Denazification in Ukraine (3.15.22)

On July 12, 2021, Vladimir Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, an essay that lays out the casus belli for his recent invasion of Ukraine. According to Putin, Ukraine is a nation under threat of neo-Nazis, and in need of denazification - a process which was last used in the late 1940s. Many commentators have written about the way Putin uses history to justify his current invasion of Ukraine. In recasting the origins of the Kievan Rus - the ninth century polity that served as precursor to Russia and Ukraine - he has claimed that there is no historical Ukraine, and that this is a war of reunification. In unilaterally invading a sovereign nation, he has placed himself as the re-ascendent gendarme of Europe, in a similar mold to Tsar Nicholas I. In claiming the need to “denazify” Ukraine, Putin uses the events of the Second World War to tie his modern revanchist Russia to the Soviet Union that suffered the brunt of the Nazi war machine. There are a myriad of problems with each of these historical claims - and the many others that have been raised - but his cynical use of the word “denazify” requires closer scrutiny.  

        In 1945, allied soldiers and their governments found themselves in a unique position. They had gone to war not just to defeat Germany, but also Nazi ideology. The suffering of their peoples and their witness to concentration and extermination camps made them believe that a new sort of mechanism was needed to cleanse Germany of Nazism and rebuild the country on a moral foundation. As occupiers, they were now in a position where they had to eradicate all Nazi laws, official positions, and organizations. The mechanism chosen for the removal of Nazi influence from public life was called “denazification”. The main guidelines were set by the victors during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, and detailed further by the Allied Control Council in Berlin, but for the most part the authorities of each zone could decide how they would enforce this sweeping policy. In contrast with denazification, which was aimed at the civil servants and private workers who worked for or profited from the Third Reich, war criminals were judged in Nuremberg up until 1949 in a separate tribunal system.

As Germany was occupied by four different powers (French, British, American and Soviet), there were four different types of denazification - each corresponding to the financial and ideological positions of each occupier in 1945. France, the only country actually defeated by the Nazis in the Second World War, used it as an exercise in victors’ justice. The British, in their penury, only targeted a few high ranking officials. The United States was the only country that tried to determine the guilt of every German citizen living in their zone of occupation, in an expensive and time consuming process of questionnaires and tribunals that proved to be extremely unpopular - as well as ineffective in actually denazifying Germany. As might be expected, denazification was handled in a radically different manner in the Soviet Zone. The Soviets were firm believers in the collective guilt of Germans, and were ready to carry out death sentences as punishment for this guilt. Other Germans were forced into labor, and provided with starvation rations. Operating under Marxist theories, the NKVD used denazification to eliminate social groups that had given the Nazis access to power, such as landowners and industrialists. In 1948, with the advent of the Cold War and the perceived need to turn former adversaries into allies, denazification was ended in all four zones, with several high ranking Nazis never having been held accountable for their crimes in the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Denazification was the process of removing Nazi ideology, as well as the people and infrastructure, from public life in Germany. Despite Putin’s claims, Ukraine is not now, nor has it been, a Nazi state - a state with a government defined by Nazi ideology nor has there been any prospect of Ukraine becoming a Nazi state. Ukraine’s embattled president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is a Jew - and his grandfather, Semyon Ivanovych Zelenskyy, served in the Red Army. Semyon’s own father as well as three brothers were murdered in the Holocaust. While there are extreme right-wing groups operating in Ukraine, including armed militias such as Right Sector or the Azov Battalion, the number of soldiers these paramilitaries can claim are numbered in the hundreds, not thousands. In general, neo-Nazis are treated as a pariah by mainstream Ukrainian society. Svoboda, the largest far right political party operating in Ukraine, earned just two percent in the 2019 parliamentary elections - smaller than similar parties in Latvia, Slovakia, Greece, Austria, and others. Prior to the start of hostilities in the Donbas in 2014, these groups were of no threat to Putin - instead, their energy had mostly been directed at Ukraine’s two hundred and fifty thousand Jews, the Romani, and the Kyiv government.

But even if we were to ignore all the data and accept Putin’s claims, that these groups somehow form an existential threat to the Russian Federation, and that the only way to effectively combat them is to invade the entirety of Ukraine - we are still left with the fact that none of this is what could be called “denazification”. When the Allies marched into Germany in the winter and spring of 1944-1945, the language of denazification was not what was used - it was referred to as warfare. Germans who had joined the Wehrmacht under conscription were not all Nazis. As they were fighting for a Nazi government, we can be forgiven for often not registering the importance of this point, but the combat on the ground was men against men, not the larger war of ideas being waged in government offices and in the public square. Denazification was a process - an uncoordinated, controversial and ultimately failed process, it should be repeated - of eliminating Nazi elements from a nation that had nazified all of its institutions - not just the government and the military, but churches, universities, the arts, youth organisations, labour, and so on. What we are seeing now - a war carried out by an authoritarian dictatorship against a nascent democracy - bears no resemblance to this history. In hiding behind the label “denazification”, Putin is doing what, as a KGB man, he has always done: spreading disinformation so as to lead people away from the truth.