Angela Merkel is about as gracious as they come.  During the Danzig Summit, there seemed no crime of WWII that she was unwilling to accept responsibility for:  “I pay tribute to the 60m people who lost their lives in this war unleashed by Germany.“

Merkel’s encompassing and compassionate speech was important and underrated, perhaps even taken for granted given the tidy (and deserved) historical dustbin that the Third Reich has been consigned to.  Vladimir Putin, though his comments to Gazeta Wyborcza were commendably open, did not see any reason to go quite so far to denounce the conduct of Joseph Stalin, as he doesn’t believe that the Russian leader should occupy that same category as Hitler in our collective memory and understanding of that terrible war.

Aside from the fact that Merkel, who was born in 1954 and grew up in the GDR, and Putin, who was born in 1952, had no personal much less political control over any given event of the war, I don’t necessarily disagree with Putin’s reluctance to grovel.  But we would do well to try to understand it.