Originally posted at www.i24news.tv, published 29 March 20151

One man's journey to the 1heartland of fascism

2Hostility to minorities and attempts to rewrite Holocaust history in Baltics - but no one cares, except Russia

3This year marks the 25th anniversary of Baltic independence and more than a decade of full membership in the European Union and NATO. If the assumption was that those developments would cure Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian society from the scourges of fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism, the events of the past month clearly show that these plagues have not been eradicated. During this period, four separate neo-Nazi/ultra-nationalist marches were held in the Baltics, all of which I attended as a monitor/protester, and I believe that it is important to publicize what I saw and attempt to evaluate the importance and potential dangers posed by those events.

The first question in that regard is the legal status of these marches. Those 4in Latvia (in Riga on March 16, to honor Latvian SS veterans) and in Lithuania (in Kaunas on February 16 and in Vilnius on March 11, both days on which Lithuanian independence is celebrated) have been a subject of controversy since they were launched, in Latvia in the 1990s and in Lithuania in 2008. Local courts decided to allow the marches on the basis of freedom of speech, and all attempts to have them banned, or at least moved out of the city center, including my appeals this year to the mayors of both Lithuanian cities, have not achieved any practical results.

The second question concerns the sponsors of the events and the number and identity of the marchers. With the exception of Estonia, where the march was organized by the Blue Awakening youth movement, closely linked to the new Conservative People's Party (EKRE), 5the organizers in Lithuania and Latvia are not officially connected to political parties, but clearly identify with those on the extreme right. In the past, there were government ministers who participated in the SS veterans' march in Latvia, but since the annexation of Crimea, the government has forbidden such participation and last year it cost a minister his post. This year quite a few MP's from the right-wing All for Latvia party marched, and the ministers of justice and of culture, along with Parliament Speaker Ingrida Murnietse, attended a memorial service for the SS.

The number of marchers ranged from 200 in Tallinn to 500 in Kaunas and 1,500 each in Vilnius and Riga. In Estonia, the overwhelming majority of marchers were young - most appeared to be high school students - whereas in Lithuania, most were young adults and in Riga there were also many elderly supporters. 6One must remember, however, that for every person marching, there are at least several hundred Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians who fully agree with the marchers' ideology. Thus, for example, in Estonia's election several days after the march, the EKRE obtained seven parliamentary seats (out of 101), after garnering more than 46,000 votes.

7Two dangerous themes were dominant in practically every event. The first was the open hostility toward local minorities — Poles, Russians and Jews in Lithuania, the latter two in Latvia and Estonia. 8The second was support for ongoing efforts throughout much of post-Communist Eastern Europe to rewrite the narrative of World War II and the Holocaust. These are designed to [1.] hide or minimize the extensive crimes by local Nazi collaborators, [2.] promote the canard of equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes (erroneously classified as genocide), and [3.] glorify those who fought against the Soviets regardless of whether they had murdered Jews during the Holocaust.

Section of the march gets underway at Vilnius’s Cathedral Square on the March 11th independence day event organized by neo-Nazi and far-right elements with state acquiescence. Original photograph at www.defendinghistory.com

9Thus, Latvian SS veterans are portrayed as freedom fighters who paved the way for independence, even though the Nazis had absolutely no intention of granting the Baltic countries sovereignty, and marchers in Kaunas carried a huge banner with the image of Juozas Ambrazevicius, the prime minister of a short-lived provisional Lithuanian government, who publicly supported the Third Reich and lethal measures against Lithuanian Jews. In both Lithuanian cities many marchers wore swastikas, and in Vilnius, a large black SS flag was displayed. Only in Estonia was this theme missing, but each summer an international gathering of SS veterans from all over Europe is held, including from countries in which such meetings are legally banned.

The final question relates to the reactions to the demonstrations. Unfortunately, with the exception of Riga where about two dozen protesters symbolically "fumigated" the Freedom Monument after the SS march, 10there were very few counter-protesters, 12 individuals in Kaunas, no one besides myself in Tallinn, and about 20 in Vilnius, almost all of whom came thanks to the dedicated efforts of Prof. Dovid Katz, the editor of www.defendinghistory.com who is the sole active Jewish voice in the Baltics against Holocaust distortion.

The only good news was that for the first time since Faina Kukliansky assumed the post of Chairperson of the Lithuanian Jewish community, she issued a statement denouncing the march in Vilnius (after initially ignoring the one in Kaunas), and several community officials participated in our protest. There was only silence from the Jewish communities of Latvia and Estonia, as well as from the Israeli embassies in Vilnius, Riga and Helsinki.

