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Red Army Veterans Called to Testify About Nazi War Crimes

Jamie Dettmer

   Russia prosecutors are summoning Red Army veterans to recall their
   battlefield experiences to help identify Nazis and their collaborators
   who carried out Second World War atrocities in the Soviet Union.

   The new war crime investigations are being linked by observers to
   President Vladimir Putin's renewed interest in historical memory and
   his determination to shape how the world remembers Soviet leader Josef
   Stalin and especially the Soviet Union's contribution to the defeat of
   Nazi Germany.

   The Russian leader and former KGB officer has complained that the
   Soviet Union's huge wartime role and its losses have been distorted and
   downplayed for political purposes by Western politicians and
   historians. Putin has asserted Western popular culture overlooks Soviet
   sacrifices and focuses more on events such as the Normandy landings of
   1944.

   Russian investigators intend to question as many as 1,000 Red Army
   veterans, nearly all very frail, according to Russian media. The family
   of a 94-year-old veteran complained to The Moscow Times of receiving a
   formal summons from the prosecutor's office in Volgograd, a city in
   southern Russia previously known as Stalingrad, the site of arguably
   the most important of any Second World War land battle.

   'Strict tone' criticized

   "We just couldn't believe that the prosecutors would summon a frail old
   man to their offices during the coronavirus outbreak using such a
   strict tone," the veteran's grandson Denis Chistyakov told the
   newspaper. "Why not just come to his house for a chat?"

   The Volgograd prosecutors' office told the paper that such summonses
   had been sent to at least 80 veterans in the region. Summonses have
   been sent to veterans throughout Russia, according to press reports.

   Alexander Bastrykin, head of Russia's Investigative Committee, told the
   state-run RIA Novosti news agency earlier in the year that
   investigations were being set up to "establish, identify and name all
   the guilty Nazis, whether they are alive or not." He added: "Nuremberg
   did not convict all those responsible. Irrespective of whether they are
   alive or not, we must name those names. Only the memories of
   eyewitnesses can accurately reconstruct the details of the criminal
   activity."

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