Is the call for “Leopard 2” tanks comparable to the Nazis’ hope for their “miracle weapon” V2? That’s obviously how Chancellor Schmidt sees it. FDP politician Strack-Zimmermann calls the Nazi comparison “completely out of place” and “simply wrong”.
The FDP politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann has criticized the Nazi comparison made by Chancellor Wolfgang Schmidt in the struggle for a delivery of battle tanks to Ukraine. “I offer Wolfgang Schmidt a collegial introduction to a little weapons knowledge. Then he would quickly realize that not only is the comparison with Nazi weapons completely out of place, it is also simply wrong,” said the chair of the defense committee.
At a discussion event in Berlin on Thursday, Schmidt defended the government’s position that it would not supply the Ukraine with battle tanks to defend itself against Russia. Among other things, the SPD politician compared the calls for German “Leopard” 2 tanks with hopes that were placed in Nazi Germany in the V2 rocket, which propaganda described as a “wonder weapon”.
“Sometimes I’m tempted to call it the V2 syndrome of the Germans,” said Schmidt – that there is a miracle weapon that, like magic, ensures that things get done. “And now the Leopard 2 (…) is that silver bullet that will end the war. And it won’t.” According to Nazi terminology, V2 stands for Vergeltungswaffe 2 and was widely used by Nazi Germany against civilian targets.
The Eastern Europe historian Franziska Davies also criticized the statements made by the head of the Chancellery. “Discrediting the calls for Western tanks as ‘V2 syndrome’ (this analogy to Nazi Germany’s weapons is inappropriate) and an expression of mental immaturity (‘teenagers’) is a reversal of the debate,” she wrote on Twitter. It’s also “a bit disturbing” to worry about how tanks might arrive in Russia and what Russian propaganda might make of it. “Russia has long seen itself at war with NATO.”
