Russian officials in St. Petersburg have bizarrely been having a bunch of law students re-enact the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi leaders to stoke support for the war against Ukraine.
The most recent performance was held in the assembly hall of the city administration, according to the Russian news outlet Fontanka, which noted that the city’s governor, Alexander Beglov, had been in attendance.
Beglov, one of the most fervent cheerleaders for Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine, gushed that he could barely watch the Nuremberg reconstruction “without crying.”
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“The production is very strong, powerful. We understand that today the grandchildren of those same Nazis are trying to destroy the Russian world, our faith, and moral values,” he said, according to Rotonda Media.
“This production brings together our memories of that time and today,” he said.
Students of a government-run law school were enlisted as both the directors and actors in the re-enactment. They have reportedly been staging the spectacle since late January for audiences made up of government officials, on whom the irony is apparently lost.
The show has focused on trials against Nazi military leader Hermann Goering, Hitler loyalist Rudolf Hess, and others.
In return, the school received an award from the governor, who has managed to curry favor with Putin in recent months by rallying around the country’s fledgling war machine. The governor has made a show of visiting Mariupol, the Ukrainian city ravaged by Russian bombs, praising “heroic” Russian troops and promising to restore the same drama theater where hundreds of civilians were killed in a Russian air strike.
Last summer, even as residents of Mariupol reported still being able to smell the stench of the dead under Russian occupation, Beglov claimed the city is “glad … they are with Russia.”
“They all speak in Russian and think in Russian,” he said.
Meanwhile, preschool-aged children in Russia’s Perm region were treated to a series of “patriotic” lessons this week in which war veterans kindly taught them how to fire rifles.
