Israeli officials are very upset over Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s suggestion that former German dictator Adolf Hitler may have had “Jewish blood.”
The remarks by Sergei Lavrov were made during an interview on Italian TV program called Zona Bianca on Sunday, just a few days after Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Lavrov was asked about Russia’s claims that they are fighting to “denazify” Ukraine despite Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky being Jewish.
Lavrov, in response, claimed “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. [That Zelensky is Jewish] means absolutely nothing. Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews.”
Israeli figures across the board issued statements of outrage over the remarks.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said “Such lies are meant to blame the Jews themselves for the most terrible crimes in history and thus free the oppressors of the Jews from their responsibility,” adding that “no war today is the Holocaust or is like the Holocaust.”
Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid said the remarks were “unforgivable.”
“Foreign Minister Lavrov’s remarks are both an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error. Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism,” Lapid tweeted on Monday.
“Most of his remarks are absurd, delusional, dangerous and deserving of any condemnation,” Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial head Dani Dayan tweeted. “Lavrov deals with the reversal of the Holocaust: turning the victims into criminals, based on the promotion of a completely unfounded claim that Hitler was of Jewish descent.”
Claims that Hitler’s unidentified paternal grandfather was Jewish have been fueled for decades based on an assertion by Hitler’s own lawyer Hans Frank, who according to his memoir in 1953, was instructed by the German leader to to investigate rumors that he had Jewish ancestry in his blood.
Frank asserts that he had uncovered evidence that Hitler’s grandfather was Jewish, though most historians remain skeptical of the claims.
Other competing theories about the genocidal dictator and his motivations include claims that he was gay, a pedophile, impotent, suffering from Parkinson’s, or had advanced syphilis.
The Azov battalion, employed by the Ukraine military and reportedly holed up in bunkers underneath the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol, regularly employs neo-Nazi iconography. Moscow has cited their existence as a sanctioned part of the Ukrainian military as proof of Nazis in Ukraine.
Russia invaded its neighbor earlier this year after a years long standoff over the disputed Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. Moscow claims it launched a “special military operation” to protect ethnic Russians in the breakaway republics Donetsk and Luhansk from Ukrainian state violence, while Kiev and its allies maintain the invasion was unprovoked.
Previously, current and former Israeli politicians expressed similar outrage when Zelensky compared Ukraine’s fight against Russia to the Jews’ struggle against Hitler.