12Outside of the region, 11with the exception of Russia, there were no official responses despite numerous international media reports, especially about the Riga march. I can only surmise that perhaps the incessant, and to a large extent justified (albeit often exaggerated) criticism from Moscow of this phenomenon, has silenced those in the West, who long ago should have been the first to object.

Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its Israel Office. His most recent book is "Operation Last Chance; One Man's Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice." His website is: www.operationlastchance.org and he can be followed on Twitter @EZuroff

Examination

Passage and analysis
The headline portends the remainder of Zuroff's piece will be a fact-challenged hatchet job. The contention that Latvia or the Baltics as a whole are a "heartland of fascism" is both abhorrent and categorically false. Being a Holocaust scholar and activist does not convey a license to smear others with impunity.
Given its neo-fascism, ultra-nationalism, invasion and annexation of Crimea and further invasion into Ukraine, Russia's denouncement of Latvian "fascism" is laughable. The Kremlin labels anyone who maintains the USSR did not "liberate" eastern Europe as "fascists". Indeed, the Kremlin has co-opted the very cause of anti-Nazism with its World Without Nazism to serve its USSR-glorifying propaganda. It's not that only Russia "cares". It's that only the Kremlin, and Zuroff, falsely claim Latvia is "the" heartland of fascism.
The history of the Latvian Legion as dedicated solely to fighting against the Red Army on the Eastern Front, as having no Nazi sympathies, as planning to drive out the Germans after driving out the Russians in a repeat of the Latvian War of Independence—a goal enshrined in Latvian Legion song—is incontrovertible. Zuroff is the danger here. Locked arm-in-arm with Kremlin-funded propagandists in Rīģa, shouting "Nazi!" epithets from the sidelines, Zuroff drives a wedge between Jews and Latvians, and soils the morality of his cause. If Zuroff were to protest that his cause should be judged by its morals, not methods, then he would be obliged to recognize the same regarding the Legionnaires, who fought only with the hope of restoring Latvia's independence, not in "support" of, or "for", Nazi Germany, Nazism, or Hitler.

Our focus here, the Latvian commemoration, was established in 1952 and has now (as you read this) been observed for 72 years. Any genuine controversy would have manifested decades ago. Nor was there controversy when the commemoration began to be observed in a Latvia free after half a century of Soviet occupation. "Controversy" arose only after the commemoration was declared to be an official day of remembrance:

On Monday, in an interview on the LNT broadcast "900 Seconds", Latvian University Inesis Feldmanis stated March 16th is being exploited for the purpose of Russian propaganda. He pointed out that the current Legion commemoration, placing flowers at the Freedom Monument, had taken place without incident until 1998, when the 16th was officially declared a day of commemoration. "From the moment that March 16th was declared a day of commemoration, it became a day of confrontation," the historian stated. He observed that although the official status as a day of commemoration was repealed from March 16th, "you can't ladle up spilled water". Background materials have been issued to residents this year to explain March 16th events and the odyssey of the Latvian Legion. "Our duty is to insure that the relations and combat compatriots of fallen Legionnaires can commemorate them," said Feldmanis.2
That Russia launched its calumnies against Commemoration Day only after the Latvian parliament effectively gave the lie to "Soviet liberation," says everything that needs to be said about the true origins of any "controversy".
Zuroff's contentions emanate from his neo-Nazi event meme, in which case all supporters are fascists by definition—"extreme right" is merely a euphemism. (We expect more politicians would march had they the courage of their convictions and if the Latvian government did not buckle in the face of criticism, thereby validating false accusations of extremism. We would note that Russians who publicly called the "All for Latvia!" party "fascists" were successfully sued for defamation and forced to pay damages.) Zuroff betrays his prejudice as he calls the Legion commemoration a "memorial service for the SS". The Legion had nothing to do with Hitler's criminal SS. Zuroff and Russian propaganda make the utterly fabricated association.
Since Zuroff describes the commemoration as an manifestation of Nazism commemorating Hitler's SS, then anyone participating must be an adherent of fascist Nazi ideology. We can only observe that if 1,500 marched in Rīga, then there are not only several hundreds but more likely a thousand Latvians for each participant who hold sacred the memory of those who sacrificed their lives in the hope of restoring Latvia's freedom. The commemoration is not Nazi "ideology" at work.

