What do you call Russia's war crimes in Ukraine? Mass murder? Genocide? Or a new Holocaust?

Monument to citizens of St. Julien de Crempse massacred by Nazis.

Back in the late 90’s, my family and I rented a house in Southwest France outside of Bergerac in a small village called St. Julien de Crempse.  One day we were driving with some friends to a routier, a rural French “truck stop,” in a village along the Dordogne River.  The road we took, the D660, ran right along the river through fields of wheat and sunflowers and alfalfa.  We were coming up on the bridge that crossed the river into Couze-et-Saint-Front when a phalanx of Gendarmes stopped us and all the other traffic on the road.  Some kind of ceremony was taking place in the middle of a grassy field between the road and the river.  As a crowd gathered, a military band, complete with brass and a spiffy drum line, marched into view and took its place.

Then a small bus was guided through the traffic by the Gendarmes and just in front of us turned and drove into the field.  We watched, fascinated, as a small group of old men, their chests covered with medals, were escorted to a place of honor just in front of the band.  There was a sound of trumpets and an honor guard snapped to attention and presented the French flag. The old men doffed their berets and held their right hands over their hearts as La Marseillaise, the French National Anthem was played. Then two or three small boys in dark blue pants and light blue shirts marched forward with a wreath and leaned it against a small obelisk, the point of which could barely be seen poking above the tall grasses.

After a while, the old men were escorted back to the bus and the band marched away to depart on another bus and the boys marched off with the color guard and the ceremony was over.  As the Gendarmes moved into position to begin directing traffic again, I asked one of them what the occasion was.  “It is a ceremony to lay a wreath on the site where the first OSS agent landed from Great Britain to help the resistance fight the Nazis,” he said.  “Who were the old men in the berets?” I asked.  “Veterans of the resistance,” he answered.  “There are still a few of them alive, and they are brought here from their villages every year for the ceremony.”

That is how alive the history of World War II still is in France and the rest of Europe, for that matter.  The following day, a British friend loaned me a history of the war years in the Dordogne, and I read how the resistance had been so fierce in the region that the Nazi army had dispatched part of a Panzer division and an SS battalion to deal with them. 

Reading the book, I discovered the largely untold history of the massacre of the men and boys in village after village right around where we were staying.  In fact, St. Julien de Crempse had a monument next to the town hall, or mairie, commemorating the 45 men and teenage boys from the village who were lined up on the orders of an SS commander and shot on the 9th of August, 1944.  In fact, there were monuments to similar massacres all around the Dordogne – there was a granite slab in Mussidan, just to the northwest of Bergerac, an obelisk in Goujounac, a small village on the road to Cahors, commemorating yet another massacre.  I put my daughter Lilly in the car one day and decided to just drive around and see how many war memorials I could find and discovered there was a monument of some kind in practically every village in the area, many of them honoring the victims of Nazi massacres that had taken place.  Some of the monuments were made of wood, some of granite, some of limestone, some of marble, and all were engraved with the names of those who had been murdered, and many, like those in St. Julien de Crempse, belonged to the famous French resistance group, the Maquis.

I asked the woman we rented the house from about all the massacres that had taken place in the area, and she said, “That’s why you don’t see any cars with German license plates around here.  They know not to come here.  The local people won’t serve them in restaurants, won’t allow them in their hotels.” 

That’s how deep the history of the war ran through that part of France, and how deep was the resentment of the German occupation and the crimes they committed still, and this was more than 50 years after the end of the war.

I was talking to my friend Bill Taylor, the former ambassador to Ukraine, as the shelling of civilian neighborhoods in Ukrainian cities continued for a second week.  For some reason I mentioned the monument in St. Julien de Crempse, and Bill said there are similar monuments to people massacred by Nazis in villages all over Ukraine.  I had a look at a map of the German campaign to take Moscow in 1941.  The Nazi front lines ran through Kyiv on the 26th of August.  By the 1st of October, the front was just west of Kharkiv and was nearing Mariupol in the south.  By the time the Soviet army halted the German advance in early December, the front lines in Ukraine passed through the eastern region in the Donbas now being fought over again. 

In 1941, civilians were being killed by Nazi soldiers under the command of General Gerd von Rundstedt and four Einsatzgruppen commanded by Otto Ohlendorf, an SS functionary under Reinhard Heydrich.  The SS was ordered to establish “security” as the German army made progress by killing Jews and partisans.  At least initially, only adult males were ordered killed, but the killings soon became indiscriminate and included women and children.  Von Rundstedt’s army also employed the “hunger plan” which involved denying food to prisoners of war and civilians on a mass scale, saving the supplies for the German army.  The plan included starving the citizens of occupied Kyiv and Kharkiv, denying them food and water, killing tens of thousands, especially in Kharkiv where the starvation was the worst. 

