(VOVworld) – Russia’s top leaders said on Monday that attempts to distort World War II’s history would pave the way for the revival of Nazism.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the revision of World War II's history could lead to the repetition of terrible tragedies, such as the Holocaust.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that any attempts to rewrite the history and revise the Soviet Union’s contribution to the Allies’ victory in World War II would mean the justification of Nazi crimes. He said that the world needed to defend the truth about events during the Second World War, or otherwise it could lead to the repetition of terrible tragedies, such as the Holocaust.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that historical revisions have been exercised by politicians in countries that once suffered from Nazi occupation for political motives. He said such attempts would provoke new conflicts, lead to new tragedies, and the revival of radical nationalism meant the forgetting of World War II’s lessons. On Monday Putin and Medvedev attended a memorial event in Moscow to mark the 70^th anniversary of the Auschwitz concentration camp’s liberation by the Soviet Army.
Addressing a commemoration in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised the importance of the Auschwitz concentration camp’s liberation.

German President Joachim Gauck (L) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (centre) and German constitutional court President Andreas Vosskuhle (R) applaud during a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary in the German parliament Bundestag in Berlin. (Photo: Telegraph)

She reiterated the “eternal responsibility” of all Germans to remind future generations of the Nazi’s crimes and that Germany could never forget its responsibility to millions of Jewish survivors. She condemned Islamic terrorism and anti-Semitism aimed at immigrants in Germany, saying that threats to nearly 100,000 Jewish people in Germany were shameful and that her government had a responsibility to protect them.