News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: The Battle Continues

Date: November 28, 2000

"Russia, Germany condemn aggressive nationalism at war memorial ceremony
ORANIENBURG, Germany, Nov 26 (AFP) -

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and his German counterpart Joschka Fischer issued a joint call Sunday to combat belligerent nationalism, during a ceremony recalling the Soviet role in liberating Nazi Germany.

The two men were attending the inauguration of a memorial for Russian victims of the Nazis at the former concentration camp of Sachsenhausen north of Berlin.

Fischer said Germany's moral responsibility for the terrible deeds of the Nazis meant that it must answer the challenges of a liberal society.

He sharply condemned the desecration of Russian war graves in eastern Germany as an attack on Russian-German relations.

Ivanov said Russia could not remain indifferent if Nazism raised its head in Europe again, as aggressive nationalism and hostility toward foreigners were contrary to the peaceful co-existence of peoples.

The Russian minister said Sachsenhausen was tied up with a tragic chapter in European history, but also recalled the human contribution of Red Army soldiers who had freed Germany from National Socialism.

The ceremony attended by Ivanov was the occasion for a protest by German human rights activists against Russia's war against the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

In an open letter, the general secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples, Tilman Zuelch, said Fischer could not attend such a ceremony "while the Russian army continues its genocide" there.

According to Zuelch, 10,000 people have been killed by the Russian forces in Chechnya since September 1999.

The monument to the Russian soldiers at Sachsenhausen is composed of a split block of granite representing their torn and lost lives. The Russian prisoners of war were the biggest national group in the camp after Poles.

One third of all Russian prisoners of war taken by the Nazis are believed to have died at Sachsenhausen.

Overall figures are not available but 12,000 are believed to have been cold-bloodedly murdered there between September and December 1941. Tens of thousands more died before the camp was liberated by Soviet forces in 1945.

The camp was then administered by Soviet forces until 1949, during which time democratic opponents of the Soviet system who had already been persecuted by the Nazis were detained and died there along with Nazis."