See You in ‘Nuremgrad’: Russian Guilt and European Debts

Before 2022, Europe chose to turn a blind eye. Since 2022, it has failed to grasp the nature of the war Russia is waging and is not doing everything it could to help Ukraine—which it owes it. Ukraine, resisting alone, is paying for this with its blood, and our collective guilt grows heavier every day. For a “Nuremgrad trial” to take place, the Putin regime must first collapse. But such a trial cannot be limited to the conviction of criminals; it must reopen what Putin has sealed—the painful confrontation of Russian society with the truth of its past.

Yes, see you in Nuremgrad, but don’t pack your bags. “Nuremgrad,” the Russian Nuremberg, does not yet exist. Neither after Stalin, nor after the collapse of the USSR, nor after Bucha, Izium, or Mariupol has Russian society been confronted with what was done in its name. No tribunal, nothing comparable to the German “Work of Remembrance¹”. And this absence paves the way for the crime to be repeated.

And it is being repeated. In 1932–1933, Stalin orchestrated the destruction of the Ukrainian nation through famine, the Holodomor—what Lemkin called a “classic example of Soviet genocide²”. Ninety years later, a single letter has changed: from holod (famine) to kholod (cold). The means differ, but the goal remains the same: the destruction of the people through the suffocation of their living conditions.

There was, however, a moment when a “Nuremgrad” seemed possible: in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. But no one had defeated it. No victor forced Russian society to confront its crimes. Sakharov, who could have told the Russians what Jaspers had told the Germans—you are not all criminals, but you are all responsible—had died two years earlier, worn out by his struggles.

We must therefore take a detour through Germany—not because the regimes are the same, but because it was there, amid the rubble or from exile, that the words were forged that are still missing in Russia. Jaspers, Arendt, Rossellini, Remarque, Sirk: each attempted to name what the law alone cannot grasp—the silence of those who stood by, the responsibility of those who knew. What they forged was not intended solely for Nazism, but for all the times it might happen again.

In 1946, in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials, Jaspers published Die Schuldfrage³. Banned from publishing since 1937 for refusing to separate from his Jewish wife, and informed that their deportation was scheduled for April 14, 1945, he had prepared cyanide pills with her. American troops entered their city, Heidelberg, on April 1. The philosopher who remained addressed students, some of whom were in uniform: it is from this insider’s experience that the book draws its strength. Hannah Arendt, whose Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility⁴ was published the same year, writes from the opposite perspective: exiled in New York, stateless since the Nuremberg Laws stripped her of her nationality.

Eighty years later, their lucidity enlightens us. On March 17, 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova for the deportation of Ukrainian children—extending the gesture of Nuremberg. But the accused has not been defeated. He governs, he receives guests. And Russian society, trapped in a fog where the state denies all guilt, has little room for the work of differentiation that Jaspers described.

This fog does not envelop Russia alone. It also extends over Europe. The title of Arendt’s essay states it plainly: responsibility falls on anyone who knows and does not do everything in their power to prevent the crime. The concepts forged by Arendt and Jaspers for post-Auschwitz Germany apply to Russia at war—and turn against all those who witness the crime without acting.

In Karabakh, in the Urals, a school videographer named Pavel Talankin filmed from the inside what the absence of Nuremgrad produces on a daily basis. His Oscar-winning documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin⁵, shows a school transformed into a war machine: children march in step, handle weapons, and recite propaganda scripts that their teachers don’t even understand—they stumble over the word de-na-zi-fi-ca-tion . Putin, quoted in the film, declares: “It is not soldiers who win wars, it is teachers⁶.” A sad echo of his master Stalin, who used to hammer home: “Writers are the engineers of the soul⁷. ”

Solomon, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian fighter I met, posed this question with a soldier’s frankness: “How do you explain the silence of Russians? Fear of the FSB is not enough⁸…” What Talankin’s film brings to light is older and deeper than fear—the habit of submission, passed down from generation to generation. The teachers in Karabakh do not invent propaganda; they endure it and pass it on, killing in their students, as Olga Medvedkova writes, “everything that is spontaneous, free, joyful, and alive⁹.”

