Babyn Yar to Buchenwald to Bucha
Commentary on RIA Novosti Article and Nazi Final Solution
This article is being written from Kyiv, Ukraine on the 43rd day of the war. The minutes from the Wannsee Conference as translated into English are from the official US government translation prepared for evidence in trials at Nuremberg. The RIA NOVOSTI article “What Russia should do with Ukraine?” were translated by Nataliya Popovych , Co-Founder at Ukraine Crisis Media Center.
Mass graves. Women raped repeatedly in front of their children, then executed in front of them. Young girls and women raped and run over with tanks’ tracks, their bodies a bloody pulp. Old men, hands tied behind their backs, a bullet to the back of the skull, the remnants of their faces splattered on the pavement in front of where their bodies lie. More grotesque descriptions could be employed.
Europe has seen these scenes before on its own soil. Ukraine has also. Europe seems to be willing to see them again as long as they don’t cross their NATO line while the Ukrainians are reliving the same atrocities perpetuated on them by the Nazi regime. The playbook and the rhetoric of the butchers is almost identical. The main difference being that the Russian Federation in it various and previous guises has been guilty of considering its target almost subhuman for at least five centuries versus the Nazi’s who developed their plan and Final Solution within a few years. The disgusting irony is that the Russian Federation is using Nazi style thought processes and propaganda to justify its Nazi style polices and actions while claiming to fight alleged Nazis in Ukraine.
Russia’s very own history begins in Kyiv when it was the ruling principality of Kyivan Rus’ which began in the late 9th century and eventually controlled lands across what is much of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Mongol invasions, the sacking of Constantinople during the Crusades and internal warring faction brought an end to the dominance of the principality by the 13th century. During it rule, Kyivan Rus had a profound effect on the spiritual, economic, and strategic significance of the lands that would take its name, Belarus and Russia. Along with Ukraine, all three trace their origins to Kyivan Rus.
Muscovite Rus was just a muddy backwater until Prince Daniel I of the Rurik Dynasty (the same dynasty that ruled Kyivan Rus since about 862) brought it to prominence through military expansion and strategic marriages with the Golden Horde. Muscovy would rise in power from that point forward but always traced its roots to that beautiful city on the Dnipro River, Kyiv. The peoples of Ukraine would eventually come to be referred to as “Little Russians”. This is one of the first steps in the denigration of Ukraine and its peoples. “Little” did not mean they were small of stature but instead meant the Ukrainians were not on equal footing with those in Moscow and eventually, St. Petersburg and all of Russia. They were less than the Russians as far as the Russians were concerned.
The current President of the Russian Federation whose name one can barely utter at this point, wrote less than a year ago, that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Yet, these “Little Russians” are somehow inferior despite their being one people it would seem. If one was a foreigner with three years to spare, there was no war and could spend a year in Ukraine, a year in Belarus, and a year in Russia, then this person would see that though they have many similarities, they are also vastly different with none actually being “inferior” to the other. The former Puppet President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev himself referred to Ukrainians as “vassals” although it was in reference to Ukrainians being vassals to the West. Russia has shown for hundreds of years that it considers Ukraine to be vassals and Medvedev seems to be venting that the Ukrainians are now refusing to be Moscow’s vassals so they therefore must be vassals of someone else. A list of synonyms for vassal are slave, thrall, bondsman and serf. Thus, Russia has always seen itself superior to Ukraine and now that this purported vassal state has taken on its own identity and system, it must be obliterated because it is run and inhabited by an inferior subhuman group of people (the article will get to the particulars of this further on).
The Nazi’s Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 took just about an hour and half to decide to wipe the Jews from the face of the earth. The minutes of this conference as translated state “the official central handling of the final solution of the Jewish question without regard to geographic borders.” The Nazi Final Solution for the Jews was decided about 80 years to the day (January 20, 2022) that the orders were issued for the extermination of Ukraine. The RIA article as translated states “Denazification can only be carried out by the winner, which implies (1) his absolute control over the denazification process and (2) the power to ensure such control. In this respect, a denazified country cannot be sovereign.” And later in the document “The name “Ukraine” apparently cannot be retained as the title of any denazified state entity in a territory liberated from the Nazi regime.”
One must lay aside emotions and look deeply into the rhetoric being used by the Russian Federation in its war against Ukraine as the justification for its wanton massacre of civilians who are considered “passive” Nazis by Moscow. Here it is as stated “…a significant part of the masses, which are passive Nazis, accomplices of Nazism, are also guilty. They supported and indulged Nazi government. The just punishment of this part of the population is possible only as bearing the inevitable hardships of a just war against the Nazi system, waged as carefully and prudently as possible in relation to civilians.” Just punishment and inevitable hardships must summarily mean rape, execution, torture, starvation, dehydration and other sundry suffering for guilty Ukrainian civilians who may or may not have supported the legitimate government in Kyiv. Rape and murder are no longer just a shot away but even if Ukraine does not get some shelter, it will not fade away.
