By Willy Wimmer.
If a statement should ever have been true, then it is this one: something like this would never have happened with Helmut Kohl as Federal Chancellor. Every contemporary still has the pictures of Verdun, the great battlefield of the First World War etched in his memory. In front of the Douaumont Memorial, French President Francois Mitterand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl joined hands. Everyone who was there and everyone who remembers these images knew that this gesture would have nothing of political shifting sands to it. It wasn’t any different with Willy Brandt in the Warsaw Ghetto. This was not only a dignified response to the commemoration. There was an obligation associated with it that would go far beyond the occasion. Even the great military parade in 1962 at the French military training area of Mourmelon, which was organised by the French President General Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer on the battlefields of two World Wars with troops of both formerly hostile armies and states, breathed the spirit of a possible reconciliation. Peace should be possible between both states and peoples.
The German Chancellor, Dr. Angela Merkel, with the participation of German soldiers in the largest NATO manoeuvre since the end of the Cold War against Russia, is breaking a taboo. This is exactly what could prevent the creation of what has been made possible through grand gestures and rational action towards the Russian Federation and the Russian people: lasting peace and possible reconciliation.
It is precisely the Russian people who meet the German people with an open mind, which would actually be completely unimaginable after the devastation of the Second World War and the attack of the German Reich against the Soviet Union. No, you can stay wherever you want in the streets and squares of this great country: you are welcome as a German. When I visited the famous Taman Division near Moscow in 1987 as the first Western defense politician, even the Division Museum was free from disparaging the soldiers of the opposing Wehrmacht. The division’s political leader, in the words of his mother, said that a mother would also mourn these young German soldiers.
In 1985 the German President Richard von Weiszäcker denounced in the German Bundestag a behaviour that could be called ” historical forgetfulness”. This word is applicable to the behaviour of the entire German leadership today. It voted to let this manoeuvre take place with German soldiers. She has set the direction and lets the generals of the Bundeswehr talk about the manoeuvre as they do. She has nothing against German soldiers burying themselves “in the front gardens of Leningrad/St. Petersburg”. St. Petersburg today is a shining pearl of common European culture. On 28 January 2020, in Jerusalem, on the occasion of a commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz, Russian President Putin will unveil a monument in memory of the blockade of Leningrad by the German Reich during the Second World War. The German Chancellor will be present and will be responsible for the fact that Russia today has become and is threatened by the same ‘Versailles’ spirit that struck its own country during the First World War and Versailles.
It is no wonder that the German government in May 2019 did not remember “Versailles” one hundred years ago, or the German President in a commemoration ceremony for which he is responsible. Versailles does not only mean “unspirit of revenge” but the conscious inability to strive for peace. Instead, those responsible for the dictation at Versailles were aware of the fact that the road map for the next war was to be set up with “Versailles” in 1919. Wolfgang Effenberger has recently pointed out that the French Marshal Foch, at whose grave US President Trump stood in 2017, spoke of another war in about twenty years’ time.
He should not be mistaken. This thinking is expressed once again with the NATO major manoeuvre, deliberately planned for the day the war ended on 9 May 1945. As if it needed further proof. An American president who had propagated a balance with Russia during the election campaign is hunted down by means of an impeachment. The “NATO West” cannot make peace, it can only make war, whether cold or hot.
The American conference in Bratislava/Slovakia in April 2000 made the American goal for Europe clear: Iron Curtain between the Baltic and Black Sea, Russia can stay where it wants and can be dismantled or broken up into smaller pieces. NATO’s manoeuvre, which begins at the end of January 2020, is a shameful manoeuvre that only serves the warmongers.
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