The Mirror and the Drawer

In 1945, the victors entered Berlin. They opened the camps and forced the Germans to look at the corpses. Then came Nuremberg—imperfect, but real—and those denazification chambers where millions of Germans had to answer for their conduct. The exercise was often sabotaged, sometimes grotesque. But a mirror was held up.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed like a rotten ship. But the ship’s keel—the KGB—remained intact¹⁰: upon it, Putin rebuilt the state, repainted the hull, and changed the flag. Same holds, same course, different initials. The Gulag’s executioners were never tried; the archives, briefly opened, were quickly closed again, like a drawer pulled open by mistake¹¹.

In the absence of a Nuremgrad, post-Soviet Russia never went through this moment of internal rupture. International human rights organization Memorial was its rough draft; Putin banned it in December 2021, two months before the invasion, thereby severing the thread that connected Russia to the truth of its past, just before the past began anew.

Arendt had seen what was at stake in this void. Totalitarianism destroys the “neutral zone” of existence: that space where one can live without life depending on crime. When this zone disappears, everyone is summoned to fall in line: criminal, accomplice, or suspect. Everyone is implicated, and no one knows whom they are dealing with anymore.

Impunity is not a void; it is a legacy. A system that goes unjudged settles into habits, institutions, narratives, and the ability to say, “It wasn’t me.” What is passed down is not only the ideology of crime, but its know-how.

In 1932–1933, Stalin orchestrated the destruction of the Ukrainian nation through famine. Lemkin described the mechanics: four simultaneous blows—the intelligentsia, the churches, famine, and ethnic mixing. Millions of deaths, no tribunal. And international law itself, later on, was negotiated under Soviet pressure in such a way as to leave the crime unpunished¹².

Ninety years later, the same weapons—or nearly so—are back: denial of identity, rape, looting, deportation of children, destruction of energy infrastructure as winter approaches. In October 2022, the Russian army destroyed the Holodomor memorial in Mariupol—erasing the memory of the previous genocide to better carry out the next.

Jaspers questioned the promise of Nuremberg. He saw it as “a fragile and ambiguous precursor to a world order”. The ICC warrants against Putin and Lvova-Belova extend this gesture, but the accused has not been defeated. He governs, travels, and receives guests. Jaspers did not merely praise the tribunal: he exposed its limitations. “Restricting the trial to leaders serves to exonerate the German people.” But he immediately added: “Not in a way that frees them from all guilt—quite the contrary. It is the nature of our true guilt that becomes all the more clear.”

The criminal trial draws a line: you are not all criminals. But this line reveals what lies on the other side—the political, moral, and metaphysical guilt that each person needs to examine for themselves. Without this separation, the trap closes: “Where everyone is guilty, no one is¹³.”

To declare that the Russians, like the Germans of yesterday, form a criminal bloc is to reproduce what the regime wants us to believe—the identity of the people with the ruling power—and it is, paradoxically, to exonerate the guilty by dissolving their responsibility into an undifferentiated ethnic collective, which mirrors what totalitarianism has always sought: the fusion of the people and power.

The Ukrainians—victims of two unpunished genocides ordered from Moscow, ninety years apart—have undeniable reasons to be angry. Anyone who looks at the facts shares their anger. But it does not exempt us from distinguishing: “collective guilt” is an attribute of totalitarian regimes; “collective responsibility” is the lot of the citizens of a criminal state—a responsibility from which one is freed “only by acting against war¹⁴.”

What strikes one is the starkness of the facts. Bodies in the streets of Bucha, hands bound. A mass grave in Izium. In Mariupol, the word “CHILDREN” painted on the floor of the drama theater, legible from the sky—then the bombs. Nothing clandestine: the crime is committed in the open, as if it no longer needed the cover of darkness.

Talankin’s documentary shows that this shamelessness is no accident. In Karabakh, Wagner mercenaries enter a school as one might invite a firefighter who is actually an arsonist. “Here’s a very nice little mine; it lets you kill a lot of people in one go…” The scene is filmed, embraced, and the crime being taught becomes a program.

