A Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of Hitler’s Invasion of Estonia



According to an Lrytas / BNS report (English here), the Jewish Community of Estonia has expressed ‘surprise and displeasure’ over plans to hold an event today to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the arrival of the Nazis in the city Viljandi.

The statement from the head of the community, Ala Jacobsen, includes the following:

“The usual attempt to portray as ‘warriors against Bolshevism’ people who collaborated with the Nazi occupational regime, and furthermore on the day when the mass murder of the citizens of Viljandi and Estonia who belonged to the ‘wrong’ ethnicity, according to the ideologues of Nazism, began, appears completely idiotic, if not an intentional provocation aimed at tarnishing Estonia’s reputation in the world.”

The event is being organized by an Estonian association of soldiers called Sakala. One of the event’s organizers told the press:

“The arrival of the Germans is considered the liberation of Estonia, because it was saved from the order introduced in June, 1940, when about ten thousand people were deported to Siberia and the local people were impoverished. Order has again become a normal thing for Estonians.”

The director of Viljandi’s city museum, Jaak Pihlak said:

“The terror of 1940 was clearly more destructive than the repressions the Germans carried out over three years.”

Estonia thereby joins the shameful roster of governments in the region that tolerate celebrations of the de facto outbreak of the Holocaust in their countries, in a marked shift toward mainstreamization of pro-Nazi sentiment, accompanied by wholesale disregard for the slaughter of these countries’ Jewish populations — except when shows have to be put on for naive foreign visitors.

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