Row over Second World War tribute featuring Nazis

A Russian poster meant to honour Second World War veterans has sparked outrage after it was mistakenly printed with images of Nazi soldiers instead of Soviet troops.

Published: 1:43PM BST 22 Apr 2010

Veterans in the Ural Mountains city of Perm were furious after designers at a local publishing house illustrated the poster with Nazi propaganda pictures downloaded from the internet.

"This is simply blasphemy," Alexander Sergeyev, chairman of the Perm region veterans' committee, told the television channel.

The committee was especially upset because it paid for the printing of the posters, which were meant to be distributed ahead of the 65th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, celebrated in Russia on May 9.

The designers at the Perm Book Publishing House apparently could not tell the Nazi and Soviet soldiers apart, and of the six photographs in the poster, four featured German forces rather than the Red Army.

"We are young and we didn't see the war. We don't know what Fascist soldiers looked like," Svetlana Somova, a senior manager at the Perm Book Publishing House, said.

The most prominent photograph in the disputed poster features a grizzled Wehrmacht soldier, while another picture beneath it shows Nazi troops surrounding a captured Soviet tank.

The Perm region veterans' committee was given a chance to review the designs before the posters were printed, but its elderly chairman did not notice the mistakes because of his poor eyesight.

The mistakes were only noticed after the posters had been printed and hung in schools and local government buildings in Perm, located 700 miles east of Moscow.

The Soviet Union suffered immense losses of more than 20 million people in the Second World War, and its role in the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany remains the subject of fierce patriotic pride in present-day Russia.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/7619413/Row-over-Second-World-War-tribute-featuring-Nazis.html