A difficult point to understand is why the Russian Federation published this article after nearly 40 days of a war that it is clearly not winning. Russian forces may not be losing exactly but they are certainly not marching toward anything that looks like a victory. Sitting in Kyiv, one surmises that the tactic may be to prepare the Russian and Belarusian people for a nuclear attack on Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities. The article being discussed certainly lays further groundwork for the elimination of the Ukrainian state. Unfortunately, according to The Levada Center, internal Russian polling shows a majority support the alleged “Denazification” of Ukraine which means that the Russian masses actually believe that Nazis live and rule in Ukraine. Of course, this preposterous to people in the West, but Russia need only its domestic audience in Belarus and Russia to believe they are conducting a just war against a common enemy.
The Wannsee Protocol states two essential points in the beginning:
1. The expulsion of Jews from every sphere of life of the German people.
2. The expulsion of Jews from the living space of the German people.
The Nazis had attempted all this through accelerated forced emigration and were frustrated at how slow and costly it was. Wannsee brought an end to what according to the protocol was “The aim of all this WAS to cleanse the German living space of Jews in a legal manner.” The Russian Federation has grown intolerant of a frozen conflict in Donbas and is now moving in the same direction for a Final Solution for Ukraine.
The RIA Article states this “The denazification can in no way be less than one generation, which must be born, grow up and reach maturity under the conditions of denazification.” Further on, it states “Denazification will inevitably also be a de-Ukrainization-a rejection of the large scale artificial inflation of the ethnic component of self-identification of the population of the territories of historical Little Russia and New Russia, begun by the Soviet authorities.” Sounds like the expulsion of Ukrainians from every sphere of life and the living space of the Russian people, doesn’t it? Also sounds like a 30-year project which is subtly alluded to in the paragraph quoted above concerning a generation of denazification.
Now, how the Russian Federation will determine those who will be accepted from this new generation as Russian and not Ukrainian. The article never comes out and directly says it, but the quote concerning a full generation of denazification and de-Ukrainization seems quite clear. Section IV of the Wannsee Protocol states “In the course of the final solution plans, the Nuremberg Laws should provide a certain foundation, in which a prerequisite for the absolute solution of the problem is also the solution to the problem of mixed marriages and persons of mixed blood.” The Nuremberg Laws were adopted on September 15, 1935 by the Reichstag of the German Nazi Party. The first one was for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the second was the Reich Citizenship Law essentially the first being against mixed marriages and the second granting citizenship to pure Germans. At the end of the Wannsee Protocol it reads as this “State Secretary Dr. Stuckart maintains that carrying out in practice of the just mentioned possibilities for solving the problem of mixed marriages and persons of mixed blood will create endless administrative work. In the second place, as the biological facts cannot be disregarded in any case, State Secretary Dr. Stuckart proposed proceeding to forced sterilization.”
Will the Russian Federation go this far? Could it even afford it if it could given the sanctions currently in place and expected to remain in place and/or get worse if they undertake anything remotely similar? The truth is that the world has seen what the Russian military is capable of in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel and other places. Clearly, the troops have full license to torture, rape and murder the passive Nazi civilian population. In order to de-Ukrainize Ukraine, they would need to remove the Ukrainians en masse. The RF would also have to keep them from breeding. So who would make up this coming denazified generation? Sounds like they would be pure blood Russians. As stated in the RIA article “Ukrainism is an artificial anti-Russian construction that does not have its own civilizational content, a subordinate element of an alien and alien civilization.-the Bandera element is only a performer and a disguise for the European project of Nazi Ukarine, therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.
There is a lot of speculation going around concerning the Russia-Ukraine War. Facts are what counts. Russia has published its manifesto in relation to its object for Ukraine which like the actual Nazis, was and is the complete eradication of an ethnicity. Forget about the Baltics and other Eastern European nations. Russia seeks to completely cleanse the world of Ukrainian culture and of all things and people who identify Ukrainian. The only reassuring line in their whole manifesto is this “The line of alienation, however, will be found empirically.” The paragraph is much longer but in paraphrasing it can be summed up that Russia will allow a hostile section of Ukraine to exist, that which it calls Western Catholic Ukraine. In order for Russia to “allow” it to exist it will have to be forcibly neutral and have no weapons and may require a permanent Russian military presence along with being bordered by that section that is pro-Russian and has an exclusion line. So, in other words a West Germany and an East Germany or Korea or what have you.
Realism for Russia is not what realism is for most of the world. They do realize that they can only take what they can keep and hold. The lengths they are willing to go to in order to achieve that are still undetermined. Are they willing to turn part of Ukraine into a nuclear wasteland in the old cliché of “If I can’t have it, then nobody can.”? Babyn Yar to Buchenwald to Bucha to Hiroshima? Is that what the world is facing right now?
The Nazis were far better organized than the Russians. Both in their military offenses and their final solutions. This is not the tip of a hat to the Nazis but a clear statement of fact. The Russian Federation’s concentration camps are bomb shelters in Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kherson, Chernihiv and many more. Maybe they are smarter than the Nazis in that there were no costs of construction only that of destruction. The battlefield tells another story. Do Russian troops have the capability and the motivation to carry out the Master Plan? Right now, 43 days into war, it does not seem so. Things are not always what they seem, as we all know. Ukraine needs heavy weaponry to stop what Russia should do with Ukraine. Western powers have been in this seat before and are not acting. What more evidence do they need?