Germany, Russia and my grandmother

In the month since Russia launched a new offensive against Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, and its surroundings, I have thought a lot about an earlier assault on Kharkiv, and of a young woman named Anna who experienced it.

Eighty-three years ago next week, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. By the autumn, its forces had reached Kharkiv. Many of its inhabitants fled eastward, away from the front. Anna did not. She missed the departure of the lorry that evacuated her family and was instead detained and sent to Germany for forced labour. There she met Daniel, a Polish man who had already spent the better part of two years in the factory where they were put to work. They were forced to work until the spring of 1945, when they made their way back to Poland on foot to restart their lives.

Anna and Daniel were my grandparents, and I think of them, too, when I contemplate the German debate over how to help Ukraine today. This cannot be understood without the deep collective reckoning Germany has undertaken with respect to its own past. That does not, I fear, always lead them to the right conclusions.

Everyone remembers Berlin’s pathetic offer of helmets, when Russian tanks were about to roll towards Kyiv. Since then, Berlin has become one of the largest donors of military equipment. Even so, each time Kyiv has been granted more powerful weapons, Germany has always needed the cover of somebody else moving first. Today, Germany is withholding two particularly important forms of help that could change the course of the war. One is the continued denial of Taurus missiles. The other is a refusal to countenance the seizing of Moscow’s $300bn-plus of blocked foreign exchange reserves as a down payment on the compensation owed to a ruined Ukraine.

Other countries, too, have long said no before they said yes — to tanks, to more powerful missiles, to fighter planes. France also resists seizing Russia’s state assets. They fear retaliation, and recoil at the idea of a balance of power that tilts so far against Moscow as to undermine its internal stability. These are ignoble but shared western instincts. But in Germany, something more shines through. Especially before February 2022, many Germans expressed the sense of owing Moscow a duty of redemption for their grandparents’ crimes and a debt of gratitude for the Soviet army’s crushing of Nazi power and its departure after reunification. 

This view remains visible on the far right and left, and among some of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats. It may not be shared by the coalition government, but still seems to chill the chancellor’s support for anything that can be construed as Germany fighting Russia. He rules out sending military personnel to Ukraine, allegedly required if Taurus missiles were given.

But it is not for Germans to define what they owe their millions of past victims. That is for the victims themselves, including Anna and Daniel. On their behalf, I claim a say in what Germany owes to whom.

First, it is not pacifism. To think that because the country committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, it must forever forswear force is a terrible mistake. Second, its debt is not to Moscow and never was. It is to the individuals and peoples Germany once violated: the Jews of eastern Europe, of course, and the non-Jewish victims in those “bloodlands” of both Nazi and Stalinist terror — to a large extent Ukrainians and Belarusians. And part of what Germany owes them is defence against renewed terror and annihilation — especially at the hands of Moscow.

My grandmother only lived in Kharkiv because she had earlier had to flee her childhood home in central Ukraine. Stalin’s policy of forcibly collectivising farms (including my great-grandfather’s) and diverting harvest to urban workers led to famines which killed millions of Ukrainians at the start of the 1930s. This is the family history of virtually everyone with roots in the bloodlands: terror at the hands of both Berlin and Moscow. It is perverse for today’s Germany to think its historical obligation involves withholding anything that can bring victory to people it victimised within living memory against a Moscow now re-enacting those crimes.

martin.sandbu@ft.com