In an escalation of high level pro-Nazi rhetoric in Riga, the nation’s president, Andris Bērziņš, said today that the international community needs to have it explained.
Have what explained? Why those who served in Nazi Germany’s Latvian Waffen SS divisions are honored in the country’s capital on March 16th each year.
The president of Latvia went on to say that “It’s crazy to think they’re war criminals.”
In response to the international petition created by Olga Zabludoff asking the Lithuanian government to rescind permits for the March 11th neo-Nazi march in the center of the capital city Vilnius on the nation’s independence day, Lithuanian embassies in various countries yesterday sent their “Jewish lists” a statement dated 24 February 2012 signed by right-wing Jewish MP Emanuelis Zingeris.
The problem is that Mr. Zingeris’s eloquent statement, calling his countrymen to unity, justice and all lofty things on the nation’s independence day, does not mention with one word the actual neo-Nazi march that is the issue at hand.
It is a striking contrast with the unvarnished words from the heart of a simple Jewish resident of Vilnius about the same neo-Nazi march which DefendingHistory.com released, also yesterday, on YouTube.
The Seventy Years Declaration, released on 20 January 2012, was the subject of a 31 January 2012 Žinių radijas (News Radio) station panel discussion including one of the Lithuanian signatories of the declaration, Social Democratic MP Vytenis Andriukaitis, himself a signatory of the Lithuanian Declaration of Independence. MP Andriukaitis was attacked by the foreign minister for signing.
MP Andriukaitis’s response won international support, and there is reference in the panel discussion to the support from British human rights champion MP Denis MacShane for all eight Lithuanian parliamentarians who signed the Seventy Years Declaration.
The other participants were rather obviously opposed to MP Andriukaitis (and the Seventy Years Declaration), making it a rather unbalanced panel: the moderator, Audrys Antanaitis; Ronaldas Račinskas, executive director of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania (known for short as the “Red-Brown Commission”; it is chaired by Conservative MP Emanuelis Zingeris, the only Jewish signatory of the Prague Declaration); far-right political activist and academic Marius Kundrotas. The original Lithuanian broadcast is available here. What follows is as full as possible an English translation made from the audio.
AA: Hello, this is Audrys Antanaitis. Today: about a history that inevitably affects our present. The so-called Wannsee Declaration [= Seventy Years Declaration] again recalls a painful past and its different interpretations. So, can the Holocaust be compared with Communist crimes? It’s said that that offends Jews. But why should Jews be offended by a reminder that the Communists also killed en masse innocent people? And in general, why have we today decided to compete on who suffered more, the victims of the Nazis or the victims of the Communists? Is this really important to the victims themselves and their families? Does talking about one’s suffering really require comparison with the sufferings of other victims?
Is it really important on what basis the mass murder was carried out, or executed? That basis will not bring the person back in any event. Today our guests are Ronaldas Racinskas, executive director of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania; historian, political scientist and member of the board of directors of the Nationalist Union Marius Kundrotas; and signatory to the Act of Restoration of Independence and vice-chairman of the Social Democratic Party Vytenis Andriukaitis. Welcome.
Various: Good day. Good day. Good morning.
Dozens of people marching on the streets with flags in their hands and badges on their chest.
When they reach their destination a strange looking person steps on the podium and starts to speak. His speech is saturated with hate. He demands a “Jew-free” country. He blames the Roma people for the problems of our society.
And this is not 1944. It is 2012. Here in Hungary.
The Council of Europe’s Commission against Racism and Intolerance today published online its 9 December report ECRI Report on Latvia (fourth monitoring cycle). In the 67 page report, the ECRI (European Commission against Racism and Intolerance) explicitly condemns the Waffen SS marches enabled and supported for many years by some of the highest echelons of Latvian government and society. There is also reference to the more recent case of celebrating the day of Hitler’s invasion in 1941.
Developments have started moving quickly in the ill-starred project to host the current foreign minister of Lithuania as “guest of honor” at a Tel Aviv “gala” at the Dan Panorama Hotel on March 5th.
