The Latvian Legion Day was celebrated at the state level at the end of the 90s, but the Latvian Saeima decided to exclude this date from the list of the official holidays. However, the amendments to the law don’t prevent Waffen SS Legionnaires and their followers from marching in the center of Riga on 16 March every year. The Latvian capital always anticipates this with concern: Prime Minister Māris Kučinskis recently said that there would be increased security measures in the city on this day.
Apart from the meeting on the occasion of the Latvian Legion Day, opponents of such marches will hold their own events. One of the supporters of the anti-Nazi movement in the Baltic states, a renowned historian and hunter of war criminals, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Israel's office Efraim ZUROFF in anticipation of the March, 16 told the correspondent of RuBaltic.ru the analytical portal his view of the situation.
— Dr. Zuroff, your position on the SS fighter’s marches in Latvia and the gatherings of the 20th Estonian SS Division’s veterans in Sinimäe are well known. But could you express it one more time? Why do you find these phenomena to be wrong and dangerous for the Baltic Republics?
— We are against such marches because they glorify those who fought for the victory of the Third Reich. This regime was the most genocidal in history, it is responsible for killing millions of innocent people. So, among the participants of the marches and those whom they glorify, there were fighters (especially in Latvia) who served in the collaborationist police and took part in the extermination of the Jews before joining the Estonian and Latvian divisions. And now we see how the Nazi executioners are turning into heroes.
— For all appearances, you still keep an eye on what is happening. Has the situation changed in recent years? How exactly?
— It is difficult to note any changes. Frankly speaking, the Baltic Republics are now trying to rewrite the history of the Holocaust. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, there is an attempt to hide the fact that the residents of these countries took part in the murders of Jews. In fact, only in Eastern Europe collaborationism and aiding the Nazis included active participation in mass killings - in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia individual local collaborators were willingly taking part in this. You may heard that I had wrote a book together with Rūta Vanagaitė called Our People: Journey with an Enemy". Together with Rūta we visited forty places where mass murders took place, where Jews were killed. 35 of these places are in Lithuania, with 5 - in Belarus. This is a special story: there was a separate unit, a Lithuanian battalion, which was sent to Belarus to exterminate the Jewish population there. It killed about 20,000 Jews in the winter of 1941-1942. There are no talks about it in the Baltics in order to hide the role of local residents in the events. This is the first reason for rewriting history. And the second is that in the Baltics, there are attempts to equate the crimes of the communists to Nazi crimes in order to prove that they were equally terrible. The actions of communists are also labeled as genocide, although this is not true. Hiding their own crimes, the Baltic Republics emphasize that their inhabitants were victims of communism. This is correct, but communism and Nazism are not the same thing.
— Can we say that the creeping Nazification in the Baltic states and similar processes in Ukraine are parts of some holistic phenomenon?
— First of all, I want to be extremely cautious in the definitions and disagree with you. It is not about a creeping Nazification. These countries are not Nazi, they are more democratic than Russia is, for example. And that's not the issue. The issue is trying to keep silent about their own crimes and sympathizing with criminals as victims of communism. To be completely frank, the problem is partly that Russia flatly refuses to recognize the crimes of the Soviet regime, to allow restitution, etc. Unlike Germany which has made great progress in terms of dealing with Nazi crimes. Thus, in some countries we can observe a peculiar phenomenon which can be called “envy of the Holocaust”. What does it mean? This is a kind of jealousy towards the status of people who are remembered as victims of the Jewish genocide. The International Holocaust Remembrance Day is a special memorable date, which is commemorated annually on 27 January, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz by soldiers of the Red Army. In many cases Jews have achieved restitution, compensation, in some cases their property was returned. And there is a special sensitivity to people who survived during the Holocaust. The victims of the communist regime are trying to achieve what the Jews have achieved in the recognition of the Holocaust. But this is a completely different case. Communism was never a part of a fanatical ideology that sought to wipe out entire groups of people from the face of the Earth. The Communists never used or created the mass murder industry that the Nazis created with their death camps. Therefore, it deserves to be treated differently.
— Does the phenomenon you’ve described - the hiding of Nazi criminals - extend to other countries?
— True, it is very relevant for Ukraine, to some extent for Belarus and Croatia. There are other examples. Many questions arise with Poland, where a new law on the history of the Holocaust was recently adopted. These are parts of one huge problem of Eastern Europe.
— Is there no such problem for the people in Central Europe?
— The question is not as painful. It is easier for them to recognize the mistakes of the past. They persecuted Jews, rounded them up and sent them to be murdered in other countries. In general the local collaborators did not kill the Jews themselves (though for example, in Hungary, Jews were murdered by Hungarians in Kamenetz-Podolsk in Ukraine, in the city and area of Novi Sad, and in Budapest under the Szalasi regime). This applies to Central, Western and Northern Europe. But the matter is also that the Eastern European states became able to speak the truth only after the collapse of the USSR. If other countries had more than 70 years to understand their guilt, the former communist countries only had 28. This process takes time, it is very complicated. It is not easy to recognize the guilt of your own citizens in committing terrible crimes. It took 50 years for Jacques Chirac to admit France's responsibility for the Vichy regime. It took 50 years before Vranitzky (the Federal Chancellor of Austria - ed.) said: "We are not only victims, we are also criminals". In addition, criminals in Eastern Europe not only persecuted Jews, but killed them. Therefore, perhaps Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, Croatia will need 100 years to be ready to tell the truth.
— In 2014 the followers of Bandera in Ukraine became the main strike force of the Maidan ...
— I don’t agree that they were the main force, but continue.
— The question is: can the supporters of the SS in the Balticы organize something like this?
— No chances whatsoever! For many years I have been taking part in anti-Nazi actions and I see that the number of people supporting SS veterans is very small. In Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia they are absolutely marginal elements. Unlike Ukraine, there are much more.
— What about ordinary people in Israel? Are they concerned about what is happening in these countries?
— People from Israel pay attention to the problem. We have a lot of immigrants from the Baltic Republics, from Ukraine, from other countries. They are aware of what is happening. In turn we try to do everything we can to inform people.
— Are you going to take part in anti-Nazi actions in Riga?
— No, it is on a Shabbat this year. For me it is a job, and I don’t work on Shabbat.
— Are there people from the Baltic States or Ukraine among the war criminals you are looking for?
— There are no active cases today. However, it doesn’t mean that we will not have them tomorrow.
— How can ordinary people resist the glorification of Nazi supporters?
— They have to protest, write letters to the members of the Saeima, Rada or other institutions that perform the role of parliament in their country, and try to change the opinions of people from their country who approve these terrible things. What is happening in Ukraine now is absolute madness. Renaming of the streets, exaltation of Bandera and Shukhevych ... They deserve to be heroes less than anyone. People who risked their lives and saved Jews are the actual heroes.