This is what Arendt brings to light¹⁵. Not a moral failing but a technique of governance. Totalitarianism is not content merely to make people commit crimes; it prepares for the aftermath through confusion, scattering responsibilities as one scatters ashes. It does not need everyone to kill. It needs many to remain silent, to repeat, to sign, to cheer, to teach—so that complicity becomes so ordinary that refusal to participate marks one as an anomaly.

On October 1, 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal handed down its verdicts. Twelve death sentences, a few prison terms, three acquittals. The criminal guilt of the leaders was settled. Then five hundred denazification chambers—the Spruchkammern—set about sifting through thirteen million Germans. Five categories, a questionnaire, a classification: principal culprit, compromised, slightly compromised, follower, exonerated. Germany attempted to judge itself.

But the endeavor soon ran out of steam. The chambers became what Lutz Niethammer would call a Mitläuferfabrik¹⁶ —a “follower factory” where the compromised were whitewashed on an assembly line. There is a shortage of personnel, the Cold War shifts priorities, and by March 1948, in the American zone, denazification ceases to be an emergency¹⁷. The Allies had wanted to judge; they end up recycling the men.

The Poison and the Schoolteacher

It is then that Roberto Rossellini, a guest of the French government, walks through the ruins of Berlin with a camera. Germany Year Zero¹⁸ – filmed in 1947, released in 1948 – shows what the Spruchkammern fail to see: the mental structures of Nazism survive beneath the rubble, and the vehicle for this survival is the schoolteacher. The film gives a tangible form to Arendt’s intuition.

Edmund Köhler is twelve years old. He wanders through the rubble, digging up whatever he can from the debris, bringing home a few deutschmarks for his family. His father is sick, bedridden; the family survives in a shared apartment, in cramped conditions and hunger.

One evening, by candlelight—an almost liturgical scene—the father speaks from his bed. The words fall slowly, addressed to his children: “Let us, however, be aware of our faults… we are paying for our mistakes… We foresaw the disaster without preventing it. ” And above all: “I should have rebelled, but I was weak, like many of my generation.” We recognize Jaspers’ categories—moral, political, and metaphysical faults—but filtered through an intimate confession, before Edmund, who listens without fully understanding. The father isn’t imparting a lesson—he’s passing judgment on himself. He declares himself weak. He declares himself guilty. He doesn’t yet know that someone else, out there, will teach his son what to do with the weak.

For there is Henning, the former schoolteacher. An unrepentant Nazi, he speaks to the child as one speaks to a soldier. What he teaches is no longer Nazism as an identifiable ideology, swept away by defeat. What survives is the foundation upon which it was built: a raw social Darwinism, stripped of its ideology, reduced to its core. “Accept it, he’s old. You have to have the courage to eliminate the weak. The weak make way for the strong.” And that gesture, amid the ruins, when he points to a tree behind a fence: “You’ll recover, look at nature. ” Political parties can be dissolved; the idea that weakness is a fault and that nature itself commands its elimination is not so easily dissolved. Between these two adult statements, Edmund draws a tragic conclusion: he kills the one who declared himself weak and who pronounced the sentence upon himself.

“Year Zero” should be a fresh start. But Rossellini films a continuity: the regime’s mental structures still survive amid the rubble. Year Zero never really happened, and it is because of this absence that Edmund dies by throwing himself from the top of a dilapidated building.

While Rossellini posed the question “What remains of Nazism in people’s minds when Nazism has lost the war? ,” the Spruchkammern were being stripped of their substance; certificates of good conduct circulated like paper money—they were called Persilscheine, laundry certificates. Reconstruction pushed everyone to whitewash their pasts.

