Ukrainian Publisher Hopes to Make Killing Selling Top Nazi Ideologist's Diaries

On January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the largest in the network of Nazi concentration camps which exterminated between 1.5 million and 4 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, between 1942 and 1945. Friday saw commemorations of the 72nd anniversary of the camp's liberation in Europe, Russia and around the world. 

January 27 was officially recognized as International Holocaust Remembrance Day via a resolution in the UN General Assembly in 2005. The resolution calls on UN members to create educational programs to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, and to prevent future acts of genocide from taking place.

However, while the Nazi war machine and its poisonous ideology were crushed by the Soviet Union and its Western Allies at the close of the Second World War, in some corners of Europe, Neo-Nazism continues to command an audience.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian news site Kharkiv Today reported that Folio, a major local publishing company, was preparing to publish the late wartime diaries of Nazi ideologist Joseph Goebbels, for the first time in the Ukrainian language.

According to the news resource, the book will include the musings of the propaganda minister from approximately the last year of his life, between 1944 and 1945. Goebbels and his wife committed suicide on May 1, 1945 after murdering their six young children. He dictated the last entry in his diary a few weeks beforehand.

The book's back cover, images of which have appeared on the internet, notes that Goebbels wrote about 15,000 pages-worth of material in his diaries. Suggesting that the writing from 1944-1945 was "the most valuable part" of his diaries, the book's description explains that without "knowledge or understanding" of these materials it is impossible "to get a more or less complete understanding of German National Socialism."

Издательство Фолио в #Харьков издаст дневник Йозефа Геббельса на украинском языке. Мемуары охватывают последние годы жизни идеолога.
Отакої. pic.twitter.com/fyTaVTaDbd

— Корень в квадрате (@korenvkvadrate) 25 января 2017 г.

The Folio publishing house in #Kharkiv will publish the diaries of Joseph Goebbels in Ukrainian. The memoirs cover the last years of the ideologist's life. There you go.

However, making clear that the diaries were not simply meant for academic purposes, Folio director Alexander Krasovitsky said that he believed the book was "needed by Ukrainian society."

"All the secrets of contemporary Russian propaganda have their roots here. The book hasn't even been published yet, but I have already received several harsh letters about it," Krasovitsky added.

Residents of Kharkiv, which is known in Ukraine for having among the best universities in the country, have generally had a hard time accepting the recent efforts by the state to glorify Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. According to Kharkiv Today, social media users have already condemned Folio's plans to publish the Goebbels diaries. Many users said that the top Nazi propagandist's scrawlings have no place on the bookshelves.

Asked to comment the effort by Radio Sputnik, historian and Nazi Germany specialist Konstantin Zeleski stressed that these diaries were a "fount of anti-Russian propaganda," and are almost guaranteed to be meant for political purposes.

The main question, Zeleski suggested, centers around the issue of why the diaries are being published now. "Goebbels' diaries really are an interesting historical source, if they are truly considered simply as a historical source," the historian explained. "But in this case the question is: what is the purpose of their publication [now]? After all, Goebbels' diaries are in their essence a work of propaganda. Goebbels didn't write the diaries for himself, but with the intention that they would be released after some time" to be read by others.

The academic added that in recent years, the Nazi propaganda minister's diaries have become a kind of textbook for anti-Russian propagandists. "These diaries contain many interesting facts, of course, but Goebbels shapes them in his own way. The line 'Why did Hitler attack the Soviet Union? Because the Soviet Union had attacked Hitler' effectively comes from [these diaries]. Generally, when one reads them, one is struck by the 'storehouse of information' that they provide for contemporary anti-Russian propaganda."

"Factually, all of the slander that we have heard about the Great Patriotic War over the last two years has come out of these diaries," Zeleski emphasized.

Furthermore, the academic noted that from an academic point of view, there is really no point in translating the diaries into Ukrainian. "Historians can read them in German. This book will be marketed in the fashion 'Do you want to know the truth about the Second World War? – Here, read this.' The rest, it will be said, is 'Russian propaganda'. I am 100% sure that this is how this book will be presented."

"In general, the publication of Goebbels' diaries in Ukrainian is itself very revealing. It's as if the country has no other concerns right now except about translating Goebbels' diaries," Zeleski concluded.

The Russian-language book Joseph Goebbels: Diaries From 1945 has been banned in Russia since 2011. The Nazi propaganda minister's late-war diary entries were first discovered in 1992 in archives in Russia by German historian Elke Frohlich. The last volume was published in 2008. Revisionist historians have suggested that Goebbels' image of the 'Russian menace' has been effectively taken up by propagandists, both during the Cold War and more recently, to present Russia as an enemy of the West.