Recognition as genocide: Bundestag discusses Holodomor

90 years ago more than three million people died in Ukraine – driven into a famine by the Soviet dictator Stalin. Now Germany wants to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide.

Holodomor – the term has it all. It contains the Ukrainian words for “hunger” and “kill”. More than three million people fell victim to the Holodomor – says Eastern Europe historian Franziska Davies from the University of Munich: “The Holodomor is the name of the famine in Ukraine that began in 1932. And this famine was caused by Stalin’s decision to use violence in agriculture to collectivize.”

Farmers had to give up grain and seeds, and many of them were brutally persecuted and deported. The famine was not planned from the start, says Davies, but once it happened, the regime used it to enforce power and dominance structures. For example, people who wanted to flee hunger could no longer get away: “For example, train tickets for Ukrainians were no longer sold. They could no longer leave the country. Cities were cordoned off.”

Bundestag discusses Holodomor

In Soviet times, the Holodomor was hushed up. Only since the 1980s, in the course of perestroika, has the event been processed. In Ukraine it became part of the national identity.

90 years after the Holodomor, the Bundestag is to be reminded of it today – with a clear goal, says SPD MP Dietmar Nietan, the rapporteur responsible for his parliamentary group in the Foreign Affairs Committee: “In this motion for a resolution, the German Bundestag will commit to the To classify Holodomor as a genocide in political and historical terms. This classification is an important signal with which we counter historical revisionism, but also honor the victims of this crime.”

Steinmeier: Famine was not the result of failed harvests

The factions of the traffic light coalition and the factions of the CDU and CSU submitted the application together. AfD and Left were not asked. Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is grateful that the Bundestag wants to commemorate the events.

In an interview with the Deutsche Welle he said that the Holodomor was relatively little known as a crime in Germany. “But we have to remember that Ukraine was the victim of this famine,” said Steinmeier. “The famine was not the result of bad harvests, as has been claimed for years and decades, above all by Russian historians.”

Ukrainian ambassador praises clear position

The clear positioning of German parliamentarians on the Holodomor was welcomed by Ukraine in advance. The new Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Oleksiy Makeyev, said: “It is important for us that a non-partisan resolution is launched in the Bundestag. We see that actually all democratic parties in the German Bundestag are behind Ukraine.”

The Bundestag’s commemoration of the Holodomor: a highly symbolic sign of solidarity in times of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.