The mirror existed, but Adenauer’s Germany was learning to look away. It was amid this collective amnesia that Erich Maria Remarque published A Time to Live, a Time to Die in 1954. The novel no longer poses Rossellini’s question—what does Nazism do to a child?—but the one that came before: what can an adult man do when he knows, and must return to the front in 1944? Rossellini looked at a child beyond moral consciousness; Remarque scrutinizes a soldier who is beyond excuses. Edmund dies from realizing too late what he has done; Ernst Gräber suffers from realizing what he continues to do. Between the two works, nine years—and the failure of the Spruchkammern to collectively resolve what Jaspers left to the conscience of each individual.

In 1958, Douglas Sirk adapted the novel under a modified title: A Time to Love and a Time to Die¹⁹, about which Godard wrote: “I have never believed in Germany during wartime as much as I did while watching this American film shot in peacetime²⁰,” emphasizing its darkness and the impossibility of closing one’s eyes as tightly as one might wish.

Sirk—born Detlef Sierck in Hamburg—had left the Reich in 1937 because his second wife was Jewish. He had been separated from his son Klaus, who was entrusted to his first wife who was a Nazi sympathizer, who forbade all contact. The child became an actor in propaganda films before being sent to the Eastern Front. He died in 1944 near Novooleksandrivka, in the Kherson Oblast²¹. Sirk could only see his son on the big screen, in films approved by Goebbels. Filming A Time to Love meant imagining the final weeks of a son whose story he would never know—and giving a fictional soldier the conscience that his own son may never have had.

In the film, Remarque himself plays the role of Professor Pohlmann—a character who rejects easy answers, in a scene that serves as the moral center of the book.

Gräber returns from the Eastern Front on leave. He knows the war is lost, that the camps exist, that the regime continues to function “so that those responsible can remain in power a little longer”. He goes to find his former professor—forced into retirement, taking refuge in an apartment with a kerosene lamp as his only light and his books as his only company. Catacombs amid the ruins—the last refuge of what Pohlmann calls, without naming it, conscience.

Gräber asks him the question that Jaspers would formalize into concepts but that Remarque brings to life as an inner drama: where does my complicity begin? Not “am I guilty?”, but something more demanding, which has already gone beyond the usual excuses—orders, propaganda, ignorance. He names the entire continuum: the lies, the oppression, the camps, the massacres of civilians.

Pohlmann refuses to answer. Neither absolution nor condemnation—he leaves Gräber to his own devices. He dismisses the Church’s answers, which can play both sides—“Thou shalt not kill” on one hand, “Render unto Caesar…” on the other. It thus has a certain “leeway.” Then it is the old professor who accuses himself: “But we, who saw it all and let it happen! Why? Laziness of the heart? Indifference? Selfishness? Despair?” Nine years later, we hear the intertextual echo of Edmund’s father—“I was weak; I let it happen”. But where the father’s confession fell on deaf ears, Pohlmann’s opens up a space: he includes himself in the guilt so that Gräber can confront his own. An inner Nuremberg.

In 1947, Rossellini filmed a poison that survived the regime’s demise and spread through a child’s mind as well as in the tea served to the father. Ten years later, Remarque and Sirk posed the follow-up question: what do we do with the poison once we’ve identified it—and must still return to the front? In Russia, the poison is state policy, and guilt is manufactured in step with the crimes.

Karabakh, seventy-five years later

Talankin’s documentary is the contemporary mirror of Rossellini’s film. Abdulmanov, the Stalinist history teacher in Karabakh, teaches that “whoever does not love his homeland is a criminal”—he imparts a catechism of death through Monday morning lessons, the repetition of slogans, and the gradual familiarization with violence, which the children learn to no longer discern.

The teachers in Karabakh do not question their complicity. When Talankin suggests they stop, they acknowledge the absurdity—then fall silent. Conformity is the condition of normality, and the cost of refusal seems too high to them. Primo Levi called this space where complicity merges with survival the gray zone²²; the teachers of Karabakh inhabit it without knowing it.

There is no Pohlmann in Karabakh. Abdulmanov, the history teacher and admirer of Beria, is like Rossellini’s Nazi schoolteacher, but his country remains undefeated. And there is no Gräber either: Remarque trapped his character in a moral topography with no way out—but Gräber named the trap. In Russia, the question can only be posed at the cost of exile or prison; silence ceases to be mere fear; it becomes the very fabric of daily life.

