As we write this, the horror of war is unfolding in Ukraine. The last time Kyiv was under heavy artillery fire and saw tanks in its streets was during World War II. If anyone should know it, it’s Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is obsessed with the history of that war.
Russian propaganda has painted the Ukrainian state as Nazi and fascist ever since Russian special forces first entered Ukraine in 2014, annexing the Crimea and fomenting the conflict in the Donbas, which has smoldered for eight long years.
It was propaganda in 2014. It remains propaganda today.
This is why we came together: to protest the use of this false and destructive narrative. Among those who have signed the statement below are some of the most accomplished and celebrated scholars of World War II, Nazism, genocide and the Holocaust. If you are a scholar of this history, please consider adding your name to the list. If you are a journalist, you now have a list of experts you can turn to in order to help your readers better understand Russia’s war against Ukraine.
And if you are a consumer of the news, please share the message of this letter widely. There is no Nazi government for Moscow to root out in Kyiv. There has been no genocide of the Russian people in Ukraine. And Russian troops are not on a liberation mission. After the bloody 20th century, we should all have built enough discernment to know that war is not peace, slavery is not freedom and ignorance offers strength only to autocratic megalomaniacs who seek to exploit it for their personal agendas.
Statement by scholars of genocide, Nazism and World War II
Since Feb. 24, 2022, the armed forces of the Russian Federation have been engaged in an unprovoked military aggression against Ukraine. The attack is a continuation of Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and its heavy involvement in the armed conflict in the Donbas region.
The Russian attack came in the wake of accusations by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of crimes against humanity and genocide, allegedly committed by the Ukrainian government in the Donbas. Russian propaganda regularly presents the elected leaders of Ukraine as Nazis and fascists oppressing the local ethnic Russian population, which it claims needs to be liberated. President Putin stated that one of the goals of his “special military operation” against Ukraine is the “denazification” of the country.
We are scholars of genocide, the Holocaust and World War II. We spend our careers studying fascism and Nazism, and commemorating their victims. Many of us are actively engaged in combating contemporary heirs to these evil regimes and those who attempt to deny or cast a veil over their crimes.
We strongly reject the Russian government’s cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression. This rhetoric is factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it, including Russian and Ukrainian soldiers of the Red Army.
We do not idealize the Ukrainian state and society. Like any other country, it has right-wing extremists and violent xenophobic groups. Ukraine also ought to better confront the darker chapters of its painful and complicated history. Yet none of this justifies the Russian aggression and the gross mischaracterization of Ukraine. At this fateful moment we stand united with free, independent and democratic Ukraine and strongly reject the Russian government’s misuse of the history of World War II to justify its own violence.
Signatories:
Eugene Finkel, Johns Hopkins University
Izabella Tabarovsky, Washington D.C.
Aliza Luft, University of California-Los Angeles
Teresa Walch, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Jared McBride, University of California-Los Angeles
Elissa Bemporad, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center
Andrea Ruggeri, University of Oxford
Steven Seegel, University of Texas at Austin
Jeffrey Kopstein, University of California, Irvine
Francine Hirsch, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Anna Hájková, University of Warwick
Omer Bartov, Brown University
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, New York University and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Christoph Dieckmann, Frankfurt am Main
Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Waitman Wade Beorn, Northumbria University
Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland
Timothy Snyder, Yale University
Jeffrey Veidlinger, University of Michigan
Hana Kubátová, Charles University
Leslie Waters, University of Texas at El Paso
Norman J.W. Goda, University of Florida
Jazmine Conteras, Goucher College
Laura J. Hilton, Muskingum University
Katarzyna Person, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw
Tarik Cyril Amar, Koc University
Sarah Grandke, Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial/denk.mal Hannoverscher Bahnhof Hamburg
Jonathan Leader Maynard, King’s College London
Chad Gibbs, College of Charleston
Janine Holc, Loyola University Maryland
Erin Hochman, Southern Methodist University
Edin Hajdarpasic, Loyola University Chicago
David Hirsh, Goldsmiths, University of London
Richard Breitman, American University (Emeritus)
Astrid M. Eckert, Emory University
Anna Holian, Arizona State University
Uma Kumar, University of British Columbia
Frances Tanzer, Clark University
Victoria J. Barnett, US Holocaust Memorial Museum (retired)
David Seymour, City University of London
Jeff Jones, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
András Riedlmayer Harvard University (retired)