For reasons too complicated to go into here, von Rundstedt was never tried for war crimes, although he was accused of murdering civilians in Poland, Soviet Russia (including Ukraine and the massacre at Babi Yar) and Southern France (the massacre at Oradour in 1944.)  By testifying against the Nazi high command at Nuremberg and then getting passed around between the Allied powers after the war, von Rundstedt finally ended up bankrupt and ill in a nursing home in Hanover, Germany, and died of heart failure in 1953 at 78.

I’m going through all this history for several reasons:  to show that mass murder of civilians happened before in Ukraine in the exact places that are now under heavy bombardment by Russians, and mass murders happened in France and Poland and Greece and…well, you get the picture.  You could run out of space listing all the places where civilian men, women and children have been killed by armies rampaging through Europe.  In the 20’s century, it was the Nazis.  Today it’s the Russians, who themselves suffered so profoundly during the war.  The Soviet Union as a whole, including what is now Russia and Ukraine, lost 27 million people during World War II.

It's easy to call what the Nazis did mass murder.  And of course the word “Holocaust” has long been what the world calls the murder of more than 6 million Jews by the Nazis before and during the war. 

What do we call the killing of civilians that is going on right now in Ukraine?  It’s certainly mass murder.  The number of Ukrainian civilians who have been killed over the past two weeks is hard to pin down, as such figures usually are while a war is in progress.  The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights official number is 406, with 801 wounded as of yesterday.  But the office of the Ukrainian emergency services in Lviv, which has tried to keep a count by gathering records of deaths on the fly from hospitals and other Ukrainian facilities, says as many as 2,000 civilians have been killed, according to Reuters.

It is obvious from reports on CNN and MSNBC along with reporting by the AP, New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, and Reuters among other sources, that Russian forces are purposefully targeting civilian areas of cities large and small across Ukraine. The Russian army has been stymied in its ability to move its infantry and armored units into cities that have been well-defended by the Ukrainian military and civilian militias, so they have settled for shelling civilian neighborhoods with artillery and rockets from firebases on the outskirts of cities and in some cases starving the population and denying them water, electricity, and fuel for heat, which will doubtlessly lead to deaths by hypothermia, starvation, and dehydration and exposure to diseases like cholera and dysentery.

The Nazis did exactly this to the Ukrainian people 81 years ago, and now the Russians are copying them.

These deaths during a war do not just happen because people fail to take care of themselves or ensure their own safety and health.  They happen because the aggressor army executes a plan.  The Nazis put words to it like the “hunger plan” and they even had names for the soldiers assigned to murder civilians like the Schutzstaffel, the notorious SS, and the murderous units known as Einsatzgruppen.

The Russian terror campaign in Ukraine is obviously the result of frustration that Putin’s war hasn’t gone better.  The excellent Julia Ioffee of the online magazine Puck reported last week that an op-ed in the state-owned organ RIA News published just two days after the war started seemed to proclaim that the war had already been won:  “A new world is being born before our eyes,” wrote Pyotr Akopov, a favorite propagandist of Putin’s. “The Russian military operation in Ukraine has opened a new era…Russia is reconstituting its unity. The tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe of our history, its unnatural twist, has been overcome.  Ukraine will no longer exist as an anti-Russia,” he continued.  “Russia is rebuilding its historical fullness, gathering the Russian world, the Russian people together—all the Great Russians, the Belarusians, and the Little Russians,” which is slang for Ukrainians in Putin’s circle.

The op-ed turned into an embarrassing mistake as the Russian army’s advance was stalled.  RIA took the op-ed down because it had “published far too soon what was clearly pre-planned for the event of a lightning victory and the rapid fall of Kyiv that Putin had been counting on,” reported Ioffe.

When the plans of dictators go awry, they order reprisals.  They blame Jews and order them killed.  They blame Ukrainian civilians who will not surrender and order them killed.  The Nazi campaign to “take” Moscow lasted five months, one week and six days, from June 22, 1941, to December 5.  More than 800,000 Soviet soldiers were killed.  It is not known how many civilians were murdered, but it had to have been a shocking number.  Moscow did not fall, and Ukraine and Ukrainians played a part in that victory. 

The history of World War II doesn’t merely linger; as it is in France, in Ukraine memory is alive, it is the national conscience of a people, and it is at least in part why Ukraine has not surrendered and likely never will.  We have names for the horrors of war like the Holocaust.  We should have a name for the indominable spirit of the Ukrainian people.