There is no basis for Zuroff's contention of widespread hostilities toward Russians and Jews. When the international association of Russian journalists held its annual convention in Latvia in 2000 to call attention to the oppression and abuse of the Russian minority, even the Duma representatives in attendance freely admitted that what they found was far different from the rampant mistreatment they were led to expect by Kremlin pronouncements and Russian-Latvian "rights advocates"—the very same individuals with whom Zuroff links arms against Latvians. Zuroff fails to recognize his own role as a principal instigator of discord. Zuroff & company falsely denounce Latvians as "Nazis!", and then transmogrify the personal antagonism they engendered against themselves into ethnic hatred and anti-Semitism.

The Russian middle class would not be seeking out Latvia as a haven from the oppression of Putin's regime if Russians were the object of hatred as Zuroff alleges.3

Herein lies the heart of Zuroff's alleged Latvian neo-Nazi trifecta. First and foremost, it is the USSR's "liberation" of Eastern Europe which is being rewritten, nothing else. It is "liberation" only if sovereignty is restored to the legitimate authorities. Instead, for 100,000,000 people, the Nazi occupation was replaced with a Soviet one, while the Baltic countries disappeared off the world map completely.
  1. Commemorating the sacrifices of the Latvian Legion has absolutely nothing to do with Jews or the Holocaust or Nazism. Even "guilt by association"—employed to use the crimes of the few joined late in the war to the Legion to condemn it—fails to hold water: not a single individual has ever been accused of a war crime while in the service of the Legion. No crime is being hidden or minimized.
  2. Only based on a technicality is Zuroff correct that according to the definition of genocide passed by the United Nations4, mass population displacement and murder targeting an economic or political class are not declared acts of genocide—but only because that would have opened an Allied power, the Soviet Union, to criminal charges and threatened the resolution with a Soviet veto. Indeed, Raphael Lemkin, progenitor of the term "genocide" (1944), considered the conduct of the USSR previously in Ukraine (the Holodomor) and elsewhere to constitute genocide.5

    Zuroff's contention here is, instead, a canard of non-equivalence. That Hitler targeted Jews as a race—recalling the goal was to eliminate Jewish influence on German economic and political life, packing them into cattle cars and sent them off to their deaths—their bodies destined for industrial ovens, is genocide. Whereas, following Zuroff's logic, he would contend that in Latvia, Stalin's targeting Jews as an economic and political class6, packing them into cattle cars and sending them off to their deaths—bodies dumped by the track side or buried in mass graves after perishing in Russian labor camps, does not constitute genocide. Moreover, it was Stalin's complete decapitation of Jewish civil society which rendered Latvia's Jews unable to organize and respond to the Nazi onslaught a mere week after the first Soviet mass deportation.

  3. To even intimate that anyone would use defense of Latvian freedom to excuse crimes against humanity is a reprehensible and baseless accusation, regardless of the morality of their cause.
Hindsight is 20:20. As it turned out, messages the British radioed to the Latvians trapped in Courland to prepare for evacuation by sea were a complete lie as well. Germany did, in fact, hold out the carrot of the restoration of Latvian sovereignty in return for continued resistance against the Red Army. As mentioned above, Latvians hoped to drive out the Russians and then turn on and drive out the Germans in a repeat of their War of Independence—the Germans had no intention of granting sovereignty the first time around, either, having even declared the United Baltic Duchy under German aegis. Yet the Latvians had prevailed. Just because retrospect informs us that Latvia's hope to restore independence after WWII was doomed, Zuroff's contention that one cannot portray those who fought and died for the hope of freedom as heroes is as preposterous as it is prejudiced.
Zuroff bemoans the world's apathy to the glorification of Nazism. Perhaps if he concentrated on the rise of genuine neo-Nazism in countries such as Greece and Russia, or even home in America, he would make more headway. Where Latvians are concerned, Zuroff's campaign feels more a vendetta, less a crusade.

Behind the headline

They are all Nazis

An ever-present subtext to the Holocaust in Eastern Europe are contentions that it could have only succeeded so thoroughly if it had massive local support among the local population, therefore proving the Holocaust had massive local support. Holocaust activist scholarship largely ignores that the Nazis fabricated and staged the "Germanless Holocaust." Indeed, there are specific accounts where reports were sent to Berlin telling of marauding Lithuanians completely wiping out local Jewish settlements—whereas a German witness to one of these atrocities wrote to Berlin that the German commando unit was sloppy and was nearly discovered; they needed to be more careful, as it would look bad for Germany if the truth of German responsibility were to be revealed.

