Red Army Calender Mistakenly Pictures German Soldiers

Russian officials withdrew a commemorative calendar celebrating the Red Army’s victory over Hitler, after designers used photos of German soldiers instead of Soviet soldiers.
Veterans reacted furiously when a poster appeared in schools in the Urals region of Perm before the 65th anniversary of the end of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War.
The publishers who designed the calendar admitted that they had been unable to tell the difference between the Nazi and Soviet armies. They had downloaded images from the internet to illustrate the poster after deciding that pictures provided by a local veterans’ committee were not interesting enough.
Four of the six photographs featured Nazis, including one of a group of troops surrounding a captured Soviet tank and another of a soldier bearing an SS propaganda poster.
“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, told Russia’s NTV television.
The company insisted that it had sent the final design to the Perm city veterans’ committee for approval before it printed their order of 1,500 copies. But Aleksander Sergeyev, chairman of the Perm regional veterans’ committee, told The Times that the elderly official who saw the poster was practically blind and had not noticed the mistakes.
He said that the man had sent prepared text and photographs to the publishers and had not realized that they had chosen different images for the final design. Mr. Sergeyev said: “He believed that they were using his material and that they were just sending it to him to check.
“This is simply blasphemy, especially on the eve of such a great victory day. We have advised all of our veterans’ groups to collect every copy of this calendar so that they can be destroyed. Then we will order a new one to be printed.”
The error was spotted only after officials began distributing posters to schools and regional government buildings. Teachers noticed the distinctive Nazi helmets worn by soldiers in the pictures.
Soviet losses from the Second World War have been estimated at 26 million people, or one in seven of the population.
The Kremlin is planning celebrations to mark the 65th anniversary on May 9, including a military parade on Red Square that will include British, American and French soldiers marching alongside Russian forces for the first time.