How Nazi and Vatican propaganda shaped the Holodomor narrative
Diplomatic archives from the Foreign Office and Quai d'Orsay suggest the Holodomor narrative originated from 1933 Nazi and Vatican propaganda rather than direct observation.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
The Holodomor: The campaign that turned famine into a weapon
In August 1933, the Nancy Party newspaper published a series of photographs of starving men on its front page under the headline "Russians reduced to skeletons." According to diplomatic documentation from the period, these images actually depicted the famine of 1922. This serves as the starting point for a thesis exploring the debate: that much of the narrative surrounding the 1932-1933 Ukrainian Holodomor was constructed as an propaganda campaign rather than a record of an isolated event, and that its documentary origins lie in German and Vatican intelligence services rather than direct on-the-ground observation.
What the 1933 diplomatic archives reveal
The release of British Foreign Office papers, the 1933 Ponsonby Moore Crosthwaite memorandum on Ukrainian history and its relations with Poland and Russia, and documents from the French Quai d'Orsay support an uncomfortable thesis: that the famine was used as a geopolitical pressure tool. According to this documentation, the German strategic objective was to prevent the Franco-Soviet alliance advocated by Herriot since his arrival as head of the French government in the second half of 1932.
The French ambassador to the Holy See, Charles-Roux, sent a confidential telegram to the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Theodor Innitzer, asking for explanations regarding his call for "public charity" to aid famine victims in Ukraine and the Caucasus, as reported in La Croix\" on August 22, 1932. The organization of this campaign was led by Monsignor de Herbigny, a French Jesuit. The Vatican responded by denying its involvement, but Charles-Roux considered the response "implausible": Innitzer had, at the very least, consulted with the Holy See before making propositions regarding the causes and extent of the famine.
The July 1933 Concordat and the partition of Ukraine
According to the cited documents, the scheme originated with the signing of the Concordat between Hitler and the Vatican in July 1933. The text included, among other secret clauses, the occupation and joint partition of Ukraine. The plan was devised by the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, who also sought the liquidation and annexation of Czechoslovakia to safeguard Germans in the Sudetenland.
The campaign was deployed on several fronts. On August 18, 1933, the Völkische Beobachter published its photographic series using recycled images from 1922. Pamphlets such as "Ukraine under the yoke of Moscow," published by the Russian Industrial and Commercial Financial Association, circulated with passages like "men are eating men," and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic episcopate sent a letter to all people of goodwill protesting the extermination of the small and the innocent. The German press, from the Vossischezeitung to the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, spoke of production crises, supply issues, and alleged chronic revolts in the Kuban.
The counterpoint: reports that do not fit the narrative
Against this offensive, the documentation records testimonies describing a more complex reality. The Swedish-born American engineer Henning Rowsing, returning to the United States via Scandinavia, stated that while there was a shortage of everything in the USSR, he added that "schools have multiplied," that there are few completely illiterate people in the young generation, that theaters and leisure venues are always full, and that numerous public baths had peine.
Letter 267 from Charles Alphand, the ambassador in Moscow, to Paul-Boncour, the President of the French Council of Ministers, dated September 13, 1933, recounts his six-day journey through Ukraine and the northern Caucasus. Alphand was dazzled by the Dnieprostroi, the Dnieper hydroelectric station. Some argue these reports prove the famine existed but was instrumentalized; conversely, others argue that a diplomat officially invited by the Soviet government would hardly certify a catastrophe.
The battle of the figures: censuses versus narratives
The debate becomes most heated in the demographic arena. The Soviet censuses used in the discussion depict a growing country, not one bleeding out. In 1926, the USSR population was 147 million inhabitants; in 1939, it was 171 million. The 1937 census, declared invalid by the authorities, showed 162 million, a figure that does not align with 1939.
By republic, in 1926 the RSFSR had 101 million and Ukraine 29 million; in 1939, the RSFSR had risen to 109 million and Ukraine to 31 million. Belarus rose from 5 to 5.6 million. The question hanging over these numbers is elementary: if Ukraine lost millions of people in a planned famine, where do the two million extra people appearing thirteen years later come from? The full calculation, with the breakdown by republic, presents a picture that does not match the figures repeated in various forums.
The comparison with Spain that no one makes
The most repeated argument in the discussion concerns scale. The Spanish Civil War and its aftermath left documented hunger for years, with episodes like those in Las Hurdes (Extremadura) before the conflict and an atrocious postwar period, in addition to executions on both sides. And yet, it is argued, those deaths were not used to construct a victimhood epic of tens of millions.
The Irish Potato Famine, which brought many Irish immigrants to the United States, killed approximately half a million people. Every time the Holodomor is invoked, some voices point out, the figure rises. So many millions are attributed to it that there should be no one left in Ukraine to work the fields, let alone to stand up against the German invasion. The math, quite simply, does not add up.
