MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said that ignoring the Soviet Union’s role in liberating Nazi German death camps such as Auschwitz and not inviting surviving family members of Soviet troops to liberation anniversaries was a shameful act.
A commemoration to mark 80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz camp in Poland by Soviet troops was attended by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Britain’s King Charles, French President Emmanuel Macron, Polish President Andrzej Duda and many other leaders.
Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, was not invited due to the war in Ukraine.
“This is such a strange, shameful thing to do,” Putin told Russian state television in an interview released on Sunday.
“You can treat the head of the Russian state, me, in any way you want – no one is asking for any invitation. But if you had thought about it, you could have been a lot more subtle.”
Putin said that if the Soviet soldiers who took part in the liberation of the camps could not be invited due to health or age, then at least their families could have been invited to the events marking the anniversary of the liberation.
As Soviet forces pushed back Nazi troops in Europe in 1944 and 1945, they liberated a number of death camps including Majdanek, Auschwitz, Stutthof, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. U.S. troops liberated Buchenwald and other camps while British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen and other camps.
More than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, perished at Auschwitz in gas chambers or from starvation, cold and disease. Poles, Roma and Sinti, and Soviet prisoners of war were also killed there, according to the Auschwitz museum.
In all, between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews across German-occupied Europe. The second largest group of victims of Nazi racial policy after the Jews were Soviet prisoners of war, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Other major groups killed included Soviet citizens, Poles, gypsies, sexual minorities, disabled people and others who offended Nazi ideas of racial superiority.
The International Criminal Court has ordered a warrant for Putin’s arrest for war crimes in Ukraine. Russia denies the accusations which Moscow says were made up to smear its image.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Ros Russell)
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