September 29-30, 1941 – November 6, 1943

How NATO Countries Rewrite History to Make Nazis Look Like Victims

Monument to Soviet citizens and POWs at the ravine at Babi Yar.

In October 2021, events that took place around the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar Massacre give a prime example of how NATO countries falsify history to create disinformation about which forces are the threat to peace in the world today, sanitize the role of those who espouse reaction and neo-Nazism, because such forces serve the U.S./NATO’s agenda of militarization and warmongering in the present.

That year, Christelle Néant, journalist and founder of Donbass Insider, wrote about an attempt by then German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the commemorations for the victims of the massacres committed by Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators at Babi Yar, to falsify the history of who carried out those atrocities.

Néant writes that on October 6, 2021, “Steinmeier visited Ukraine to inaugurate a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Babi Yar massacre. And the least one can say is that this speech, which was revolting from the point of view of historical truth, shocked those who know history.”

Néant lays out the facts of the events that began in September 1941, before assessing Steinmeier’s speech. She writes:

“A few days after the arrival of the Wehrmacht in Kiev on 19 September 1941, the NKVD (Soviet secret police), which had anticipated that the German occupiers would move into the Soviet administrative buildings, detonated charges placed in advance in these buildings. These explosions and the fires that followed killed several thousand German soldiers.

“The Germans decided to use these explosions as a justification for massacring the Jews of Kiev, and an order was issued asking the city’s Jews to assemble on 29 September at 8 am at the corner of Melnikova and Dokterivskaya streets, not far from the Babi Yar ravine.

“On hand to kill the Jews were not only SS, German Sonderkommando policemen and members of the Waffen SS, but also the 201st Schutzmannschaft Battalion, a battalion of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators from Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B, which is referred to in some sources as the ‘Ukrainian auxiliary police.’ Roman Shukhevych, a member of the OUN-B, was captain of the first company of this battalion.” It is worth noting that Bandera, Shukhevich and the OUN-B are infamous for their war crimes, while those who make up the neo-Nazi regime brought to power in the 2014 U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine, and the neo-Nazi battalions fighting today in Ukraine for NATO interests, hold them in highest regard. The same is true of those in Canada who make up the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, whose members include avowed Nazi collaborators.

Recounting the events that transpired from September 1941 to November 1943, Néant writes:

“In two years, nearly 140,000 people were shot or buried alive in the ravine: Jews, Poles, Gypsies, prisoners of war, mentally ill people and opponents of the Nazis. In 1942, 621 members of the OUN (the Ukrainian nationalist organization that collaborated with the Nazis and took part in the Holocaust) were killed by the Nazis at Babi Yar (yes they should not have made an alliance with the devil).

In 1944, the advancing Red Army uncovers the mass graves at Babi Yar as the Nazis flee.

As if the facts of what took place in Babi Yar are not known, Steinmeier said in his speech: “Here in Babi Yar, in the last days of September 1941, German troops murdered nearly 34,000 Jews. It was the Germans who perpetrated these atrocities. Words fail us in the face of their absolute cruelty and brutality. This act – it was not an act of retaliation. The mass murder of the Jews of Kiev was a meticulously planned crime – planned and executed by members of the SS, the security police and the Wehrmacht. They were all involved.”

Néant points out that by omitting any mention of the Ukrainian collaborators, “Steinmeier ‘clears’ them somehow for the Babi Yar massacre, since according to him, only the Germans were responsible. Moreover, the expression ‘Ukrainian collaborators’ does not appear once in the German President’s speech, even though they played a more than active part in the Holocaust!

“But where his speech was most shocking was when he later equated the Roma, Sinti, prisoners of war, and disabled people massacred at Babi Yar, with members of the Ukrainian Liberation Army.”

Steinmeier said, “Here, too, in Babi Yar, after the massacre of the Jews of Kiev, the killing continued: until 1943, until the retreat of the Germans. Tens of thousands of Sinti and Roma, members of the Ukrainian Liberation Army, disabled people and prisoners of war lost their lives in this ravine.”

The Ukrainian Liberation Army, Néant points out, “is a term that actually covers all Ukrainian units that fought on the side of the Nazis, including those that massacred Jews, Gypsies, disabled people and prisoners of war! To put them in the same sentence as their victims, as if these Ukrainian collaborators were as much to be mourned as those they helped to massacre, is absolutely despicable.

“This speech was so shocking that Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, who was present at the inauguration of the Babi Yar memorial, almost fell off his chair when he heard Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s speech.”

Dolinsky wrote on Facebook, “‘Yesterday, at the magnificent ceremony at Babi Yar, I almost fell off my chair when German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that at Babi Yar ‘thousands of fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [OUN; the Ukrainian translation of the speech says insurgent army instead of liberation army – translator’s note] were exterminated.'”

Dolinsky goes on to enumerate the members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army that Steinmeier included in his remembrance of the victims of the Nazis:

– Volodymyr Bahaziy, a member of the OUN, the mayor of Kiev, an accomplice in the theft and extermination of the Jews of Kiev, who was later shot by the Germans

– Ivan Rogach, OUN member and editor of the newspaper Ukrainskoe slovo, that called on the people of Kiev to expel and kill the Jews, who was later executed by the Germans

– Yakov Shevchenko, OUN member, Ukrainian police commander and the direct perpetrator of the murder of the Jews of the Fastov district, who was also killed by the Nazis.

Dolinsky goes on to point out that the streets adjacent to the mass grave at Babi Yar are named after other murderers and accomplices to murder from the OUN.

Néant concludes her article as follows:

“By erasing the role of Ukrainian collaborators in the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, and by placing the death of the executioners on the same level as that of their victims, Frank-Walter Steinmeier has indeed engaged in a sordid rewriting of history. A rewriting that allows Ukrainian neo-Nazis to whitewash their ideological ancestors such as Stepan Bandera or Roman Shukhevych, and thus to present themselves as simple nationalists, and not as neo-Nazis.

“It is by rewriting history that neo-Nazism is allowed to develop, among others in Ukraine. And Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s speech is part of this rewriting of history, making him an accomplice in the development of neo-Nazism in Ukraine.”

(From Donbass Insider, October 9, 2021. Photos: J. Boyer, Wikimedia)

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