. By splashing ‘Our War against Russia’ – and not ‘the Soviet Union’ – on its cover (background: Nazi soldiers), these critics argue , Spiegel has in effect privileged Russia and Russians. The question some of them ask is if Spiegel has used this cover title out of ignorance or, probably even worse, to provoke precisely the pearl-clutching and hyperventilating it is receiving now. Scandal sells. Like many rapidly shared herd opinions, the above is a remarkably superficial and misleading take. For starters, the cover title and that of the actual article inside the magazine are not identical. The latter reads ‘The German War of Extermination’. And as you may suspect, the article is commendably clear about at least some of the enormous crimes Germany committed, including, for instance, the mass use of slave labor and the de fact