The Soviet denial of murdered Jews’ identity during and after the Great Patriotic War

Emblazoned onto virtually every war memorial in the former Soviet Union is the slogan “nikto ne zabyt, nichto ne zabyto” (no one will be forgotten, nothing will be forgotten). After World War II, a veritable cult of the Great Patriotic War served to buttress the Soviet regime’s legitimacy. The Soviet leadership established the Extraordinary State Commission in 1942 to collect evidentiary material for use in its domestic war crimes trials and at Nuremberg. These units collected evidence about Nazi atrocities. Comparing these original reports and the ones sent on to Moscow shows the politicization of the dead, whose Jewish identity was subsumed under the umbrella term “peaceful Soviet citizens.” Additionally, the emphasis of the Red Army reports on human losses was replaced by a recounting of the economic and material losses suffered by the USSR. In the selection and description of evidence, Soviet authorities participated in the denial of genocide for many Jewish victims.