Bert Hoppe is a German journalist, photographer, and scholar who holds a doctorate in history and works at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Berlin. We are publishing his article with Mr. Hoppe's permission, which the German Federal Agency for Civic Education previously published. The original in German can be found here.

Until the Russian occupation at the end of February 2014, Crimea remained in the minds of most of the German public exclusively as a tourist destination. The history of Crimea, especially the German occupation during World War II and the massive crimes committed there, was vaguely known. This is not surprising given the general lack of knowledge about Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine. The German view of the East has long been shaped by the "Russian complex" that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, in whose shadow Ukraine remained even after it gained its final independence in 1991.

One of the most prominent representatives of this way of thinking is Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, who still draws her symbolic capital as a "Russia expert" from her former status as an ARD correspondent in Moscow and who in 2014 justified the annexation of Crimea as a Western "act of self-defense" of Russia. No circumstances on the peninsula itself, nothing that happened there before and after 1991 played any role in her reasoning - only geopolitical reflections on the strategic importance of Crimea in relations between the United States and Moscow: after all, Russia could not "allow NATO forces to suddenly appear near its Black Sea Fleet."

The fact that Krone-Schmalz found such a wide response with her statements about the "Crimean crisis" is not only due to the persistent "Russian complex"; many people still think that "great powers" negotiate among themselves about the territories of other countries, and that this is the natural course of things. In addition, it shows both a general ignorance of the history of this peninsula and a specific ignorance of the German aspects of this past. It is telling that people remember mainly two events that have both been mythologized, albeit to different degrees: the visit of Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt to Leonid Brezhnev at his summer residence in Oreanda in September 1971 and the plane crash of Josef Beuys in the north of the peninsula in March 1944.

Iconic photographs of Brandt's visit remain, including one of him relaxed, wearing sunglasses, sitting next to Brezhnev in a speedboat on a trip along the coast. A year after the signing of the Moscow Accords, it was important for the Soviet party and state leader to provide the West German guest with the most pleasant atmosphere for negotiations to advance the policy of détente. Right at the Simferopol airport, as Brandt recalled in his memoirs a few years later, the delegation was invited to "a small snack in a kind of VIP area." It turned out to be an hour-long feast with "casual conversation" and a lot of alcohol. "Maybe they wanted to test how strong the guests' nerves were. If so, I passed the test." Almost no attention was paid in the subsequent descriptions to Brandt's brief remark about a regional party official, a former Red Army doctor, who was among those present and spoke "without prejudice" about the military events in Crimea, especially the last battles with the Wehrmacht in 1944.

This could have been a starting point to highlight, in retrospect, the most important aspects of Germany's historical ties with Crimea - the occupation of the peninsula during World War II and the massive crimes committed there. But they were overshadowed by the fuss over Brandt's "bathing suit of diplomacy." (The chancellor even bathed in the sea with the Kremlin leader; Eric Honecker, five years later, was received much colder in Oreanda and stayed only a few hours.)

Even more surprising is the lack of interest in the wartime events in the case of Joseph Beuys's plane crash, which was the backdrop against which he placed his artistic "awakening." During the retreating battles in March 1944, as Beuys repeatedly told, his plane was shot down, nomadic Crimean Tatars pulled him out of the snowy wreckage, carried him into their tent, rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in a blanket to save him from hypothermia, and then fed him honey to gain strength. This was a perfect fit as a mythologized story for Beuys's anthroposophical artistic concept, but it had little to do with reality. He and the pilot, due to his lack of skills in flying in the dark, missed the runway and made an emergency landing; the pilot died, and Beuys was hospitalized with a concussion. But the listeners of his story were more interested in the closeness to nature of the Tatars, presented as "noble savages," than in the reality of war. If they had remained in Crimea, the "nomads" would have been recognized by the Wehrmacht as "suspected of guerrilla activity" and, at best, placed in a camp, and most likely shot.

What seems to be an innocent private myth of the artist fits into the numerous stories of German war veterans, where their own suffering is exaggerated and the suffering of people in the occupied countries is ignored. In the case of Crimea, there was a myth that deserved critical rethinking even during Beuys's lifetime, as the Nazi occupiers developed monstrous plans for the peninsula based on it: the creation of ‘Gothengau’ as an outpost of German "living space."

