National Monument Commemorating the Victory of the Red Army over Nazi Germany

אנדרטה לציון ניצחון הצבא האדום על גרמניה הנאצית

In the Israeli coastal town of Netanya, a memorial commemorates the victory of the Soviet army over Nazi Germany in World War II.

History

In the first few months after the German invasion on the Soviet Union, the Red Army suffered enormous losses. Within a short period of time, large parts of the European part of the USSR were occupied by the Axis powers, and millions of Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner of war. In December 1941, the Wehrmacht offensive came to a halt a the gates of Moscow. One year later, the Red Army won the Battle of Stalingrad, which is regarded as the turning point of the war in the East. From 1943 onwards the Soviets took over the initiative more and more, and in 1944, the territory of the Soviet Union was liberated. After the Allies landed in Normandy in July 1944, the German resistance gradually collapsed. The Red Army conquered large parts of Eastern and Central Europe and finally Berlin. The High Command of the Wehrmacht signed its unconditional surrender in the night of May 8 to 9, 1945, ending the Second World War in Europe.
The victory of the Red Army meant the survival of the remaining Jewish population in Eastern and Central Europe and their liberation from concentration camps and ghettos. For example in January 1945, the Red Army liberated both the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Budapest ghetto. Immediately after the end of the fighting, Soviet commissions of inquiry were set up to document the crimes committed by the Nazis.
According to estimates, more than half a million Jewish soldiers fought in the Red Army, with over 200,000 of them killed in action. Often, they encountered difficulties: in both the Soviet population and the Red Army, Jews were often subject to discrimination and mistrust.

Netanya, 2012, View of the memorial, Avishai Teicher

Netanya, 2013, Detailed view of the memorial, Yehudit Garinkol

Victims

As a result of the Second World War, 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives, including 13 million soldiers and 14 million civilians. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were killed in German camps and well over one million Soviet Jews were deliberately murdered, most of them in mass shootings. More than 200,000 Jewish Red Army soldiers were killed in action.

The State of Israel was founded in 1948, just three years after the final prisoners were liberated from the National Socialist concentration camps. Many – although by no means all – of the survivors of the Holocaust chose to make the Jewish state their new home. Right from the start, memory of the Holocaust played a key role in shaping identity in the fledgling nation. However, the culture of memory in Israel was far from uniform and it has been in flux throughout the nation’s history. The experience of the systematic extermination of the European Jews served both as an admonition and as a justification for Zionism, the principal ideology of the generation that established the Israeli state. For the Zionists, the Jewish state was necessary in providing Jews with a homeland where they could finally live in safety and where they would be untroubled by antisemitism. In 1951, Holocaust survivors made up a quarter of the population of Israel. Relations with the survivors were difficult. In the 1950s, the tendency was not to talk about the Holocaust. At the same time, there was much agonising soul-searching. Whilst some survivors felt a sense of shame, many of the Jews who had come to Palestine before the war were ambivalent towards them; the allegedly passive role of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust did not sit well with the Zionist image of the »new Jews«, who were strong and able to defend themselves. This explains why for a long time the official view of history was shaped by heroic representations of the ghetto uprisings rather than the individual experiences of the victims. A good example of this tendency is the »Ghetto Fighters’ House«, the first Holocaust memorial, founded by survivors in 1949. A turning point came with the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961. This trial captured the Israeli nation’s attention for months. Many survivors spoke for the first time in great detail about what had happened to them. The trial led to the memory of the Holocaust becoming a defining feature of Israeli identity – an effect encouraged by the political leadership. Even those Israelis who had not experienced the Holocaust now saw it as part of their own history. As Israeli society changed so Holocaust memory became increasingly differentiated. On account of the increased temporal distance from the Holocaust and cultural change, memory itself evolved. Whilst the emphasis had formerly been placed on the number »six million«, memory now became more individualised. Victims were not perceived anymore as a »mass« of people but as individuals with names. Increasing attention was paid to the different histories of the victims and to their social, religious and cultural backgrounds. Countless forms of memory emerged. To give one example, Israel’s official Holocaust Memorial Day, »Yom Hashoah«, first introduced in 1951, is now marked in many different ways. A two minute silence is observed at 10 am and during the day there are a vast number of public ceremonies as well as events held in schools and synagogues and by families. However, the focus of these events varies widely. A further clear example of the diversity of the culture of memory in Israel is the development of the national memorial site Yad Vashem through the decades. Yad Vashem comprises many different approaches to memory in one place, from monumental style memorials to quiet rooms for contemplation and highly personal accounts of individual experiences.

Remembrance

At the end of the 1940s, the Soviet Union supported the founding of the State of Israel and was initially its main ally. But the Soviet dictator Stalin refused to let the Soviet Jews emigrate and at the same time launched an anti-Semitic campaign at home that ended only when he died in March 1953. Until then, the former ally of Israel had become an opponent in the Middle East: While the USSR now supported the Arab states, the United States became the protective power of the Jewish state. Israel's relations to the communist states of Eastern Europe remained tense until the end of the Cold War.
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union approximately one million Jews emigrated to Israel from its successor states. Their influx also changed Israel itself, socially, politically and culturally. After the end of the Cold War, intergovernmental relations between Israel and Russia improved enormously. The idea of a monument commemorating the Red Army's victory over Nazi Germany was first discussed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to Moscow in 2010. It was realized two years later and inaugurated in the presence of the presidents Vladimir Putin and Shimon Peres. The design of the monument, inaugurated in a central place of Netanya where several memorials remember Israeli soldiers killed in action, was designed by the Russian monumental artist Salavat Shcherbakov. According to the Hebrew, Russian and English inscriptions, the labyrinthine memorial symbolizes the transition from darkness to light - with war and the Holocaust on the one hand, and victory, peace and hope on the other. Realistically appearing reliefs depict events of the Holocaust and war.

Netanya, 2012, General view of the memorial, Avishai Teicher

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times.

Contact

Moked@netanya.muni.il

http://www.netanya.muni.il

Sderot Oved Ben Ami
Netanja

Netanya, 2012, Entrance to the bunker-like »dark« part of the monument, Avishai Teicher

Netanya, 2012, Commemorative plaque at the memorial, Avishai Teicher

Weimar

Buchenwald Memorial

Located on the Ettersberg (Etter Mountain) near Weimar, the Buchenwald concentration camp was one of the largest concentration camps in the German Reich. Between 1937 and 1945, the SS held hundreds of...

Bremen

Memorial Submarine Bunker »Valentin«

Since May 2011, the Memorial Submarine Bunker »Valentin« commemorates the victims of the satellite concentration camp in Bremen-Farge and six other camps in the region. Between 1938 and 1945, the pris...

Moringen

Moringen Concentration Camp Memorial

Since 1993, the Moringen Concentration Camp Memorial, located in the Göttingen area, has honoured the fates of the prisoners who were incarcerated at the »provincial workhouse« between 1933 and 1945....