Agency Report –
Russian representatives should be allowed to take part in commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, German politician Sahra Wagenknecht told dpa on Wednesday.
Wagenknecht – who founded the populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) last year – said excluding Russian diplomats from memorial services would be to forget history.
“Anyone who no longer knows or wants to know that the Soviet army bore the brunt of the war against Nazi Germany and that 27 million people from the Soviet Union, the majority of them Russians, fell victim to the extermination campaign of the German Wehrmacht, is out of place in German politics,” she told dpa.
Wagenknecht’s upstart anti-immigrant party, which received just short of 5% of the vote in February’s parliamentary election, has been seen as pro-Russia for its open questioning of German support for Ukraine.
Her comments came after the German Foreign Office recommended that officials from Russia and Belarus should not be invited to commemorations of the 80th anniversary of the war’s end in May.
The decision was justified by fears that Russia could “exploit the commemorative events and improperly link them” to the war in Ukraine.
Wagenknecht said the move “damages Germany’s international reputation” and warned of a “new German zeitgeist that seeks to mentally prepare us for the next war with Russia.”
East Germans in particular have not forgotten that “without a Soviet President [Mikhail] Gorbachev, German reunification would never have happened,” she added.
The Russian embassy has insisted on participating in events marking the anniversary.
However, the Bundestag – Germany’s lower house of parliament – said that the Russian and Belarusian ambassadors would not be invited to its commemorative ceremony on May 8.
