In Volgograd, a student was fined 300 thousand rubles for a photo of Heinrich Mueller posted on the website of the Immortal Regiment

The Volgograd Regional Court found student Denis Vorontsov guilty of the rehabilitation of Nazism, who posted a photo of Heinrich Müller on the website of the Immortal Regiment online action. He was fined 300 thousand rubles. How the photo passed the obligatory moderation is not specified.

Vorontsov was charged with Part 1 of Art. 354.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (rehabilitation of Nazism) and part 2 of Art. 294 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (obstruction of justice), informs united press service of courts in the region.

According to the investigation, in May 2020, Vorontsov, through the VKontakte social network, issued an application for participation in the Immortal Regiment online action. The student added a photograph of Heinrich Müller, head of the IV department of the state secret police (Gestapo) of Nazi Germany, for demonstration. At the same time, he indicated that Gennady Mikhailovsky was captured in the image.

On May 12, 2020, this image was “shown to an unlimited number of persons on the air during the” Immortal Regiment “action along with photographs of participants in the Great Patriotic War,” the court noted.

“Thus, Vorontsov publicly approved the participation of the SS and the Gestapo in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Second World War,” the court said.

On May 16, 2020, after interrogation, the accused “entered the office of the investigator of the RF IC,” took his phone, seized during the search, and removed “all information” from there. Thus, Vorontsov “destroyed information that has evidentiary value in a criminal case.” However, this did not affect the accusatory outcome of the case.

In court, Vorontsov claimed that someone had “hacked” his account on the VKontakte social network. According to the student, his acquaintances could have used his phone and posted a photo of Mueller, but the accused did not give their names. Vorontsov added that he did not know anything about the Immortal Regiment action on May 9, 2020, and he did not take part in it.

The broadcast of the Immortal Regiment online procession took place on May 12, 2020 on the websites of the Immortal Regiment of Russia and the International Immortal Regiment, in the social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, in the Okko online cinema. In total, the procession was watched by more than 12.5 million people.

Also, about 3 million applications were received to participate in the online march. During the press conference, the organizers of the patriotic action announced that all applications are checked by moderators and security personnel. Moreover, all the volunteers participating in the moderation “underwent preliminary training based on materials prepared by the Dean of the Faculty of Archival Affairs of the Historical and Archival Institute of the Russian State Humanitarian University, Chairman of the Public Council of the Main Archive Department of the City of Moscow, Deputy Head of the Directorate of the Year of Memory and Glory Elena Malysheva”, reported RIA News”. It remains a mystery how, with such a careful selection, it was possible to upload a photo of Heinrich Müller to the project website.

In December 2021, the court of Tomsk handed down sentence to 20-year-old Sergei Sakharov. He was sentenced to two years’ suspended imprisonment and a fine of 200 thousand rubles in the case of the rehabilitation of Nazism. For two years in a row, Sakharov made applications on the website of the Immortal Regiment to post there a portrait of Nazi German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

In 2020, residents of the Ulyanovsk region and Tatarstan were sentenced to fines in the amount of 120 thousand rubles for an attempt to post photos of Hitler on the website of the Immortal Regiment.