https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/05/opinions/sergey-lavrov-hitler-comments-ukraine-kauders/index.html
Opinion: Let's set the record straight on Lavrov's Hitler comments
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's comments on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's Jewish identity have occasioned shock, dismay, and outrage. In an interview on Italian television, Lavrov defended his country's portrayal of Ukraine as a "Nazi" state, Zelensky's background notwithstanding. "So what if Zelensky is Jewish?" he asked. "The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine." Indeed, Hitler himself had "Jewish blood," and "the most ardent antisemites are usually Jews," he said.
The show's host, not unexpectedly, declined to challenge these assertions, delegating this task to other journalists, international politicians and the public at large.
Some of the reactions have been predictable. Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that "today's Russia is full of hatred towards other nations." US State Department spokesman Ned Price condemned Lavrov's "insidious lies." Germany's government spokesman Steffen Hebenstreit suggested that such "absurd" propaganda required no further comment.
In Israel, Lavrov's provocations touched a particularly raw nerve, prompting the country's leaders to abandon their diplomatic balancing act. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid dismissed the statements as both inexcusable and historically erroneous. "The Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust," he said, adding that it was the "lowest level of racism against Jews to blame Jews themselves for antisemitism." Dani Dayan, head of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem, denounced Lavrov's account as "absurd, delusional, dangerous and deserving of condemnation."
(On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's office said Russian President Vladimir Putin had apologized for Lavrov's comments.)
Whatever Lavrov's intentions, it is important to counter his version of events. There are three issues at stake: first, his depiction of Ukraine; second, his characterization of Hitler; and third, his conception of Jewish (or any other) identity.
Antisemitism is not unknown to modern Ukraine. Tens of thousands of Jews lost their lives after World War I, as antisemitic violence became an "acceptable response to the excesses of Bolshevism." Ukrainians were not alone in perpetrating these crimes: Poles and White Russian troops were equally implicated. Pogroms and mass murder returned with a vengeance two decades later.
Anticipating the re-establishment of an independent state, nationalists in western Ukraine collaborated with the Nazis, sometimes as members of the auxiliary police force, sometimes as concentration camp guards. Again, they were not unique in taking advantage of German advances against the Soviet Union.
Present-day Ukraine has its fair share of right-wing extremism. Militias have attacked anti-fascist demonstrators and municipal politicians, as well as foreign students and Roma. Still, in the country's 2019 parliamentary election, a coalition of far-right parties secured just over 2% of the vote, a figure that pales in comparison with the successes of racists elsewhere in Western and Eastern Europe.
As much as Russian collective memory may have prejudiced Lavrov's depiction of Ukraine, it is evident that so-called "denazification" is merely a pretext to "de-Ukrainize" a territory that, for Lavrov and Russian President Vladimir Putin alike, lacks historical legitimacy.
Hitler was not Jewish. To this day, his paternal grandfather is unknown, which has led some to speculate without any evidence that the dictator's mysterious ancestor may have been Jewish – and Hitler's antisemitism a form of self-loathing that induced him to exterminate European Jewry.
According to the legend, Adolf's grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, worked as a cook for the Frankenbergers of Graz, where she was impregnated by a family member, possibly the 19-year-old son. As tales go, this one is especially fantastic. There is no evidence that Maria ever worked or lived in Graz. There is no proof that a Frankenberger family resided there. And there is certainly no documentation of a Jewish Frankenberger household in Graz.
Indeed, Jews had been expelled from the city in the fifteenth century, only to be allowed to return decades after the alleged Schicklgruber-Frankenberger affair. The source of the legend should have raised eyebrows at the outset.
Hans Frank, the notorious Governor-General of Nazi-occupied Polish territory, concocted the story as part of his memoirs while awaiting execution in Nuremberg. The fabrication included so many other factual errors that no serious historian has ever considered Frank's record reliable.