The idea of annexing Crimea to Germany dates back to the final stages of World War I, when the 52nd Army of the German Eastern Front occupied the peninsula in April 1918. This was contrary to the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, signed between Germany and Soviet Russia only a few weeks earlier, and had not been agreed upon by the government in Berlin. After the newly formed Ukrainian People's Republic had become a de facto German protectorate during peace negotiations with Moscow due to the advance of German troops, the government wanted to avoid a final "imperial overstrain" due to the occupation of Crimea.

At that time, Crimea was still part of Russia, and the Foreign Ministry considered it appropriate not to decide on the future status of the peninsula. Too much was still uncertain. In early May 1918, Foreign Minister Richard von Kühlmann stated that, given the "absolutely unstable character of Ukraine and the unpredictability of its further development," Germany should "make no effort" to promote the accession of Crimea to the new state. On the other hand, it would not be in Germany's interest if the peninsula remained "Great Russia" and the Soviet government could exert pressure on the Ukrainian state from there. Finally, he also rejected the idea of giving Crimea to the Ottoman Empire as compensation for its losses in Mesopotamia and Palestine, which could have led to a conflict between Turkey and its Ukrainian ally and a rapprochement with its British adversary.

Amid the indecision of Germany's civilian leadership, it was not difficult for Eric Ludendorff, the deputy chief of staff and de facto military dictator, to expand existing ideas about the German eastern empire to Crimea. He took advantage of the fact that there was a miniature repetition of what was observed throughout the periphery of the collapse of the Russian Empire: a long, often violent process of emancipation from the Moscow center and attempts to achieve national self-determination after decades of Russification and colonization. In Crimea, Tatars, like Ukrainians in Kyiv, responded to the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd on November 6, 1917, by expanding their demands for autonomy within Russia to independence from Russia. The newly formed government of the Crimean People's Republic, composed of Crimean Tatars and backed by two Tatar cavalry regiments returned from the front, in January 1918, opposed the existing executive committees of workers', peasants', and sailors' councils. The Bolsheviks responded with a general strike and a counter-coup, during which they defeated Tatar government troops, killed leading Crimean politicians, and proclaimed the "Tavriya Socialist Soviet Republic" a few weeks later.

Ludendorff used this conflict as an excuse to occupy Crimea with German troops. When Reich Chancellor Georg von Gertling asked him a few weeks later what the military leadership's intentions were on the peninsula, he replied that the invasion was at the request of local Tatars who asked for protection from the Bolsheviks. As in the case of the Baltic occupation, Ludendorff presented the military actions he initiated as an anti-Bolshevik police operation, thus creating facts before which the Reich Chancellor was helpless. This tactic of bypassing civilian institutions was in line with the methods he had been practicing since 1915 in Ober Ost. Ludendorff, as Chief of Staff of Oberkommando Ost, formed this quasi-military state from German-occupied territories under military administration between Kurland and northern Belarus, where he operated virtually unchecked by Berlin's civilian structures.

In early May 1918, the German commander in Crimea and Tavria, Robert von Kosh, instructed the Crimean Tatar Kurultay (People's Council) to form a new government. However, the elected prime minister, Jafer Seydamet, proved to be too independent in his politics, so he was immediately arrested. Only two months after the German invasion, in June 1918, a multinational government acceptable to the Germans began to work, headed by Maciej Sulkiewicz, a descendant of Lithuanian Tatars and a former officer in the tsarist army. In addition to the Crimeans, the government included Russians, Ukrainians, as well as an Armenian and a Crimean German, Thomas Rapp, as Minister of Agriculture.

At the same time, Ludendorff was trying to promote a larger project: a Tatar-German colonial state was planned to be created out of the Crimean Republic and the Tavriya province located to the north of it, stretching to the Dnipro River. In early May 1918, about 400 Black Sea Germans - not only from the Crimea but also from cities such as Odesa, Melitopol, Kherson, and Berdiansk - as well as two Tatar delegates, gathered in the village of Byten to discuss this project. Significantly, the project was presented by Friedrich von Lindequist, who was the Governor General of German Southwest Africa in 1905-1907 and served as Secretary of State of the Imperial Colonial Office after 1910. He was accompanied by Immanuel Winkler, a pastor born in Bessarabia (now the Republic of Moldova) and a delegate to the All-Russian Union of Russian Germans from 1917. In a series of appeals to Berlin, he developed the idea of resettling all those Russian Germans for whom there would not be enough space in Germany after the planned annexation of Lorraine, the "Polish borderland," and Lithuania. About 1.4 million people were to be resettled in Crimea and the area between Odesa, Kherson, and Mariupol. Local "Great and Little Russian peasants" could easily be persuaded to exchange their land for scattered German colonies, for example, in Bessarabia and on the Don: "We just need to show them our beautifully constructed colonies with all the buildings and gardens as bait."

