Der Spiegel: ‘Nearly six million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner and several hundred of them were held in camps near Ludwigsfelde. Countless numbers died of starvation, cold or disease. The Nazis buried many of them beside the Reichsautobahn 10, built by Adolf Hitler’s terror regime.’

And: ‘Estimates hold that 27 million Soviet citizens died in the violence, more than half of them civilians. Among them were more than two million Jewish men, women and children whom the Germans murdered in the Soviet Union through mass shootings, known as the "Holocaust by Bullets." Nearly five million people from the Soviet Union were deported to Germany as slave laborers – among them Ukrainians, Russians, Balts, Poles and Belarusians.’

And: ‘The dispute over how the past is to be understood is always part of the present.’

The past is the battleground of today’s culture wars, which sometimes become real wars.

(a sf 2161)