It's not just about Jews

The globalization of Nazism threatens everyone

Yesterday in Moscow there was a round table meeting “Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Croatia, Austria: attempts to glorify Nazism,” organized by the publishing house “Europe” together with the Russian Institute. The main speaker was the famous Israeli historian, director of the Jerusalem Simon Wiesenthal Center, authoritative “Nazi hunter” Efraim Zuroff . Opening the meeting, Chief Rabbi of Russia Adolf Shaevich recalled that “behind the attempts to glorify Nazi criminals in some states of Eastern and Western Europe there is an attempt to revise history, and this concerns not only Jews.”

Efraim Zuroff drew attention to the emergence of a new wave of neo-Nazism. In his opinion, this phenomenon is associated with the loss of sensitivity of the elites to the threat posed by the emergence of centers of Nazi ideology: “The Nazis can present us with their alternative version of history. This is especially clearly observed in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, where we constantly witness how the state persecutes and condemns so-called “communist criminals”. At the same time, not a single Nazi criminal has been prosecuted or convicted in the Baltic countries recently. In Eastern Europe, since 1991, there have been only two cases of Nazi criminals prosecuted by law.”

According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, today more than a thousand cases of Nazi criminals living in Poland, Canada, the United States, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Italy, Serbia, Croatia, Denmark, Hungary, France and Estonia are at various stages of investigation. From April 2006 to March 31, 2007, 21 war criminals were convicted. In the Baltic states during the war there were mass murders of Jews, but there they did not pay much attention to the persecution of the Nazis. For example, in Lithuania during the war, about 200 thousand Jews were killed, 37 thousand Lithuanians fought on the side of the Nazis. Of these, only a little more than 8 thousand were punished, and even then during the USSR. But in the Baltic states they willingly persecute ex-communists, Red Army veterans , former partisans, desecrate Jewish cemeteries, and demolish monuments to Soviet soldiers .

According to the speaker, in Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn there is “no political will” to prosecute Nazi criminals who were previously hiding abroad, but who returned to these republics after the collapse of the USSR. In the Baltic countries, some individuals who took part in the extermination of the Jewish population were even rehabilitated. In Ukraine, the issue of prosecuting Nazi criminals “was never on the agenda.” Mr. Zuroff warned: "Such a policy amounts to a globalization of Nazism and an attempt to rewrite history."

Victor VOLODIN