With attention focused on the government-permission-granted central Vilnius neo-Nazi march slated for Lithuania’s March 11th independence day — now the subject of an international petition on Change.org — there was minimal foreign interest in today’s independence day neo-Nazi march and demonstration in central Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city. The March 11th independence day marks the date in 1990 when Lithuania declared independence from the Soviet Union. Today’s holiday is on the date of the 1918 declaration of independence which heralded the rise of the modern Lithuanian state in the twentieth century. Both dates are revered by the country’s diverse minorities and factions. They represent freedom from oppression and foreign domination, and celebrate the building of a free and democratic state.
But in recent years, both dates have been hijacked by neo-Nazi groups in the heart of the country’s major cities, with the support of some members of parliament and leading political figures. There is, moreover, the proverbial blind eye of much or most of the elite classes, which serves as a contributing catalyst.
In a decision with a surreal touch of a topsy-turvy world, Kaunas municipal authorities have announced that they are on “security grounds” revoking the permit for a pro-human rights march with a maximum of one hundred people. The march had been permitted for 4 PM this Thursday, 16 February, in the center of Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city. It was conceived in part as a response to the neo-Nazi march which has a permit for a maximum of one thousand people at 1 PM the same day.
Honorable Mr. Andriukaitis,
Your courage needs to be saluted.
I have followed with admiration your successive actions in favor of a proper appreciation of the unique crimes of the Nazi regime in Lithuania and beyond. From signing the Seventy Years Declaration to your letter to your parliamentary colleague the foreign minister, you have a shown a courage and a decency that, unfortunately, are rare in the Lithuanian political class.
You have defended the truth and the respect for the victims.
No more no less: Estonia's defense minister, Mart Laar, has himself published a book glorifying his nation's Nazi-collaborating units
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Run-up to the bill (8 Jan 2012); Delfi Estonia (14 Feb 2012); Junge Welt (29 Feb)
[updated 17 Feb] The following “SAVE THE DATE GALA DINNER” announcement was recently posted on the Telfed Online website [update: page taken down; similar text is at the ILCCI site of the organizing "Israel-Lithuania"]:
Milan Chersonski (Chersonskij), longtime editor (1999-2011) of Jerusalem of Lithuania, quadrilingual (English-Lithuanian-Russian-Yiddish) newspaper of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, was previously (1979-1999) director of the Yiddish Folk Theater of Lithuania, which in Soviet times was the USSR’s only Yiddish amateur theater company. The views he expresses in DefendingHistory.com are as always his own. Authorized translation from the Russian original by DefendingHistory.com.
Milan Chersonski at his desk. Photo © Jurgita Kunigiškytė.
The twentieth of January 2012 made it precisely seventy years from the day when a conference of ministries and agencies of Hitler’s Germany was held at the Marlier Villa by Lake Wannsee. It went down in history as the Wannsee Conference. Nazi officials in a business-like manner in ice blood, discussed the problems of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question, the euphemism for genocide of the Jews in Europe.
Fulfillment of the Wannsee Conference decisions, which became directives, continued until the last days of the Nazi state. Not even the approach of the Red Army in the east or the successful landing of the anti-Hitler coalition in the west resulted in German leaders abandoning the project to annihilate the Jewish people. In the face of a string of crushing defeats, acute shortages of transport, ammunition, fuel and even food, the Nazis went on sending Jews to their death with a maniacal consistency.
But it would be a very serious mistake to think that the Wannsee Conference directives per se played the main role in the Final Solution of the Jewish Question here in Lithuania. In this part of the world the Nazis and their many accomplices had been quick to rob and massacre the majority of the Jewish population by December 1941. Before the Wannsee Conference.
In response to several requests from the United States, DefendingHistory.com this week asked three separate Westerners who found themselves in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to try to see the “Flame of Hope” monument, by sculptor Leonardo Nierman, in memory of the victims of the Lithuanian Holocaust, located in the heart of the Old Town, in a yard that was in the Vilna Ghetto between September 1941 and the ghetto’s liquidation three years later.
The following is an authorized translation from the Lithuanian text published on Delfi.lt on 9 February 2012. It is a reply to the foreign minister’s article published a week earlier (English translation here).
