President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmayer During his speech in the Bundestage in the National Day of the Sorrow, which is celebrated in Germany as the day of memory of the victims of Wars and State Violence, urged the Germans to “not be shy” memories of the German Wehrmacht attack on the USSR in 1941.
“This day is the day of mourning. We grieve about the victims of violence and war worldwide, women, men and children who gave their lives or whose life overshadowed the war … When we remembered the 80th anniversary of the German Wehrmacht attack on Soviet Union this year, many of us had to admit that the places of promoting the German Wehrmacht through Poland, the countries of the Baltic and Belarus, through Ukraine and Russia and in the depths of the Caucasus – these places for them do not mean anything. The same applies to many places of German Crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Greece, who were also attacked 80 years ago. Most of us also do not know these places. We do not associate any events with them, and even more we do not associate them with our own, German history … our memories It is shy to provide information about war and crimes in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. They do not cope with crimes committed against civilians, forcibly displaced persons and Soviet prisoners of war, hundred And thousands of which died in the first months after the attack: they died from hunger, killed, shot, “- leads his words RIA” News “.
President noted that the Germans “are forgotten countless other places of German crimes, such as the Belarusian village of Khatyn, which was comparable to the Earth in the spring of 1943, or a small town of Mizos in the West of Ukraine, whose gates all the Jewish population were shot in one day in October 1942 “.
He is convinced that the memory of these crimes “matters for our idea of itself as a nation, as well as for the general understanding of itself as Europeans on this continent.”