Varlam Shalamov described the camp as a “negative school of life²³” but the school in Karabakh is a school of death disguised as a school, plain and simple. There, children learn to consent to not thinking. When mobilization comes, the former students leave, and some return in coffins. Edmund threw himself in despair from a Berlin building; the children of Karabakh throw themselves, without knowing it, into the meat grinder of Donbas. The path differs, the logic remains: indoctrination manufactures bodies for death.

Rossellini showed that the fall of a totalitarian regime does not undo the ideas it has implanted. Talankin reveals something worse: an undefeated totalitarianism can start over indefinitely—with the same methods, the same masters, other children.

Is there no alternative to this silence? When Gräber obtains his leave in the spring of 1944, a threshold is crossed in Germany. Since Goebbels’s speech on total war in February 1943, mobilization has absorbed all of civilian life: there is no longer any neutral space where one could simply opt out. Remarque trapped his character in a society with no room to say no. Putin’s Russia is brutally repressive—but it has not reached that point. Gaps remain, making the gesture of Mr. Nobody possible and the silence of others harder to excuse. By taking his rushes, Talankin strips silence of its alibi.

He tells us: “I would like to be as brave as those who protested. But I am not.” A lucid self-examination—the one Jaspers placed at the center of moral guilt—with a severity that no one imposes on him.

The Debts

All of the above gives us the illusion of comfort: the crime would be over there, in a foreign language, beneath Russian uniforms. Jaspers had anticipated this evasion and distinguished four forms of guilt—criminal, decided by the judge; political, imposed by the victor; moral, which only conscience can adjudicate; and finally, metaphysical, which Jaspers referred to God: one can ignore it, but one cannot escape it. But what if one does not believe in God? Guilt—born of the simple fact of knowing and failing to act—is not lessened: it loses its judge but not its hold. Does it become heavier to bear alone? In any case, it leaves only one way out: to act.

It does not stop at the borders of the criminal state. It affects anyone who is aware of crimes committed not in some distant, indistinct place, but right before their eyes or to their knowledge. And Jaspers takes it to the extreme: whoever is present at the murder of another without risking their life to prevent it bears a guilt that neither law, nor politics, nor morality can grasp— “The fact of still being alive after this has happened weighs on me like indelible guilt²⁴.”

Europe knows. Since Bucha, since the ICC warrants. But it converts this knowledge into a calendar—summits, caution, processes. The fog does not envelop only Moscow; it has reached our capitals in the form of weariness, which takes on the air of inevitability.

What is happening in Europe is not merely a matter of metaphysical guilt. It is also a matter of political guilt—the kind that affects every citizen for the actions of the state under which they live. For Jaspers: “Failure to collaborate in the organization of power relations in the service of the law engenders political and moral guilt²⁵.” Yet European citizens do not live under a dictatorship. Their silence is a choice—and their support for Ukraine, which they know to be insufficient, is another.

What Ukraine is defending for Europe is not a territory—it is the fragile idea of a rule-of-law order, that dawn Jaspers saw in Nuremberg. If this idea still holds, it is because Ukrainians are dying for it. Thus, speaking of “aid” to Kyiv is a mistake in terminology; it is a debt.

Before 2022, Europe chose to look the other way. Since 2022, it has failed to grasp the nature of the war Russia is waging. Ukraine, by standing alone where abandoned Czechoslovakia could not in 1938, is buying Europe time^[26]. But it is paying for it with its blood. This is the most concrete form of debt—the kind that turns into guilt and grows heavier with every day we delay.

A future Nuremgrad first requires the collapse of the Putinist system—a Russia Year Zero. It cannot be limited to criminal justice; it will have to reopen what Putin has sealed—a society’s work with the truth of its past. And it will concern not only Russia but also Europe—not as a judge, but as a debtor.

