In Putin’s version of events, any attempt to assert Ukrainian sovereignty is a Nazi one, a continuation of the 20th-century battle between Russia and Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom allied themselves with Nazi invaders during the war in a bid to gain independence from the Soviet Union. © Flossenbürg Memorial / Photo by Rainer Viertlböck The grounds of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial Site (Ukraine’s last census took place in 2001, meaning more recent exact figures are hard to come by.) Zelenskyy, for his part, has refuted these claims by drawing parallels between Putin and Adolf Hitler. He’s spoken of a quest to “ demilitarize and de-Nazify” Ukraine, a country with a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and a thriving Jewish population of between 49,000 and 400,000. The invasion loomed large over the commemoration-an unsurprising shadow given the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have sought refuge in Germany since the conflict began, as well as Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s distortions of World War II history as a justification for his warmongering. During a moment of silence honoring the roughly 30,000 people who died at Flossenbürg, attendees also remembered two Holocaust survivors killed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Boris Romantschenko and Vanda Semyonovna Obiedkova. The crowd, including six survivors of the camp, had gathered in the German state of Bavaria on April 24, the 77th anniversary of the camp’s liberation.

“From prejudice to hatred to violence to murder, the paths are very short,” said Karl Freller, director of the Bavarian Memorial Foundation, to an audience of more than 500 at the Holocaust memorial site where the Nazi concentration camp Flossenbürg once stood.

Survivors the quest find the quartz