When Russian Chancellor Sergei Lavrov said he believed Adolf Hitler “had Jewish blood,” he added fuel to the Holocaust memory fire, which ignites contemporary political-ideological agendas.
Earlier, President Vladimir Putin had spoken of “denazifying” Ukraine to justify invading the neighboring country. But not just him. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also resorted to the expedient to present his version of events.
In a speech to the Israeli Parliament, he compared the Russian invasion to Nazi Germany, drawing attention to the similarity of terms used now and in the past. “Listen to what the Kremlin says. Just listen! […] Exactly as it was said 80 years ago,” he said.
Lavrov’s statement was a response to an Italian journalist who questioned how Ukraine could be a Nazi when its president, elected with 70% of the votes, is Jewish — including relatives murdered in the Holocaust.
Of course, Russian diplomacy is not unaware of Zelensky’s ethnic-religious affiliation and knew that it would be used in the construction of a Ukrainian counter-narrative. How, then, to explain the insistence on this idea?
The decision was based on the awareness that, for certain ears — and for the ears that really mattered — Zelensky’s Jewishness would not serve as a counterpoint to Nazi ideology. On the contrary, perhaps it even reinforced it. This is because, depending on the local context, the symbologies and memories in relation to Nazism and the Holocaust vary.
Thus, when referring to “denazification”, in the case of Putin, and to Hitler’s “Jewish blood”, in the case of Lavrov, the Kremlin evoked a myth that was widely circulated in Russian society and in Eastern European countries, according to the which the real victims of Nazism were Christian Russians, not Jews.
The memory of the past, as we know, is under permanent construction, it is crossed by disputes and mobilized for the purposes of the present. And it’s not unique. The belief that Hitler has Jewish ancestry stems from one of several speculations that have arisen in the face of the lack of information about his paternal grandfather.
Lavrov went even further, stating in the same interview that “the wise Jewish people have said that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews.”
Echoing conspiracy theories from the past, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and those in force today, such as that, if the Holocaust had really existed, the Jews would have been responsible for it, the chancellor turned victims into executioners, rewriting history from a specific narrative that challenges the Western hegemonic.
In contemporary geopolitics, different memories of the Holocaust can stitch together the identity of global blocks.
If, in general terms, the consensus regarding the legacy of the Holocaust unifies liberal democracies in the post-World War II period, especially the European Union and the United States, the Russian position aims to amalgamate a new traditionalist geopolitical front formed by Russia, China and Iran.
From this perspective, liberal democracies, with their identity patterns, perceived as decadent, are the enemies and are confused with a certain Jewishness, which in this “new” memory of the Holocaust is classified by opponents as “Nazi”.
Given the role that Nazism and the Holocaust have played in global public debate, some institutions such as the International Alliance for the Remembrance of the Holocaust (IHRA), which were created to safeguard this memory, have warned against trivializing it. The important thing is not to fail to see the existence of real Nazis. In the case of Ukraine and Russia, they are on both sides of the border.
