STALIN WOULD have had little cause to minimise Soviet casualties during the 1945 Potsdam conference, at which the victors’ rival claims against Germany for reparations were being examined. These true figures show the irresponsible manner in which modern governments play politics with fictitious statistics.

The Germans have always been happy to claim that they slaugh — whether Jews or Russians. A typical article published by the Axel Springer newspaper Welt am Sonntag on March 24, 1991, during the unlamented era of President von Weizsäcker, reported that the Soviet Union had earlier assessed their total World War II losses at 20.6 million, “including seven million civilians.” In 1990, said the newspaper, this figure had risen to 28 million. On March 23, 1991 Defence Minister Dimitri Yasov claimed in an interview with Pravda,that reliable organ of the Soviet Communist Party, that from 1941 to 1945 the Soviet Union had lost 8,668,400 military personnel alone, of which 56.7 percent had been killed during the German advance in 1941 and 1942 (he did not mention how many of the total had died during the Soviet offensives against Finland and Poland, 1939-40).