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German war memorial in Rzhev provokes opposition

By Liz Fekete

1 August 1997

The German Popular Union for the Care of War Graves has been given permission to build a cemetery and war memorial to German troops in Rzhev, a small town on the upper Volga, west of Moscow.

But war veterans have launched a legal challenge to the scheme and their opposition has been turned into a national campaign, spearheaded by the local Communist MP, Titiana Astrakhankima. One Russian veteran has promised to strap dynamite to his body and blow himself up if a 16-foot cross, the centrepeice of the new cemetery, is erected.

Supporters of the project say it is an act of reconciliation and that ordinary soldiers were not responsible for the atrocities. More than one-sixth of a pre-war population of 58000 were shipped off to forced labour in Germany during the Nazi occupation. Some 9000 Soviet citizens were shot, starved or tortured to death in a concentration camp set up in the centre of the town.

The head of Rzhev's local history society and the liberal daily newspaper Izvestiya are supporting the project, pointing out that scores of German war cemeteries already exist in the former Soviet Union. The support the veterans receive from the Communist party is also attacked, as its daily newspaper, the Sovietskaya Rossiya, is considered virulently nationalistic and anti-Semitic.

Guardian 11.4.97

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