The point where the analysis stalls is always the same: the famine existed, the victims existed, and at the same time, the campaign that turned that suffering into a geopolitical weapon is documented with names, dates, and telegrams. Both can be true. What does not fit is the use of the latter to cover the former, or the former to justify the latter.
In August 1933, the Nancy Party newspaper published a series of photographs of starving men on its front page under the headline "Russians reduced to skeletons." According to diplomatic documentation from the period, these images actually depicted the famine of 1922. This serves as the starting point for a thesis exploring the debate: that much of the narrative surrounding the 1932-1933 Ukrainian Holodomor was constructed as an propaganda campaign rather than a record of an isolated event, and that its documentary origins lie in German and Vatican intelligence services rather than direct on-the-ground observation.
What the 1933 diplomatic archives reveal
The release of British Foreign Office papers, the 1933 Ponsonby Moore Crosthwaite memorandum on Ukrainian history and its relations with Poland and Russia, and documents from the French Quai d'Orsay support an uncomfortable thesis: that the famine was used as a geopolitical pressure tool. According to this documentation, the German strategic objective was to prevent the Franco-Soviet alliance advocated by Herriot since his arrival as head of the French government in the second half of 1932.
The French ambassador to the Holy See, Charles-Roux, sent a confidential telegram to the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Theodor Innitzer, asking for explanations regarding his call for "public charity" to aid famine victims in Ukraine and the Caucasus, as reported in La Croix\" on August 22, 1932. The organization of this campaign was led by Monsignor de Herbigny, a French Jesuit. The Vatican responded by denying its involvement, but Charles-Roux considered the response "implausible": Innitzer had, at the very least, consulted with the Holy See before making propositions regarding the causes and extent of the famine.
The July 1933 Concordat and the partition of Ukraine
According to the cited documents, the scheme originated with the signing of the Concordat between Hitler and the Vatican in July 1933. The text included, among other secret clauses, the occupation and joint partition of Ukraine. The plan was devised by the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, who also sought the liquidation and annexation of Czechoslovakia to safeguard Germans in the Sudetenland.
The campaign was deployed on several fronts. On August 18, 1933, the Völkische Beobachter published its photographic series using recycled images from 1922. Pamphlets such as "Ukraine under the yoke of Moscow," published by the Russian Industrial and Commercial Financial Association, circulated with passages like "men are eating men," and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic episcopate sent a letter to all people of goodwill protesting the extermination of the small and the innocent. The German press, from the Vossischezeitung to the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, spoke of production crises, supply issues, and alleged chronic revolts in the Kuban.
The counterpoint: reports that do not fit the narrative
Against this offensive, the documentation records testimonies describing a more complex reality. The Swedish-born American engineer Henning Rowsing, returning to the United States via Scandinavia, stated that while there was a shortage of everything in the USSR, he added that "schools have multiplied," that there are few completely illiterate people in the young generation, that theaters and leisure venues are always full, and that numerous public baths had peine.
Letter 267 from Charles Alphand, the ambassador in Moscow, to Paul-Boncour, the President of the French Council of Ministers, dated September 13, 1933, recounts his six-day journey through Ukraine and the northern Caucasus. Alphand was dazzled by the Dnieprostroi, the Dnieper hydroelectric station. Some argue these reports prove the famine existed but was instrumentalized; conversely, others argue that a diplomat officially invited by the Soviet government would hardly certify a catastrophe.
The battle of the figures: censuses versus narratives
The debate becomes most heated in the demographic arena. The Soviet censuses used in the discussion depict a growing country, not one bleeding out. In 1926, the USSR population was 147 million inhabitants; in 1939, it was 171 million. The 1937 census, declared invalid by the authorities, showed 162 million, a figure that does not align with 1939.
By republic, in 1926 the RSFSR had 101 million and Ukraine 29 million; in 1939, the RSFSR had risen to 109 million and Ukraine to 31 million. Belarus rose from 5 to 5.6 million. The question hanging over these numbers is elementary: if Ukraine lost millions of people in a planned famine, where do the two million extra people appearing thirteen years later come from? The full calculation, with the breakdown by republic, presents a picture that does not match the figures repeated in various forums.
The comparison with Spain that no one makes
The most repeated argument in the discussion concerns scale. The Spanish Civil War and its aftermath left documented hunger for years, with episodes like those in Las Hurdes (Extremadura) before the conflict and an atrocious postwar period, in addition to executions on both sides. And yet, it is argued, those deaths were not used to construct a victimhood epic of tens of millions.
The Irish Potato Famine, which brought many Irish immigrants to the United States, killed approximately half a million people. Every time the Holodomor is invoked, some voices point out, the figure rises. So many millions are attributed to it that there should be no one left in Ukraine to work the fields, let alone to stand up against the German invasion. The math, quite simply, does not add up.
The point where the analysis stalls is always the same: the famine existed, the victims existed, and at the same time, the campaign that turned that suffering into a geopolitical weapon is documented with names, dates, and telegrams. Both can be true. What does not fit is the use of the latter to cover the former, or the former to justify the latter.
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (102 replies).
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