Polly Zavadivker, University of Delaware
Aviel Roshwald, Georgetown University
Anne E. Parsons, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Carole Lemee, Bordeaux University
Scott Denham, Davidson College
Emanuela Grama, Carnegie Mellon University
Christopher R. Browning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (emeritus)
Katrin Paehler, Illinois State University
Raphael Utz, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin
Emre Sencer, Knox College
Stefan Ihrig, University of Haifa
Jeff Rutherford, Xavier University
Jason Hall, The University of Haifa
Christian Ingrao, CNRS École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, CESPRA Paris
Hannah Wilson, Nottingham Trent University
Jan Lanicek, University of New South Wales
Edward B. Westermann, Texas A&M University-San Antonio
Maris Rowe-McCulloch, University of Regina
Joanna B. Michlic, University College London
Raul Carstocea, Maynooth University
Dieter Steinert, University of Wolverhampton
Christina Morina, Universität Bielefeld
Abbey Steele, University of Amsterdam
Erika Hughes, University of Portsmouth
Lukasz Krzyzanowski, University of Warsaw
Agnieszka Wierzcholska, German Historical Institute, Paris
Martin Cüppers, University of Stuttgart
Matthew Kupfer, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
Martin Kragh, Uppsala University
Umit Kurt, Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem
Meron Mendel, Frankfurt University of Applied Science, Anne Frank Center Frankfurt
Nazan Maksudyan, FU Berlin / Centre Marc Bloch
Emanuel-Marius Grec, University of Heidelberg
Khatchig Mouradian, Columbia University
Jan Zbigniew Grabowski, University of Ottawa
Dirk Moses, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Amos Goldberg, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Amber N. Nickell, Fort Hays State University
Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Wuppertal University
Thomas Kühne, Clark University
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, Appalachian State University
Amos Morris-Reich, Tel Aviv University
Volha Charnysh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stefan Cristian Ionescu, Northwestern University
Donatello Aramini, Sapienza University, Rome
Ofer Ashkenazi, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Roland Clark, University of Liverpool
Mirjam Zadoff, University of Munich & Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism
John Barruzza, Syracuse University
Cristina A. Bejan, Metropolitan State University of Denver
Isabel Sawkins, University of Exeter
Benjamin Nathans, University of Pennsylvania
Norbert Frei, University of Jena
Stéfanie Prezioso, Université de Lausanne
Olindo De Napoli, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Eli Nathans, Western University
Eugenia Mihalcea, University of Haifa
Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Purdue University
Sergei I. Zhuk, Ball State University
Paola S. Salvatori, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa – Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Antonio Ferrara, Independent Scholar
Verena Meier, Forschungsstelle Antiziganismus, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Frédéric Bonnesoeur, Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, TU Berlin
Sara Halpern, St. Olaf College
Irina Nastasa-Matei, University of Bucharest
Michal Aharony, University of Haifa
Michele Sarfatti, Fondazione CDEC Milano
Frank Schumacher, The University of Western Ontario
Thomas Weber, University of Aberdeen
Elizabeth Drummond, Loyola Marymount University
Jennifer Evans, Carleton University
Sayantani Jana, University of Southern California
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Fairfield University
Snježana Koren, University of Zagreb
Brunello Mantelli, University of Turin and University of Calabria
Carl Müller-Crepon, University of Oxford
Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, Freie Universität Berlin
Amy Sjoquist, Northwest University
Sebastian Vîrtosu, Universitatea Națională de Arte “G. Enescu”
Stanislao G. Pugliese, Hofstra University
Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan
Antoinette Saxer, University of York
Alon Confino, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Corry Guttstadt, University of Hamburg
Vadim Altskan, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
Evan B. Bukey, University of Arkansas
Elliot Y Neaman, University of San Francisco
Rebecca Wittmann, University of Toronto Mississauga
Benjamin Rifkin, Hofstra University
Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland
Walter Reich, George Washington University
Jay Geller, Case Western Reserve University
Atina Grossmann, Cooper Union
Francesco Zavatti, Södertörn University
Eliyana R. Adler, The Pennsylvania State University
Laura María Niewöhner, Bielefeld University
Elena Amaya, University of California-Berkeley
Markus Roth, Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt
Brandon Bloch, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Monica Osborne, The Jewish Journal
Benjamin Hett, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Volker Weiß, Independent Scholar
Manuela Consonni, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Svetlana Suveica, University of Regensburg
Izabella Tabarovsky is a researcher with the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, focusing on the politics of historical memory in the former Soviet Union.
Evgeny Finkel is a political scientist and historian at Johns Hopkins University.
This article was first published by the Jewish Journal.