Honorable minister, looking at the headline of your public statement, I hoped at least that you would apologize for the position expressed earlier that “it is impossible to find any difference between Hitler and Stalin except in their moustaches (Hitler’s was smaller).” I agree with the position expressed by Dennis MacShane, member of the British House of Commons, that such jokes by foreign minister Audronius Ažubalis are inappropriate in discussing the mass murder of six million Jews.
In your public statement, you again place two signed declarations in opposition to one another. One of them — the “only true one” — the “Declaration on European Conscience and Communism” signed in Prague in 2008, maintains that the precondition for a unified Europe is a unified view of history and the ability to condemn the last century’s crimes against humanity. The second, the Seventy Years Declaration — the declaration referred to as if it were a crime and condemned by you —was adopted marking the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee conference, a declaration which rejects attempts to trivialize the atrocities of the Jewish genocide.
The German Government has repudiated the trivialization of Nazi regime by the ambassador of the European Union in Afghanistan, Vygaudas Ušackas, a former foreign minister of Lithuania. In a 6 December Wall Street Journal article, Ušackas called Nazi rule in Lithuania “a few years’ respite from the Communists.” An apology was called for by Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel Office, and a debate ensued.
20 января нынешнего 2012-го года исполнилось 70 лет с того дня, когда в 1942-м году на вилле Марлир близ озера Ванзее состоялась конференция представителей министерств и ветвей власти гитлеровской Германии, которая вошла в мировую историю по названию озера – Ванзейская конференция. Это было совещание нацистских чиновников, которые деловито и хладнокровно обсуждали вопросы реализации «окончательного решения еврейского вопроса», то есть полного истребления евреев в Европе.
A FIRST-TIME PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN LEYVIK HOUSE YIDDISH CULTURE CENTER, THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER ISRAEL OFFICE AND THE ASSOCIATION OF LITHUANIAN JEWS IN ISRAEL
“Where is your conscience?” Holocaust survivor Joe Melamed, 87, himself interviewed last August by agents of Interpol at the Lithuanian authorities’ insistence, at right, carries a (Hebrew) sign: “Dear Participants in the Dinner! Where is your conscience? Where’s solidarity with our Holocaust survivors, resistance fighters and partisans?” A survivor from Šiauliai (Shavl), at left, sports a (Yiddish) sign: “We stand with our heroic partisans. Against neo-Nazism. We are here!” (this last phrase, Mir záynen dó, is from the Vilna-origin Jewish partisan hymn). Photo: Bella Bryks-Klein.
“Ažubalis, STOP the Neo-Nazi Parade in Vilnius” reads the sign at right, a reference to this coming Sunday’s neo-Nazi march in the center of the Lithuanian capital, currently the subject of a Washington DC based international petition. Sign at left refers to the still unretracted campaigns of defamation against heroic Holocaust survivors who escaped to join the anti-Nazi resistance in the forests of Lithuania. Second from left is Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Israel office, who has exposed Baltic revisionism for decades. Photo: Bella Bryks-Klein.
Editor and Yiddish cultural leader, Bella Bryks-Klein, carries a sign asking the Lithuanian government to stop its program of activities to glorify Nazi collaborators like the “Lithuanian Activist Front” (LAF) of 1941, which unleashed slaughter in dozens of towns before the Nazis even arrived, and indicated its intentions in advance of the outbreak of war.
Some of the 18 protesters, led by Joe Melamed (first from left), chairman of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, who greeted Lithuanian Foreign Minister Ažubalis at a Tel Aviv “gala” at which he was guest of honor. It is just over a month since Ažubalis belittled his parliamentary colleagues who signed the Seventy Years Declaration marking the Wannsee anniversary in January, when he made his infamous comment on moustache length being the one difference between Hitler and Stalin. Back in 2010 the Jewish community in Lithuania called a special meeting to draft a statement protesting a major antisemitic outburst by the foreign minister. There are seven major areas of unresolved Lithuanian-Jewish issues. Photo: Bella Bryks-Klein.
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But the Simon Wiesenthal Center rapidly reacted to both. See here and here.