For Ludendorff, such ideas sounded reasonable. He was already planning large-scale postwar resettlement actions for the Ober Ost military state to organize the ethnic patchwork in the annexed territories and thus protect them from Russia. In the short term, given the continuation of the war on the Western Front, it was important for him to make the "reserves and export ports of Crimea" "useful" for Germany, as well as to recruit soldiers from among Russian Germans. In the medium term, through the settlement of the Russian Germans who remained in the east, a "state formation dominated by German influence and securing German economic interests in the Black Sea" was to emerge in Crimea and Tavria. His successor as Chief of Staff of the Ober Ost, General Max Hoffmann, in early 1918, during negotiations with the Foreign Ministry, called Crimea "the German Riviera," while Ludendorff himself spoke of Sevastopol as "German Gibraltar" and saw the peninsula as a starting point for German hegemony as far as the Caucasus.

To realize this concept, in the summer of 1918, Ludendorff insisted on the rapid recognition of the Crimean Republic and the Sulkiewicz government. However, Berlin refused to do so, given the resumption of negotiations with the Soviet leadership. Germany had pledged to Moscow to withdraw its troops from non-Ukrainian territories after a new peace treaty, and it did not want to anger the Ukrainian government, which was now making claims to Crimea itself. Without the approval of the Foreign Ministry, Ludendorff sent Finance Minister Tatishchev to Berlin in August 1918, but no one there wanted to receive him officially. Unofficially, the German foreign minister advised him that the Crimean government should abandon the idea of independence and move closer to Kyiv.

Ludendorff's plans, which the German civilian leadership initially considered illusory, disappeared after the withdrawal of German troops from the Crimea and Ukraine in November 1918. However, a number of their elements were later used by the Nazis in their plans for the administration of the occupied (or not yet occupied) Soviet territories. Regarding the Black Sea peninsula, Hitler stated in a narrow circle on July 16, 1941, that it should be "cleansed of all foreigners and settled by Germans." As if echoing Ludendorff's fantasy of Crimea-Tauria, the dictator stated that Crimea should become "a Reich territory with a considerable interior (the area north of Crimea); the interior should be as large as possible."

While Ludendorff's plans at the end of the First World War were still mostly utilitarian - Crimea was interesting to him primarily for strategic and economic reasons - the Nazis were motivated by specifically "folklore" motives. They saw the history of the Goths, who settled on the peninsula in late antiquity (but whose traces disappeared in the early Middle Ages), as a historical justification for their settlement fantasies. Even before the attack on the USSR, a real "Gothomania" had begun, and after the occupation of Crimea, the Germans sought archaeological evidence of the thesis of a century of "Germanic" settlement continuity. Both the Rosenberg Operational Headquarters and the SS-Anenerbe created special teams for this research.

Meanwhile, the future Commissioner General of Crimea-Tavria, Alfred Frauenfeld, developed large-scale resettlement plans for his future sphere of influence. The writer and "old wrestler" served as a Gauleiter of the NSDAP in Vienna after 1930, worked in the Foreign Ministry from 1936, and was probably chosen for this position by Hitler himself. For the "Headquarters for the Development of Crimea," Frauenfeld initially compiled a "for official use only" handbook in which he summarized statistical data, pseudo-historical interpretations, and the future structure of the General District. In the fall of 1941, he specified his thoughts on the German settlement of Crimea. Initially, like Ludendorff and Winkler, he meant Russian Germans, and in June 1942 he added to this group 210,000 South Tyroleans who had chosen Germany in 1939 (after the conclusion of the Steel Pact with Italy - Ed.): the foothills in the south of Crimea were remarkably similar to the Alpine valleys in terms of climatic and agricultural conditions.

