Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Ehrenburg in 1943.

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“”Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.

—Kill, a 1942 propaganda piece that is a favorite for Neo-Nazis to take out of context

Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) was a Russian writer who spent much of his productive career in Western Europe (1908-1917 and 1921-1940) including a period living in Weimar Germany (1921-1924). His 1931 novel Factory of Dreams (Фабрика снов) deals with Hollywood. During World War II, after the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa, 1941), he wrote articles to inspire the Red Army to fight the Germans. As a Jew and a Soviet war-time propagandist, he became a favored target for (neo-)fascists to quote-mine and to demonize.

Hitting back too hard?

Because most of these works were written early in the war when the Germans were deep inside the USSR, murdering, raping, and plundering, they are unsurprisingly full of hatred against the Germans and read like the fire-and-brimstone passages from the Bible. In the aforementioned passage from Kill, written in 1942 during the battle for Stalingrad, Ehrenburg instructs Red Army soldiers to kill German soldiers and tells them that they have wasted the day if they allow one to go by where they do not kill a German. Anyone who has played Call of Duty: Finest Hour has heard it before in the opening scene. As this passage does not specify killing soldiers — because it doesn't need to — it is exploited by various Nazi groups.

Exploitation and fabrication by Nazis

During the end of World War II in 1945, Josef Goebbels created a completely fabricated incitement of rape against German women and attributed it to Ehrenburg in order to motivate Germans to fight harder. This line has been attributed to him by Western historians and constantly replayed by Nazis. Nazis also tend to blatantly ignore the historical context of Ehrenburg's legitimate writings and try to make it seem as though his encouragement to fight the German army in 1942 was intended to incite the Red Army to kill German civilians in 1945. He even said himself that he did not expect Red Army soldiers to kill German civilians, and certainly not to rape women, as he expected their anger to be directed at the enemy soldiers.

Metapedia claims that Ilya Ehrenburg was a genocide agitator against Germans. There happen to be no legitimate historians who claim that the Germans were "victims" of "genocide" during World War II. They are also an example of completely taking Kill out of context.

David Duke also posted a video on YouTube trying to demonize the Red Army by separating quotes from Kill from their historical context and reciting the old fabrication that Ehrenburg encouraged Red Army soldiers to take German women as their lawful booty.

See also

• Two wrongs don't make a right: Even if Ehrenburg declared all German women the rightful property of Stalin, that doesn't make what the Nazis did okay, no matter what David Duke tells his slack-jawed cronies.