ST. PETERSBURG, 27 January (BelTA) - The results of the Nuremberg process, during which Nazism was given an unambiguous legal assessment, are actually being reconsidered today, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a ceremony to unveil the memorial to commemorate Soviet civilian victims of the Nazi genocide during the Great Patriotic War, BelTA has learned.
Vladimir Putin recalled that on 27 January 1944 the Red Army troops completely broke the blockade of Leningrad. According to him, the memorial has become a symbol of moral duty to investigate all the crimes of the Nazis during the war and identify the guilty.
“We see how in our days the results of the Nuremberg process, during which Nazism was given an unambiguous legal assessment, are actually being reconsidered. In some countries, not only history is being rewritten and executioners are being justified. Revanchists and neo-Nazis have adopted the ideology and methods of the Nazis. In the Baltic states, tens of thousands of people are declared subhuman and deprived of their most basic rights and subjected to harassment. The regime in Kyiv glorifies Hitler's collaborators, the SS, and uses terror against all those who do not want it. The barbaric shelling of peaceful towns and villages and the killing of seniors, women and children continue,” the Russian leader said.
The head of state emphasized that the followers of the Nazi executioners, no matter what they call themselves today, are doomed. “Nothing will be able to stop the aspirations of millions of people - not only in our country, but all over the planet - for true freedom, justice, peace and security,” Vladimir Putin said.
The memorial was built in Gatchina District, Leningrad Oblast. During the war, the Krasnogvardeisk Fortified Area had its second line of defense here, consisting of field and reinforced concrete firing points, trenches and anti-tank ditches. During the years of occupation, civilians living near the front line were, literally, wiped out. This scorched earth was symbolically a line before the last frontier of Leningrad - the Pulkovskie Heights.
Gatchina District was the site of numerous camps for prisoners of war, and concentration camps for Soviet children, whom the Nazis used as blood donors for German soldiers. More than 8,000 children were killed there.
The memorial rests on a stele featuring a figure of a woman with children, echoing the image of the Mother Motherland Memorial in Piskaryovskoye Cemetery.
The Eternal Flame is lit at the foot of the memorial. Around it, there are names of concentration camps and 150 sculptural compositions (bas-reliefs) based on real stories and photographs carved in different languages. These are figures of civilians killed by the Nazis. The stele looks like being cut with barbed wire - a symbol of the prisoners’ living circumstances and tragic deaths.
The memorial will be visible to all those arriving in St. Petersburg, as Pulkovo International Airport is located nearby.
