January 31, 2025

By Jean-Pierre Page

In another assault on historical fact, the Western imperialist countries which organized the ceremonies commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp this year refused to invite any participation from Russia. Jean-Pierre Page, a former national leader of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) in France, made the following presentation to an international conference organized for the Russian think-tank Valdai Club on Jan. 29. The International Action Center publishes Page’s presentation as part of the effort to counter the imperialist rewriting of history, especially the imperialists’ attempt to erase the contribution of the USSR to the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II.

Good Morning, and thank you for this opportunity to address this important forum.

On 27 January 1945, exactly 80 years ago, the Soviet Red Army liberated the Auschwitz extermination camp.

Today, in their Russophobia, the negationists deny the use of the term “liberation,” because — they argue — it was not a military objective, only a matter of chance, an unexpected discovery of the largest death camp devised by the Nazis. These outrageous arguments do not stand up to facts, especially because after the liberation of the Soviet Union and Poland, the Red Army put an end to years of war that had caused untold destruction and over 60 million lives.

By simplifying complex facts to promote their own ideological vision, many Western leaders, their so-called “experts,” their historians of the moment, their journalists, are re-writing history to serve short-term political goals. The 80th anniversary is being weaponized in an international context characterized by conflict, wars and the inexorable decline of the West.

Auschwitz is closely associated with the Holocaust and Hitler’s Final Solution to the “Jewish problem.” But, today, this tragedy has given rise to the renewal of an indecent amalgam between the Holocaust, antisemitism, the events of October 7, [2023,] Gaza and the Palestinian question, as if — in a distorted logic — it is at the root of a resurgence of antisemitism, associated with Nazis and Auschwitz.

Establishing such a link with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and decolonization is — in my eyes — intolerable and unacceptable and must be condemned and combatted. 

Let us not forget that the establishment of the Zionist entity on Palestinian land is the result of a link made by Western powers between Palestine and the problem of Jewish refugees in Europe, victims not of Arab but European antisemitism, with its ultimate manifestation in Nazi extermination camps.

We must “stop making a mockery of history!”

First and foremost, this anti-Russian hysteria shows a gross lack of respect for the memory of 27 million Soviets who sacrificed their lives to liberate Europe, including the 65,000 Soviet prisoners murdered in Auschwitz.

Recently a U.S. media outlet proclaimed it was [U.S.] American troops that liberated Auschwitz, before retracting this and apologizing. In one of its first surveys, France’s oldest polling institute, IFOP, posed the following question at the end of World War II, repeating it 70 years later: “Which nation do you think contributed most to the defeat of Germany in 1945? Great Britain, the United States or the USSR?” At the end of the war, over 60% of French people said it was Russia. Only 20% of them said it was the United States and 12% said Britain. Seventy years later, in a reversal of opinion, 58% of them believed it was the United States. It is true that U.S.-based cinema has revisited World War II with untruths, inaccuracies and even certain charlatanism …

In 2020, France did not invite Russia to the commemoration of 8 May marking the victory over Nazi Germany, and the USSR was not even mentioned, as if it had not participated at all!

So why be surprised? What will be told in the years ahead? That it was the Soviet Union and [its Prime Minister Joseph] Stalin who started the war? That is what the European Parliament is already saying!

In September 2019, the European Parliament voted for a resolution stigmatising Nazism and Communism, placing them on an equal footing. Immediately striking is that the resolution accumulates one gross historical error over another. For instance, that World War II was triggered by the German-Soviet Pact.

History is being re-written to promote an ideological and exclusive vision that has nothing to do with facts but with pure propaganda.

Falsification of history

By reducing the origins of World War II to the “German-Soviet Pact,” the resolution places Nazi Germany and the USSR on the same level, considering both responsible. This, despite the fact that, with a few rare exceptions, no serious historian has questioned that the aggressors were Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Japan. By supporting the text, the parliamentarians even disavow the conclusions of the [post-war[ Nuremberg Tribunal [which tried and convicted leading Nazi war criminals]. This falsification of history equates those who built the Auschwitz extermination camp with the Red Army that liberated it.

This resolution aimed at erasing all traces of history legitimizes the destruction of historical monuments celebrating, for example, the Red Army’s contribution to the victory over fascism; it authorizes rewriting of history lessons to remove aspects considered too favorable toward former communist regimes and the partisan struggle; and, it normalizes the renaming of streets [eliminating communist heroes].

I believe that here we are reaching an extreme, the unstated aim of which is to make it impossible to remember, to exercise the duty of memory.

Was it not the Nobel laureate for literature, Thomas Mann, who once wrote: “To morally equate Russian communism with Nazi-fascism because both are totalitarian is at best superficial, at worst it is fascism”?

One year ago, on 17 January 2024, the European Parliament followed up this resolution with another. The new resolution does not simply call for the rewriting of history, it calls for all traces of real history to be erased and “a new shared culture of remembrance” created. For example, it calls on member states to update their existing curricula and teaching methods so that European history takes precedence over national history in order — we are told — to challenge the stereotypes and ‘sacred cows’ of national histories.

So, it is hardly surprising that slogans and emotional narratives, simplifying facts and impoverishing public debate, are replacing critical thinking. Society is being limited in its ability to analyse in a nuanced manner its own past, its complexity and its contradictions. The rise of revisionist narratives and “alternative truths” are a testimony to this devaluation of rigorous historical analysis. Ultimately, it is the legitimacy of academic, scientific and educational institutions that is being eroded, weakening them and compromising their essential role as guardians of history.

This simplification and instrumentalization of history have devastating effects on society: symbols that serve to unify, now divide. It reveals not only the dangers, but also our responsibility, especially toward the youth and new generations, to lead this struggle for history. We owe it to the more than 1 million victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, 90% of whom were Jews, but also [Romani people, formerly called] gypsies, Soviet and Polish prisoners of war, members of the Resistance, including several members of my own family.

As Bertolt Brecht once said: “The belly is still fertile from which the foul beast sprang.”

For all these reasons and all these sacrifices, our collective memory must not forget the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. That is why the exclusion of Russia from the commemoration of the 80th anniversary held at the Auschwitz camp is treacherous, inadmissible and reprehensible.

Thank You!