The new, old enemy

The new, old enemy
Germany, supposedly so friendly to foreigners, cultivates its aversion to Russians with all means of propaganda.

Hardly a week goes by without the media spreading more bad news. First came the news of new US medium-range missiles to be stationed in Germany in 2026, then the victory over the Russian army in Ukraine, which Berlin and Paris are still striving for, and finally the amendment to the Basic Law that makes it possible to spend as much money on the military as “necessary.” Why did Germany's policy of détente toward Russia in the 1970s take a U-turn in 2014, returning to slogans and goals that had already been heard in Germany in the 1930s? Is this surprising? Or were there warning signs that most Germans did not take seriously?

by Ulrich Heyden

[This article posted on 4/2/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/der-neue-alte-feind-2.]


“Fear Eats the Soul” was the title of a film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder about the love between a German woman and a “guest worker,” as migrant workers were called in West Germany in the 1970s. The film is about an older German woman and a younger Moroccan man who fall in love and marry, even though their neighbors and friends disapprove of their relationship.

Fassbinder's film, which won international awards, reminds us that it was not so long ago that it took courage to talk about xenophobia in West Germany and that progressive intellectuals such as Rainer Fassbinder and Heinrich Böll (“they called for workers, but people came”) were the ones who courageously tackled the issue.

New wave of xenophobia

Today, Germany prides itself on its friendliness toward foreigners. But no sooner have migrants from Turkey and Africa become reasonably integrated and accepted than the next wave of xenophobia arrives, fueled since 2014 by politicians, major parties, and the mainstream media. The talk is about Russians and Russian culture in Germany.

First, Russian media outlets in Germany — RT DE and Sputnik — were banned. Then Russian star conductors and opera singers were banned from German stages. At the same time, anyone who had contact with Russia was suspected of collaborating with “the enemy.”

And it got even worse: on March 18, 2025, the Bundestag voted 512 to 206 in favor of amending the Basic Law and abolishing the debt rule, which allows for unlimited additional military spending. In addition, a special fund of €500 billion was approved for infrastructure measures. The infrastructure also includes the transport routes required by NATO military forces.

Friedrich Merz and Olaf Scholz had the war credits voted on by the old Bundestag, even though the new Bundestag had already been elected. The reason: the amendment to the Basic Law would probably not have received a two-thirds majority in the new Bundestag.

And so it came to pass that the democracy of which Germans are so proud and which has made Germany famous throughout the world was simply undermined because Russia is supposedly at the door.

German politicians themselves gave the impetus for Russia's invasion

In his speech to the Bundestag, Friedrich Merz claimed that Russia would attack NATO countries and Germany after Ukraine. The only “proof” for this claim is that Russia is advancing in Ukraine. Because this advance cannot be interpreted as a threat to Germany, Merz added a whole list of unproven threats from Russia to his speech.

Russia is waging a war against Germany, "which is taking place every day, with attacks on our data networks, with the destruction of supply lines, with arson attacks, with contract killings in the middle of our country, with the spying on barracks, with disinformation campaigns, of which you (apparently referring to the AfD) are now also a part, with systematic misinformation and deception of our society and, ladies and gentlemen, with attempts to divide and marginalize the European Union."

Friedrich Merz and Olaf Scholz deliberately avoid mentioning that NATO's eastward expansion was the reason for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They distract from the fact that they themselves, with their NATO expansion, provided the impetus for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

To divert attention from their own guilt, Friedrich Merz, Olaf Scholz, Boris Pistorius, and the major German media outlets are stirring up fear of Russia on a daily basis. Fear is a medicine with which much can be achieved. Fear eats away at the soul and also at the mind. And when a German is very afraid, he is even in favor of war loans.

Fear is particularly easy to cultivate when it concerns a distant, unknown country that West Germans have generally never visited and whose language very few West Germans—unlike East Germans—know.

Since 2000, fewer and fewer everyday reports from Russia

I sensed that something bad was brewing for Russia as early as the beginning of the 2000s. After Vladimir Putin was elected president, it became very difficult for me as a foreign correspondent in Moscow to get reports and articles about everyday life in Russia published in the German media. My clients were the Sächsische Zeitung, Thüringer Allgemeine, Südkurier, Die Presse, Rheinischer Merkur, Deutschlandfunk, and other newspapers and radio stations.

Only when everyday life in Russia was linked to a dramatic event, such as alcohol and violence, when there was something to report about Russian neo-Nazis hunting migrants or Russian nationalists demonstrating for Serbia, and when the “superiority” of Western values could be emphasized, did German editors deign to print a story about everyday life.

In the 1990s, reports on Russian plane crashes, Russian drug and AIDS deaths, and street children were in high demand. When there were no more street children, I was instructed to report on Russian mafia groups, brutal methods of punishment in the Russian army, and alleged Russian spies in Western countries.

NATO began to expand eastward in 1999, first to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. At that time, German politicians were still reluctant to brand Russia as a current threat. Instead, they and the German media declared that it was necessary to “understand” the Eastern Europeans who now wanted to join NATO. After all, they had had bad experiences with Russia in the past. This was a hypocritical approach. The alleged concerns of Eastern European countries were used as a pretext to avoid talking about “the Russian threat” themselves. Many Germans, who did not see Russia as an enemy at the time, did not understand this.

