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rfmcdonaldIdly searching through Google News, I came across a rather interesting article by one Israeli Nazi-hunter named Efraim Zuroff written for the Jerusalem Post, "Rewriting Shoah history in Estonia".
Where can one start? The Holocaust in the Baltic States was profoundly complicated. Perhaps we can follow Zuroff and examine Estonia. Yes, Estonia was the first country in Europe to be declared judenfrei, but that's because there were hardly any Jews living in Estonia in the first place, perhaps two thousand. The environment for Jews was hardly hostile, especially since very liberal minority legislation assigned the Jews a substantial amount of communal autonomy. The Soviet Union liquidated the Estonian state and many Estonian Jewish leaders, then the Nazis invaded and began their massacres without any possibility of organized Estonian opposition, so I'm rather curious as to how Estonia could be fairly viewed as responsible for its Judenfrei status.
Why this extra hostility to the Soviet Union? As I blogged way back in June 2004, the Soviet Union was considerably more harsh in Estonia than the Nazis.
The 1939-1941 period in Estonia was rather nasty, including mass executions and the deportation of 6% of the Estonian population into the Soviet interior. The rate of mass murders and deportations slowed down under Nazi rule, not stopped, true, but it was a relief. Why not appreciate that? And why be surprised that military units, even those associated with the Nazis, which fought against the invading Soviet forces in 1944-1945, might still be honoured? (The units that Zuroff writes about seem to be ones uninvolved in atrocities.)
Zuroff gets even better.
As I noted above, in the case of Estonia the local inhabitants bore very little responsibility for the Holocaust in their lands, inasmuch as anti-Semitism doesn't seem to have been a notable force there and there wasn't any local state or other agency to restrain the Nazis as in, say, Finland. Again, Zuroff doesn't seem interested in considering the possibility that the Bronze Soldier might itself represent a foreign tyranny that was as bloody if not more so than the Nazis. Estonia was not liberated by the Soviet Union. Instead, it was occupied. Why honour that memory?7
This is where Zuroff really loses me. Why shouldn't a country mourn the victims of all totalitarian states? The Holocaust was only one crime among many committed by the briefly allied Nazi and Soviet states in the unfortunate belt of countries between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Certainly the occupation of the Baltic States and the invasion of Finland were both precipitated by the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact signed by Nazi Germany, certainly the Soviet Union had demonstrated its autogenocidal tendencies towards any number of ethnic, regional and class populations, certainly the occupation of a country by one side or another resulted at best in the exchange of a less murderous regime for a more murderous one. Certainly Stalin himself seems to have been planning a mass deportation of Jews to Soviet Asia on the Volga German/Chechen model. Certainly all the massacred were just as dead and just as worthy of some sort of commemoration. But no, Zuroff disagrees. Only one set of atrocities matter.
The dangerous point in pretending that one genocide or sets of acts of genocide are of singular importance, mattering more than others just because they do, is that it detracts from the whole legal concept of genocide as a thing that can happen in any number of situations. Raphael Lemkin certainly didn't intend "genocide" to stand for a single crime. The concept of genocide was invented to apply to all manner of cases. Taking "Never again" and making it instead "Never again will the Jews by murdered by Nazi Germany and its local sympathizers in the mid-20th century" degrades the concept, denying the commonalities behind all these crimes and letting them be hidden, worse like Zuroff making these crimes political footballs and avoiding any real dialogue that could just possibly prevent the identification of future atrocities.
The article notes that Zuroff went to Tallinn in order to preside over the publication ceremony of a Russian-language holocaust text. Why, a commenter at the page wondered, if he was so concerned about Estonia's attitude, did he not present an Estonian-language holocaust text? Obviously, he didn't care. Only one sort of dead and persecuted people matters to him, to his shame. May other people be spared his bigotry.
[I]n the Baltics, which suffered German and Soviet occupations, the historical concepts generally accepted throughout Europe and the rest of the world are turned topsy turvy, with the Nazis being regarded as the by-far lesser of the two evils and the Soviets considered the arch-villains.
Where can one start? The Holocaust in the Baltic States was profoundly complicated. Perhaps we can follow Zuroff and examine Estonia. Yes, Estonia was the first country in Europe to be declared judenfrei, but that's because there were hardly any Jews living in Estonia in the first place, perhaps two thousand. The environment for Jews was hardly hostile, especially since very liberal minority legislation assigned the Jews a substantial amount of communal autonomy. The Soviet Union liquidated the Estonian state and many Estonian Jewish leaders, then the Nazis invaded and began their massacres without any possibility of organized Estonian opposition, so I'm rather curious as to how Estonia could be fairly viewed as responsible for its Judenfrei status.
Why this extra hostility to the Soviet Union? As I blogged way back in June 2004, the Soviet Union was considerably more harsh in Estonia than the Nazis.
