This article is dedicated to the memory of Wolfgang Weber(1949-2024). He participated in the preparation and discussion of this article prior to his death last year.
To mark the 85th anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the traveling exhibition Rift through Europe: The Consequences of the Hitler-Stalin Pactopened last August at the Berlin-Karlshorst Museum (formerly the German-Russian Museum). A companion book of the same title was published the following month.
In this museum of all places—located at the historic site where the German Wehrmacht surrendered to the Red Army in May 1945—the new exhibition distorts the history of the Second World War, rewriting it to align with Germany’s current war aims in NATO’s proxy war against Russia.
The traveling exhibition, developed in cooperation with Professor Anke Hilbrenner, the Chair of Eastern European History at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, is modest in size, occupying only a side room of the museum. Nevertheless, it is designed to reach a wide audience through various channels. It has already been displayed in the German cities of Düsseldorf and Lüneburg, and the Federal Agency for Civic Education plans to make it available digitally as a resource for schools. In early 2025, the exhibition moved on to Ukraine. It has received government funding, including support from the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Claudia Roth (Greens), and the Ministry of Education in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
In Berlin, the exhibition was initially presented in German and English, but from the halfway point onward, only in Ukrainian and English. There was no Russian-language presentation, despite the fact that the museum is otherwise German- and Russian-speaking. This exclusion is part of the broader assault on Russian culture promoted by German media and institutions since the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Ukrainian flag now flies prominently outside the museum, and its former name—the “German-Russian Museum”—has been officially changed.
Two of the editors of the exhibition volume—Anke Hilbrenner and museum director Jörg Morré—are members of the German-Russian History Commission, which suspended its activities in February 2022. The German side of the commission also includes prominent right-wing militarists such as Jörg Baberowski (Humboldt University Berlin) and Sönke Neitzel (University of Potsdam).
The exhibition is the latest component in a broader campaign of historical revisionism that has been underway for years. Its purpose is to advance a right-wing narrative of the Second World War, tailored to the current escalation of war in Eastern Europe and internationally.
The exhibition focuses on the Non-Aggression Pact signed on August 23, 1939, between Nazi Germany and the Stalinist leadership in the Soviet Union. Also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, after the foreign ministers who signed it, the agreement facilitated the Nazis’ preparations for their long-planned campaign in the East. The Wehrmacht invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and the Red Army occupied eastern Poland on September 17.
Less than two years later, in June 1941, German tanks rolled towards Moscow. Under the code name “Operation Barbarossa,” the Nazi regime waged a war of extermination against the USSR that cost the lives of more than 27 million Soviet citizens and dramatically accelerated the Nazis’ machinery of murder. In the years that followed, 6 million Jews and millions more people were gassed by Hitler’s henchmen in concentration and extermination camps, executed in mass shootings and systematically starved and abused.
The Holocaust, the Nazis’ campaign of extermination across Europe and the devastating consequences of war and aerial bombardment remain deeply ingrained in the collective memory of the international working class. The Karlshorst Museum has addressed some of these crimes in its permanent exhibition and individual events, such as those on the Leningrad Blockade, the liberation of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland and the mass murder in Ozarichi in Belarus in 1944.
The traveling exhibition Rift through Europeseeks to replace the working class’s memory of fascist crimes with a nationalist narrative promoted by Eastern European and Baltic states. It falsely presents this as the collective memory of entire societies. In reality, it reflects the “culture of remembrance” of right-wing and fascist forces that glorify and trace their heritage to those who collaborated with the Wehrmacht and SS in their campaigns against the Soviet Union, and in the mass murder of Jews and other national minorities in their respective countries.
The historical revisionism revolves around two main axes:
First, the Hitler-Stalin Pact is used to invert historical guilt. Because the Soviet Union signed the pact and, according to the secret protocol, occupied parts of Eastern Europe, it is now blamed for starting the Second World War and its consequences. The New York Timesunabashedly spread this lie over a year ago to strengthen far-right Ukrainian nationalism in the NATO proxy war against Russia.
The exhibition argues that the Soviet Union was an aggressor driven by imperialist and colonial ambitions no different from those of the Nazi regime. In several passages, it even suggests that the communists were more brutal and more dangerous than the Nazis.
If one follows this logic to its conclusion, it leads to a new version of the infamous historical lie that Nazi Germany waged a preventive or defensive war. If the Soviet Union is cast as the imperialist aggressor and instigator of war in 1939, does this not provide the rationale to claim that Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union two years later was merely a defensive move? Was Operation Barbarossa, then, a justifiable preemptive strike against an alleged “enemy in the east”?
The preventive war thesis has been repeatedly invoked since Hitler’s time to revise the historical fact that the Nazi regime waged a deliberate and premeditated war of aggression—the principal charge at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945. Although the thesis has long been discredited by serious scholarship and is not explicitly endorsed in the exhibition, the falsification of the Hitler-Stalin Pact ultimately leads to the same conclusion and follows a definite political logic.
Germany’s current aggressive militarism is sold to the population as a defensive and preventive policy. The ruling class is disguising its geopolitical and economic interests in the Ukraine war behind a supposedly necessary “defence” against the dangerous aggressor in Moscow. For this, it needs to secure its position on the “historical front.”
Second, there is a deliberate trivialisation and suppression of Nazi crimes. The Holocaust is relativized at key points in the exhibition volume. The Nazi war of extermination is largely ignored, and the “General Plan East”—the blueprint for the war—is not even mentioned.
While German politicians and journalists are now justifying the Israeli regime’s ongoing genocide in Gaza with cynical references to the Holocaust, they are simultaneously supporting the relativization of Nazi crimes, which has been made socially acceptable in recent years.
In 2018, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alexander Gauland, claimed that Hitler and the Nazis were just “bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.” What has long been advocated by the AfD and right-wing extremist ideologues in their milieu has reached lecture halls and museums in recent years.
A key figure is the history professor Jörg Baberowski from Berlin’s Humboldt University, who declared in 2014 in Der Spiegelthat Hitler was “not vicious” and equated the Holocaust with mass shootings in the Russian Civil War. According to Baberowski, Stalin and the Red Army imposed the war of extermination on the Wehrmacht. In doing so, he took up the extreme right-wing positions of Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte, who had been rebuffed by scholars in the Historikerstreit(historians’ dispute) of the 1980s.
Around the same time as Baberowski’s initiative, the German edition of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalinby the right-wing American academic Timothy Snyder was published. Snyder has played a prominent role in providing ideological justification for the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
As the World Socialist Web Sitehas explained, Snyder argues that the crimes of National Socialism were a response to the atrocities committed by Stalin in Soviet Ukraine during 1932–33. He portrays the Hitler-Stalin Pact as an alliance between two equally imperialist and predatory regimes. The exhibition volume relies heavily on Snyder’s framework and lists Bloodlandsamong its “relevant publications” in the first footnote.
While Germany was ideologically preparing for new wars, it backed the right-wing coup in Ukraine in 2014. This provoked a civil war that, even before the outbreak of open war with Russia in 2022, had already claimed over 14,000 lives.
Today, historical revisionism is taking place in the midst of war. Thousands of young Ukrainians and Russians are being massacred in the trenches. In Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinians have fallen victim to the Israeli government’s genocide.
The editors themselves explicitly situate the exhibition volume within the context of the current war. It was developed, they write, under the impact of “Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine since 2014.” Throughout the volume, parallels are repeatedly drawn between the USSR and present-day Russia, which is accused of pursuing “imperial policies” that threaten Eastern European countries.[] Ville Kivimäki, “Finland and the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. The Survivor Case,” in: Rift Through Europe, pp. 171, 173.