(Jewish Group) Putin skews Holocaust history at global Auschwitz commemoration event in Jerusalem
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s prime speaking slot at a Holocaust commemoration event here this week was generating controversy even before the longtime leader took the podium. His remarks Thursday at the event commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army has done little to quell it.
Speaking at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, Putin claimed that 40 percent of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were citizens of the Soviet Union. Historians called the claim absurd.
“It’s completely false,” Jan Grabowski, a historian at the University of Ottawa, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview.
Jelena Subotic, a professor of political science at Georgia State University and the author of “Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance After Communism,” called Putin’s claim “ridiculous and not based on historical fact,” noting the that the “consensus” among historians is that about 1 million of the 6 million Jews murdered were from the Soviet Union.
In recent months, Putin has engaged in a war of words over Holocaust complicity with Poland, whose president, Andrzej Duda, declined to attend the Jerusalem event this week because he was denied a speaking slot. Putin has accused Poland of cooperating with Germany in 1938, while Duda has charged Russia with downplaying its own role in invading the Eastern European nation in cooperation with the Nazis the following year.
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