There remain the children. Those of Karabakh, whose path leads not to a diploma but to a uniform, often to a coffin. Those of Ukraine, deported to centers where language, identity, and memory are erased. If Nuremgrad does not come to pass, some will be the soldiers of the next war. The others will no longer know of which war they were the victims.

1. In German, Vergangenheitsbewältigung—a term coined in 1955 by the historian Hermann Heimpel—means “coming to terms with the past” and refers to denazification. Heimpel, initially compromised by the Nazi regime, acknowledged his political responsibility in the postwar period.
2. Raphael Lemkin, “Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine,” speech from 1953, in Raphael Lemkin Papers, The New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.
3. Karl Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage, Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg, 1946;
4. Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” published in Jewish Frontier under the title “German Guilt” in January 1945.
5. Pavel Talankin, David Borenstein, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, PINK, Made in Copenhagen, 2025.
6. Vladimir Putin, annual broadcast, “Results of the Year with Vladimir Putin,” TASS, December 14, 2023. Putin repeats a phrase he attributes to Bismarck.
7. Joseph Stalin, October 26, 1932, at Maxim Gorky’s home. Quoted by Frank Westerman, Engineers of the Soul: In the Footsteps of Stalin’s Writers, Vintage, London, 2011.
8. Pierre Raiman, “Fragments of Ukraine – Delivery Log,” Desk Russie, January 2026.
9. Olga Medvedkova, “Mr. Nobody in Putin’s Land,” Desk Russie, January 2026.
10. Sanshiro Hosak, “Putin’s counterintelligence state. The FSB’s penetration of state and society and its implications for post-February 24 Russia,” International Centre for Defence and Security, Estonia Foreign Policy Institute, December 2022. Cited by Jean-Jacques Rosat, The Spirit of Totalitarianism: George Orwell and 1984 in the 21st Century, Part III, “O’Brien’s Three Principles,” Hors d’Atteinte, 2025.
11. The Central Committee archives, seized by pro-Yeltsin forces in August 1991, were briefly opened at the instigation of historian Rudolf Pikhoia (RosArkhiv). As early as 1992, a presidential decree reinstated Soviet secrecy regulations. See Amy Knight, “The Secret Files of the Soviet Union,” The New York Review of Books, January 16, 2020; Theodore Karasik, Soviet Archives after 1991, RAND Corporation, 1993.
12. Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides, Paris, L’Arche, 2026. Roman Serbyn, “Lemkin on Genocide of Nations,” Journal of International Criminal Justice, vol. 7, 2009.
13. Hannah Arendt, “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” op. cit.
14. Article 5 of the Charter of the Association “For Ukraine, for Their Freedom and Ours!”
15. “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” op. cit.
16. Lutz Niethammer, Die Mitläuferfabrik, Die Entnazifizierung am Beispiel Bayerns, Dietz, Berlin, 1982. Published in 1972 under the title Entnazifizierung in Bayern.
17. Department of State Policy Statement, “Completion of punishment of war criminals and major Nazi offenders as concluding stage in penal and denazification procedure,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Germany and Austria, Volume II, August 26, 1948.
18. Roberto Rossellini, Germania anno zero, UGC, Tevere Film, Salvo D’Angelo Produzione, 1948.
19. Douglas Sirk, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, Universal Pictures, 1958.
20. Jean-Luc Godard, “Tears and Speed,” Cahiers du cinéma, Paris, April 1959.
21. Jon Halliday, “Conversations with Douglas Sirk,” Cahiers du cinéma, Paris, 1997.
22. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved. Forty Years After Auschwitz, Chapter II “The Gray Zone,” Gallimard, Paris, 1989.
23. Varlam Shalamov, On Prose. Quoted by Luba Jurgenson, The Sower of Eyes: Paths of Varlam Shalamov, Verdier, 2022.
24. Die Schuldfrage, op. cit. Chapter titled: “Scheme of Distinction,” section “Four Concepts of Guilt” in the English edition, Fordham University Press, 1947.
25. Die Schuldfrage, op. cit., section “Methaphysical Guilt”.^[26] Timothy Snyder, “17th Lennart Meri Conference,” Tallinn, May 19, 2024.