Zuroff is a leading proponent of this subtext. While he attests to the existence of German mobile killing units, he also contends that the extermination of Jewry, "900,000 victims in 15 months" "from the suburbs of Leningrad in the north to the Asov sea in the south"—meaning the totality of eastern Europe—was made possible by "fanatic support by the native population."7

In contending "for every person marching, there are at least several hundred" more adherents to the Nazi ideology, Zuroff echoes Elizabeth Holtzmann's utterance that "all Latvians are Nazis." For Zuroff, there is no possibility the annual commemoration of the Latvian Legion is simply what it is. we suspect Zuroff believes Latvians have no moral authority to claim victim status because he counts them among the fanatics who supported the Nazi annihilation of eastern European Jewry, and thus insured the completeness if not very possibility of that annihilation.

Only Russia cares

Zuroff is surely aware of events in Ukraine during and since Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea a full year prior. Yet, he openly associates himself with Kremlin agitators in denouncing Latvian Nazism. If, indeed, the "enemy of my enemy is my friend," then one might expect Zuroff to offer the same courtesy—or at least benefit of a doubt—to the Latvian Legion allying, whether volunteered or conscripted, with Germany in order to battle the Red Army.

12“Outside of the region, 11with the exception of Russia, there were no official responses despite numerous international media reports, especially about the Riga march. I can only surmise that perhaps the incessant, and to a large extent justified (albeit often exaggerated) criticism from Moscow of this phenomenon, has silenced those in the West, who long ago should have been the first to object.”

Zuroff mistakes cause and effect. The world has not gone silent because it is tired of hearing Russia complain about Latvian Nazis, oppression of the Russian minority in Latvia, and so on. It has gone silent because Russia's accusations are simply false. Accusations cannot be both justified and exaggerated: Zuroff cannot affirm Russian accusations and at the same distance himself from their vitriol. Indeed, by participating with the Kremlin in its anti-fascist "campaign", Zuroff rewards, encourages, and escalates Russia's geopolitical aggression against all its neighbors, not only Latvia.

Zuroff would do well to reconsider his choice of allies. In the digital age, all countries are neighbors. And Putin has proven there is no border, no frontier, he will not violate in pursuit of Russian dominance.


1Efraim Zuroff's comments published at www.i24news.tv/en/opinion/65928-150329-fascists-march-in-the-baltics-and-the-world-is-silent, retrieved 22-Apr-2105
216.martu izmanto Krievijas propagandas nolūkos, pirmdien intervijā LNT raidījumam "900 sekundes" sacīja Latvijas Universitātes vēsturnieks Inesis Feldmanis.
  Viņš norādīja, ka savulaik leģionāru pieminēšana, noliekot ziedus pie Brīvības pieminekļa notikusi bez starpgadījumiem, līdz 1998.gadā 16.datums oficiāli tika noteikts par piemiņas dienu.
  "No brīža, kad 16.marts tika noteikts par piemiņas dienu, tā kļuva par konfrontācijas dienu," sacīja vēsturnieks.
  Vēsturnieks pauda, ka vēlāk gan piemiņas dienas statuss 16.martam tika atcelts, taču "izlietu ūdeni nesasmelsi".
  Lai iedzīvotājiem skaidrotu 16.marta notikumus un latviešu leģiona gaitas, šogad izdots skaidrojošais materiāls.
  "Mūsu uzdevums ir nodrošināt, lai kritušo leģionāru tuvinieki un cīņu biedri varētu viņus pieminēt," sacīja Feldmanis.
Historian Inesis Feldmanis' remarks, 16 March 2015, at www.focus.lv/latvija/viedokli/vesturnieks-16martu-izmanto-krievijas-propagandas-nolukos, retrieved 03 May 2015
3viz. Special Report: The Russians Seeking Refuge In Latvia, retrieved 04 May 2015.
4U.N. General Assembly, 3rd Session, "Resolution 260 (III) [Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide]," 9 December 1948.
5Anton Weiss-Wendt, "Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on 'Soviet Genocide'," Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005): 551.
6Proportionally, Jews suffered the heaviest losses under Stalin's first mass deportation, also being condemned to the harshest conditions.
7Efraim Zuroff, Beruf: Nazijäger. Die Suche mit dem langen Atem: Die Jagd nach den Tätern des Völkermordes, Ahriman, Freiburg 1996, p. 44 and following.
Updated: September, 2023
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