"[D]uring the first Soviet occupation from 1940 to 1941, Estonia lost about 48,000 people. The three years of German occupation resulted in the death of about 32,000 citizens of various nationalities, including 929 Jews and 243 Gypsies who were either killed in concentration camps or in battle. During the second Soviet occupation, which lasted from 1944 to 1994, Estonia lost nearly 121,000 people. In all, the country lost about 180,000 people, or nearly 18 percent of the population." To break the statistics down: In the space of a year and a half, the Soviet Union--in the 1940-1941 occupation--managed to kill half again as many Estonians as in three years of Nazi occupation. In the second occupation, more than four times as many Estonians died under Soviet rule--mainly in the Stalinist era, when the Soviet Union was concerned with eliminating all possible opposition to its rule in its newly annexed territories.
The 1939-1941 period in Estonia was rather nasty, including mass executions and the deportation of 6% of the Estonian population into the Soviet interior. The rate of mass murders and deportations slowed down under Nazi rule, not stopped, true, but it was a relief. Why not appreciate that? And why be surprised that military units, even those associated with the Nazis, which fought against the invading Soviet forces in 1944-1945, might still be honoured? (The units that Zuroff writes about seem to be ones uninvolved in atrocities.)
Zuroff gets even better.
The annual SS veterans reunion is only the tip of the iceberg of sympathy for these men who are considered fighters for Estonian independence even though the victory they sought to achieve was for Nazi Germany, which had no intention of granting them sovereignty. Thus all sorts of souvenirs of the unit are widely available for purchase, its outstanding soldiers are lauded as local heroes and their exploits are memorialized in an impressive album readily available which emphasizes "their selfless courage against communism and for the restoration of Estonian independence," but which begrudgingly admits only in passing that they "had to wear a German uniform to do so" (The Estonian Legion in Words and Pictures, Tallinn, 2008, coedited by none other than former [twice] Estonian prime minister Mart Laar).
DURING MY visit, I encountered several additional examples of the Estonians' reversal of conventional historical wisdom about World War II. The most famous, and the incident which sparked violent riots in Tallinn in the spring of 2007, was the removal of a monument honoring the Soviet soldiers who liberated the country from the yoke of the Nazi occupation, from its central location in the capital to a military cemetery on the outskirts of the city.
Besides grievously insulting the large Russian minority which views the Soviet troops as heroes who achieved a vital victory in the fight against Nazism, the removal of the statue was also a painful blow to the Estonian Jewish community, whose annihilation in 1941 was orchestrated by the Nazis and their Estonian collaborators. Having visited both the monument's original location opposite the national library and its new site, it is clear that Estonians prefer not be reminded that their current narrative is a distortion of the historical events of World War II.
As I noted above, in the case of Estonia the local inhabitants bore very little responsibility for the Holocaust in their lands, inasmuch as anti-Semitism doesn't seem to have been a notable force there and there wasn't any local state or other agency to restrain the Nazis as in, say, Finland. Again, Zuroff doesn't seem interested in considering the possibility that the Bronze Soldier might itself represent a foreign tyranny that was as bloody if not more so than the Nazis. Estonia was not liberated by the Soviet Union. Instead, it was occupied. Why honour that memory?7
Today [the 22nd of August] will be marked in Estonia as a day of remembrance for the victims of totalitarian regimes. This ostensibly innocuous initiative to commemorate Nazi and communist victims together is actually just a first step towards obtaining official recognition that communism and Nazism were equally evil, a major step toward undermining the current status of the Shoah as a unique tragedy and one which will help deflect attention and criticism from the Estonians' distortion of history and failure to face their Holocaust past. (They have since independence, failed to prosecute a single Estonian Holocaust perpetrator, while bringing to trial numerous communist criminals.)
This is where Zuroff really loses me. Why shouldn't a country mourn the victims of all totalitarian states? The Holocaust was only one crime among many committed by the briefly allied Nazi and Soviet states in the unfortunate belt of countries between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Certainly the occupation of the Baltic States and the invasion of Finland were both precipitated by the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact signed by Nazi Germany, certainly the Soviet Union had demonstrated its autogenocidal tendencies towards any number of ethnic, regional and class populations, certainly the occupation of a country by one side or another resulted at best in the exchange of a less murderous regime for a more murderous one. Certainly Stalin himself seems to have been planning a mass deportation of Jews to Soviet Asia on the Volga German/Chechen model. Certainly all the massacred were just as dead and just as worthy of some sort of commemoration. But no, Zuroff disagrees. Only one set of atrocities matter.
The dangerous point in pretending that one genocide or sets of acts of genocide are of singular importance, mattering more than others just because they do, is that it detracts from the whole legal concept of genocide as a thing that can happen in any number of situations. Raphael Lemkin certainly didn't intend "genocide" to stand for a single crime. The concept of genocide was invented to apply to all manner of cases. Taking "Never again" and making it instead "Never again will the Jews by murdered by Nazi Germany and its local sympathizers in the mid-20th century" degrades the concept, denying the commonalities behind all these crimes and letting them be hidden, worse like Zuroff making these crimes political footballs and avoiding any real dialogue that could just possibly prevent the identification of future atrocities.
The article notes that Zuroff went to Tallinn in order to preside over the publication ceremony of a Russian-language holocaust text. Why, a commenter at the page wondered, if he was so concerned about Estonia's attitude, did he not present an Estonian-language holocaust text? Obviously, he didn't care. Only one sort of dead and persecuted people matters to him, to his shame. May other people be spared his bigotry.