The failure of the "blitzkrieg" and the defeat of the Germans, which became apparent no later than early 1943, prevented the implementation of resettlement plans. Crimea remained under military rule throughout the occupation; Frauenfeld, as commissar general, could exercise his authority only over Tavria north of the Sea of Azov. When the Wehrmacht launched its summer offensive against Stalingrad in 1942, fighting on the peninsula was still ongoing. In late 1941 and early 1942, the Red Army recaptured Kerch in eastern Crimea, and in Sevastopol, Soviet soldiers defended themselves against German siege troops under Erich von Manstein until early July 1942, before surrendering after heavy losses on both sides.

Manstein's memoirs "Lost Victories," first published in 1955 and repeatedly reprinted, are a perfect example of the distortion of the picture of the German war of extermination. The convicted war criminal presented himself as a military expert who was constantly hindered and thwarted in his successes on the battlefield by his ideologically blinded leadership. But most importantly, he created the myth of the "pure" Wehrmacht, which allegedly had nothing to do with the mass crimes committed by the Germans in the occupied Soviet territories.

Manstein approved of the murder of Jews. Thus, in late November 1941, he explained to his subordinates that they must "understand the need for a severe reckoning with Jewry, the spiritual carrier of Bolshevik terror." This was also necessary "to nip in the bud all the uprisings that are usually raised by Jews." Many mass murders were ordered by the officers of his area of responsibility from the Sonderkommando of Einsatzgruppe D. Their officers, as in other occupied Soviet territories, were responsible for the persecution and - in the case of Jews, Roma, and patients of psychiatric hospitals - the indiscriminate killing of "ideological opponents." While the extermination of some 60,000 Ashkenazi Jews in Crimea was largely completed by the end of 1941, Einsatzgruppe leader Otto Ohlendorf postponed the executions of Karaites and Crimean Tatars to determine whether they were not, from a "racial" point of view, Tatars. After consultations with the Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories, this was recognized in the case of the Karaites, who, unlike the Crimeans, were spared.

Only a few German sources of the time criticize the murder of Jews. For example, Werner Otto von Gentig, the Foreign Ministry liaison officer at the headquarters of the 11th Army, described the horror that the massacre of more than 12,000 Jews in Simferopol in December 1941 caused among the population, "because, of course, no one could have thought that we were killing women and children."

Just as some Ukrainians hoped that the German-Soviet war might lead to the revival of the Ukrainian state, so there were some Crimean Tatars who believed that the Wehrmacht's offensive might lead to Crimean independence. However, neither Turkey showed much interest in supporting the Crimean Tatar cause, nor were the Germans willing to allow even local Tatar self-government. Edige Kirimal, a supporter of the Crimean Tatar Communist Party chairman Veli Ibraimov, who fled abroad after his execution by the Bolsheviks in 1928, tried in vain to achieve this in Berlin in the summer of 1941, which did not prevent him from later joining the Waffen-SS.

Some of the Tatars who remained in Crimea and the Crimean Germans also initially welcomed the arrival of the Wehrmacht with hope. After Ibraimov's execution, the policy of "indigenization" was abandoned in Crimea. The national communist support for ethnic groups on the periphery of the Soviet empire under Stalin turned into increasingly harsh persecution, which affected not only Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews, but also Crimean Tatars. Along with the alleged "kulaks," numerous Crimean Tatar intellectuals fell victim to the Great Terror. The majority of the approximately 52,000 Crimean Germans, in turn, were deported to the east of the USSR a few weeks after the German attack, along with other Russian Germans, as Stalin suspected them of collaborating with the attackers. Like most of the approximately 1,000 remaining Crimean Germans, many Crimean Tatars, as a result of the terror they experienced, perceived the Wehrmacht soldiers as their liberators from the Soviet yoke and were initially willing to cooperate with the occupiers.

However, even in the case of service in the auxiliary police, this cannot always be understood as "collaboration with the enemy" in the narrow sense. Soviet secret police officers often stated that the accused were innocent and joined the units because there was no other paid work or to avoid being sent to forced labor in Germany. But it was this argument that the Soviet authorities used to justify the almost complete deportation of about 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Central Asia and Siberia in May 1944. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union were they or their descendants able to return to the peninsula. As indirect victims of German aggression, the Crimean Tatars suffered the consequences of the German war of conquest and destruction longer than any other group in Eastern Europe.