National Interest

by Andreas Umland

    Nazi Germany’s crimes against millions of Ukrainians give Berlin a special obligation toward Kyiv, an obligation the Far Left and Far Right both ignore.

    Since the United States cut its military aid by 99 percent in 2025, Germany has become Ukraine’s most important backer. Its budgetary, military and humanitarian support, both bilateral and through the European Union, is now decisive for Ukraine’s survival. Germany was the largest single provider of military aid to Ukraine in 2025 and its 2026 budget earmarks a record €11.5 billion ($12.8 billion) for the country. Germany has also granted temporary protection to some 1.3 million Ukrainians since 2022.

    Yet this partnership is new and its future is uncertain. Until 2014, Berlin’s main partner in Eastern Europe was Moscow. Until 2022, despite Russia’s already ongoing war against Ukraine, Germany kept up most of its energy cooperation with Russia, including the two Nord Stream pipelines. Many Germans still want friendly relations and economic ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia restored.

    Germany’s 12-year debate about how to secure “peace in Europe” is today driven by the radical left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW)—renamed the Alliance for Social Justice and Economic Reason in October 2026—and the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD), along with a number of pseudo-pacifist public intellectuals. Although Ukraine is the victim of an expansionist war, these parties and their millions of followers argue that it does not deserve further German support. Under a veneer of peace advocacy, they are furthering the interests of a neo-imperialist Russia.

    The rise of the AfD, now Germany’s most popular political party, has moved these ideas from public debate into the realm of policy promotion. On October 14, 2026, the AfD and BSW factions in the newly elected state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt, which together hold 44 of its 83 seats, adopted a motion titled “Peace Talks Instead of an Expansion of the War in Ukraine.” It calls for an end to Berlin’s military and non-humanitarian financial support for Ukraine and to sanctions on Russia, on the idea that these concessions would bring about a ceasefire.

    In practice, such a policy would at best produce a Russian “victor’s peace” (Siegfrieden), with Ukraine’s partial or full capitulation. At worst, it would enable a Russian offensive deep into Ukraine and the expulsion, deportation, torture, or killing of millions more Ukrainians.

    The first scenario is already partly unfolding as others, above all the United States, have withdrawn help. But a German withdrawal would be different in kind. It would push into the abyss a nation that, less than a century ago, was among the chief victims of Germany’s total war in the East. In 1987, Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano described postwar West Germany’s reluctance to confront Nazi crimes and punish their perpetrators as Germany’s “second guilt.” Today’s moral lapse among many influential Germans may one day be remembered as a “third guilt.”

    Between 1941 and 1944, Ukraine was at the heart of Nazi Germany’s war of annihilation. As historian Timothy Snyder, then at Yale and now at the University of Toronto, told a conference in the German Bundestag in June 2017: “The purpose of the Second World War, from Hitler’s point of view, was the conquest of Ukraine.” The Dutch historian Karel Berkhoff has called the Reichskommissariat Ukraine “the Third Reich’s largest colony.” His seminal monograph, Harvest of Despair, depicts a terror regime that turned the country into something like a vast concentration camp. Its ruler, Reichskommissar Erich Koch, reportedly said: “If I meet a Ukrainian worthy of being seated at my table, I must have him shot.”

    Reputable death figures for Germany’s assault on Ukraine vary depending on the counting method but are all staggering. According to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, “more than 5,265,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed” on Ukrainian territory, among them some 900,000 Ukrainian Jews. Ukraine lost at least 8 million people in the war—one in five of its prewar population. In the same Bundestag speech, Snyder asked why it is “not always remembered that 6.5 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died as a result of German occupation.” More than 2 million Ukrainians were deported to the Reich as forced laborers and the occupiers destroyed 714 towns and 28,000 villages, leaving about 10 million people homeless.

    These crimes create lasting obligations. Germany’s postwar maxim “Never again!” cannot merely mean that Germans must never again start a war. It must also mean never again grow indifferent to a nation Germany once tried to enslave, now the victim of another war of conquest.

    On October 9, 2026, the Bundestag explicitly recognized these obligations by adopting a motion from the governing Christian Democrats and Social Democrats that affirmed Germany’s “special historical responsibility towards Ukraine.” A parallel motion by the opposition Greens stated that “Germany bears a special historical responsibility for Ukraine and for peace in all of Europe.” No parliamentary group voted against either motion—but the large right-wing extremist AfD faction abstained on both.

    Germany’s left-leaning “peace camp,” too, prefers to ignore this history, feeling an obligation primarily toward Russia, which was also a victim of the Nazis, instead. Snyder warned in 2017 that “Russian foreign policy regards the German sense of responsibility [towards Russians rather than Ukrainians] as a resource to be manipulated.” Today’s pseudo-pacifists reinforce that mechanism, knowingly or not.

    In February 2023, Wagenknecht and the feminist Alice Schwarzer published a “Manifesto for Peace” that called on the German chancellor “to halt the escalation of weapon deliveries.” At a subsequent Berlin rally, Wagenknecht denounced the “endless war of attrition” supplied with “ever new weapons”—meaning arms for Ukraine, not Russia. Ahead of the Ukraine Recovery Conference in July 2025, she demanded that “no further German taxpayers’ money should flow for now.” Campaigning in Berlin in May 2026, she called it madness “that we squander billions upon billions to bribe Mr. Zelensky and his clique.”

    The AfD, with its multiple ties to Moscow, is blunter still. Its co-chair Tino Chrupalla told the Bundestag in March 2023 that Germany should stay out “because it is not our war.” In October 2026, the party’s other co-chair, Alice Weidel, told The Economist: “I believe it is wrong to continue funding a war that has already been lost.”

    Parts of Germany’s intelligentsia paved the way. In April 2022, 28 writers, artists and scholars—among them the novelists Juli Zeh and Martin Walser—urged then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz not to deliver “directly or indirectly, further heavy weapons to Ukraine.” The political scientist Ulrike Guérot has described Ukraine’s self-defense as a proxy war for the United States. The former television correspondent Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, who once portrayed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea as self-defense, told the controversial newspaper Berliner Zeitung in September 2025: “Our democracy is not being defended in Ukraine.”

    These activists ignore what the Kremlin itself says. Moscow has repeatedly and publicly demanded further surrenders of Ukrainian territory and sovereignty. It has rejected or ignored Kyiv’s proposals for an unconditional ceasefire and for mutual moratoria on strikes against energy infrastructure and attacks in the Black Sea. On April 3, 2022, RIA Novosti published Timofey Sergeytsev’s article “What Should Russia Do with Ukraine ,” which called for the country’s “de-Ukrainization.”

    Calls for a quick deal also ignore Russia’s record. Over the past 35 years, Moscow has broken almost all the security agreements it signed with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia—among them the 1991 Belovezha Accords, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the 1997 Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty, the 1999 OSCE Istanbul Document, the 2014 Geneva Statement by the EU, the United States, Russia and Ukraine and the 2015 Minsk Agreement. In these accords, Moscow promised to respect the inviolability of borders and/or to withdraw its troops from the three countries’ territories. Three decades of impunity for breaking them helped prepare the ground for Europe’s largest war since 1945.

    Germany, of all countries, should know where appeasing an expansionist dictatorship leads. As Snyder put it in 2017: “Germany cannot afford to get major issues of its history wrong.” Its own history of aggression and genocide against Ukrainians calls for more German military and financial support for Ukraine’s self-defense—not less.