In Germany, the war in Ukraine awakens the ghosts of 1939-1945

The war weighs on Ilse Thiele's mind, sitting in a floral armchair in her Berlin salon, with television constantly broadcasting Ukrainian news.

“All memories come back”, admits this 85-year-old pensioner, former director of a post office in East Germany, to the images of refugees assisted by volunteers at Berlin Central Station.

“I feel so sorry for all these people, especially for the children,” he continues.

Ilse Thiele recalls the sharp cold and hunger he felt during his own journey through Lower Silesia, in present-day Poland, in the winter of 1944-45. With their mother, they fled on foot from the Soviet advance to reach Thuringia, a state in central Germany.

The Second World War is still very present in the memory of the Germans and in their speeches and influences the perception of the invasion of Ukraine and the political debate about how to respond to it.

- “Experts on Nazism” -

The Germans were especially disgusted by Vladimir Putin's invocation of an alleged fight against Ukrainian “neo-Nazi” aggressors who fostered “genocide”.

In recent weeks, the Russian president did not hesitate to compare Ukrainian soldiers with local fighters who were actively involved in Nazi exactions in the former USSR.

The Russian embassy in South Africa tweeted that Moscow “like 80 years ago, is fighting Nazism in Ukraine.” The German mission angrily replied: “Shame on those who fall into the trap. (Unfortunately, we're kind of experts on Nazism.)”

Putin perverts the “overwhelming international consensus” that the Nazis were “the embodiment of evil,” says Hedwig Richter, professor of contemporary history at Budeswehr University in Munich.

“It's absolutely absurd,” especially if we consider Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky to be Jewish, he added.

“As a German, I am deeply offended that Putin abused the memory of German crimes during the Nazi period to legitimize his power,” the historian explains to AFP.

The expert says she is convinced of “the importance of historical memory, especially when we see how Russia, forgetting Stalinist crimes, nurtures aggressive nationalism”.

- Historical failures -

Comparisons do not come only from Moscow. In pro-Ukraine demonstrations, references to World War II are common, especially caricaturing Putin as Adolf Hitler.

Another historian, Heinrich August Winkler, established in the weekly Die Zeit common ground between the Nazi Fuhrer and the Russian leader. In particular, Putin's obsession with “a stab in the back” of the West, a rhetoric deployed in the 1920s by Hitler after the end of World War I.

“Putin faces Western democracies today with the question of whether they are serious about the values to which they aspire,” according to Winkler, who sees a parallel with the attitude of the Allies during the 1930s who wanted to avoid an armed confrontation with Germany at all costs.

For historian Gundula Bavendamm, these comparisons with Nazi Germany are problematic.

In their view, they can hide Germany's historic failures, particularly with its energy dependence on Russia, the weakness of its military spending and its complacency towards Putin and the belated awareness of “what kind of man he is”.

“Constantly invoking our responsibility in World War II may have prevented us from making real self-criticism,” regrets Bavendamm, who runs a museum of refugee history in Berlin.

For Ilse Thiele, the Berlin retiree, the ability to draw lessons from the past reopens old wounds.

“My parents lived through two world wars and I experienced one because of this Hitler pig,” she explains, also recalling the communist family of her deceased husband, imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp in Sachsenhausen.

“Do you want to start a third world war? I can't understand how, when you know a little about the war, you can start a new one... “, he says.

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