“Russian mafia, Russian savagery”

Only today did I realize that the reports of German correspondents in Moscow about the “hard Russian everyday life,” the “Russian unpredictability,” the brutality of the mafia and the everyday life of soldiers were excellent background music for NATO's eastward expansion. And it was also the perfect distraction from the fact that Germany, with its war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and the “Russian subhumans,” had itself committed a crime that was hardly ever talked about.

Why was this not talked about?

In West Germany, former Nazis quickly returned to positions of power. The “ordinary” Germans somehow never had time to deal with their own crimes. After World War II, they had to rebuild the destroyed cities in Germany.

After that, everyone finally wanted to enjoy life. And then the time began when the representatives of the war generation, who were witnesses to the massacres on the Eastern Front, began to die. And now there is no one left who can tell the story.

Instead of learning about their own history and finally putting their relationship with the Russians in order, the German elites now want to start where Germany has already failed twice. They want to become “fit for war” (Scholz) against Russia and “ruin Russia” (Baerbock). Of course, this serves a “good purpose”: Russia must be ‘liberated’ from Putin. Hitler also justified his war of extermination against the Soviet Union with a “good purpose,” namely the creation of “German living space” on the territory of the Soviet Union.

Democracy works best “without Russians”

The German media and politicians cannot under any circumstances accept that Vladimir Putin is a popular leader in Russia. Every few years, new reasons are invented as to why the Russian system is “not viable.” First, it was claimed that Russia was on the verge of collapse. The opposition around Alexei Navalny, Russian oligarchs, and Western sanctions would bring down the Russian system.

German “Russia experts” explained Russia's support for the insurgents in Donbass in 2014 as “the Putin regime's fear” of “democracy in Ukraine,” which they claimed was very attractive to the Russian people.

However, German media and politicians never explained what was supposed to be democratic about the regime in Ukraine, which had come to power through a coup d'état.

The major German media did not report that pro-Russian people in Ukraine were persecuted and that pro-Russian media and parties in Ukraine were banned from 2014 onwards.

By glossing over the conditions in Ukraine, Western media simultaneously spread the message that democracy works best without Russians, because ordinary Russians have been “corrupted” by their media and “for centuries” have been raised by “cruel tsars” to obey authority.

Even now, when social media is full of videos showing how Ukrainian security forces are hunting down men on the streets of Ukraine, capturing them and taking them to the front, or tying them to lampposts with their pants down and publicly displaying them as deserters or friends of Russia, German human rights organizations and media outlets are not getting upset; in fact, they are not even reporting on this street terror.

You can visit the graves, just not in Germany

Given the belligerence preached by German politicians, it is only logical that they do not want to remember the German soldiers who fell in the last great war against Russia and now rest in Russian soil. There are hundreds of thousands of them.

It is convenient for German politicians that the German military cemeteries with soldiers who fell between 1939 and 1945 are not located in Germany, but in Russia and other European countries.

There are 150 German military cemeteries in Russia. The German War Graves Commission has published a current overview with photos of the larger, newly established German military cemeteries in Russia.

At the Roschosska cemetery in the southern Russian steppe, 37 kilometers northwest of Volgograd—formerly Stalingrad—61,700 fallen soldiers lie in the German military cemetery. In addition, there are 14,563 “unrecoverable” and 119,595 missing.

In the North Caucasus, near the town of Apscheronsk, 15,000 fallen soldiers lie on a hillside in a German military cemetery. Between the summer of 1942 and the fall of 1943, 130,000 members of the Wehrmacht fell in the North Caucasus region.

In Sologubovka, 70 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, 56,416 fallen soldiers lie in a German military cemetery surrounded by birch forests. In northwestern Russia, south of Pskov, 29,600 fallen soldiers lie in a German military cemetery in the town of Sebesh.

Northwest of Moscow, outside the town of Rzhev, 43,000 German soldiers were buried in a German cemetery. Right next to it is a cemetery with 24,000 Soviet soldiers.

In Duchowschtschina, 60 kilometers northeast of Smolensk, 30,000 German soldiers were buried on a hill.

I visited the cemeteries in Volgograd and Rzhev myself. The sight of these graves and the silence surrounding them in Germany always make me thoughtful and sad.

If you can't even mourn your own dead, what kind of future can you expect from politicians like that?


Ulrich Heyden, born in 1954, has lived in Moscow since 1992, where he reported as an accredited correspondent for German-language media such as taz, Deutschlandfunk, Rheinischer Merkur, Die Presse, Sächsische Zeitung, and Die Wochenzeitung (Zurich). Between 2014 and 2022, he lost almost all of his clients in German-speaking countries. Today, he reports for Rubikon, now Manova, Nachdenkseiten, Junge Welt, RT DE, and on his own YouTube channel. He is co-author of the book Opposition gegen das System Putin (Opposition to the Putin System) and author of the book Ein Krieg der Oligarchen. Das Tauziehen um die Ukraine“ (A War of the Oligarchs: The Tug of War over Ukraine), co-director of the film ‘Lauffeuer’ (Running Fire) about the fire in the trade union building in Odessa, and author of the books ”Wer hat uns 1945 befreit?“ (Who Liberated Us in 1945?), ”Wie Deutschland gespalten wurde“ (How Germany Was Divided), ”Der längste Krieg in Europa seit 1945“ (The Longest War in Europe Since 1945) and ”Mein Weg nach Russland" (My Way to Russia). For more information, visit http://www.ulrich-heyden.de.