MOSCOW, January 27. /TASS/. Any attempts to rewrite history are impermissible and immoral, as they are bids to conceal one's own disgrace, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a memorial ceremony in Moscow on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz’s liberation by the Red Army on Tuesday.

"It is hard to imagine that factories of death, mass executions and deportations were horrible realities of the twentieth century, that they were organized in very civilized-looking Europe, that they were built with painstaking precision and in cold blood," Putin said. "Outright attempts to hush up the real facts of history, to distort and rewrite it are impermissible and immoral. Quite often such attempts conceal one's own disgrace, cowardice, hypocrisy and betrayal and serve as a lame excuse for direct or indirect tacit abetment to Nazis."

The president recalled history showed that "when ideas of ethnic and moral domination are being rammed into someone’s head, seeds of hatred to other nations are being sawn, human values are being destroyed and mocked on, then civilization gives way to true barbarism quickly and inevitably." The head of state noted that in this case peace gave place to cruel wars and aggression. He recalled that Nazis threatened to enslave whole peoples of the multi-ethnic Soviet Union, planned to assimilate them with the use of force and turn into slaves or just destroy physically to give a free space to races they believed to be higher than others.

"Six million Jews were killed according to the materials of the Nuremberg Trials during the Holocaust," Putin recalled, noting that "this is difficult to believe it. Not just somewhere in battles, people were just assassinated, burnt alive in ovens and executed." The president added that hundreds of thousands of Soviet compatriots were among these people. "Such crimes have and will have no statute of limitation, they cannot be forgotten and brought down into oblivion," he added.