“Our War Against Russia”

Germany’s top news magazine “Der Spiegel” remembers the bad old days

For the anniversary of “Operation Barbarossa,” the German name for the attack on the Soviet Union of 22 June 1941, Germany’s sadly declining yet still dominant mainstream news magazine “Der Spiegel” has dedicated a long title story and a sensationalist cover to Berlin’s last open war in, as the Germans used to say back then, the East. So far, so expectable: There is no doubt, after all, that this was a historic as well as horrific event.

Launching their surprise attack with millions of troops and the explicit intention to wage a “war of extermination,” those Germans of yore, sought to build a “lebensraum” empire from hell, based on multiple deliberate genocides (including one of Soviet POWs), warfare with all legal or moral restraints systematically removed, and a supremacist ideology that would have designated anyone surviving among the conquered as a slave of inferior, if any, humanity.