Germany recognizes Holodomor as genocide
Holodomor falls into the period of the most massive crimes against humanity on the European continent (Photo:REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko)
German Bundestag has voted in support of a resolution that classifies the 1932-1933 Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people, Bundestag said in a message on its website on Nov. 30.
“The mass deaths from starvation were not the result of failed harvests, but were the responsibility of the political leadership of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin,” the message said.
“Holodomor represents a crime against humanity; from today's perspective, a historical-political classification as genocide is obvious.”
In the same message, German MPs note that politically-motivated, man-made famines claimed millions of lives elsewhere in the Soviet Union, including in Kazakhstan and along the Volga and Don rivers.
These tragic events illustrate the efforts of Soviet leaders to control and suppress peasantry, the Ukrainian language, and culture, the document said.
According to the message, Holodomor is one of the largest-scale crimes against humanity on the European continent, which occurred in the same historical period.
“These (crimes) include the Holocaust of European Jews in its historical singularity, the war crimes of the Wehrmacht, and the planned murder of millions of innocent civilians as part of the racist German war of annihilation in the East, for which Germany bears historical responsibility,” MPs added.
In a subsequent Twitter post, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked Germany for this “historic” decision.
Holodomor was a man-made, Soviet-engineered famine, which claimed the lives of at least seven million Ukrainians, in 1932-133.
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