A Poland memorial for the victims of Nazi rule and a documentation center are to be built in Berlin. Ukraine is now also demanding a memorial. The dispute shows how challenging appropriate reminder politics are.
from
Florian Hassel
Andrij Melnyk can hardly wait for the coming German government. The Ambassador of Ukraine wants to call on the Chancellery and coalition parties, ministries and the new Bundestag to decide to erect a memorial to the victims of Nazi rule in Ukraine in the center of Berlin. “In Ukraine alone there were at least five million civilian victims of the German war of extermination, including around 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews who were killed by bullets in the Holocaust,” says the diplomat. 2.4 million of the forced laborers of the Third Reich came from Ukraine, “the largest group”. But as large as the number of victims is, so great is the ignorance in Germany.