OPINION | FILM | ARTS | GLORIFICATION OF COLLABORATORS | HISTORY
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FILM REVIEW
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by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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No Secret Monuments. Silent Statues and the Distortion of Truth.
A documentary by Paula Kirman and Adam Bentley.
The film’s website. Trailer on youtube. Announced on Film Freeway.
Having previously produced two documentaries related to monuments in honor of Nazis and their collaborators, Paula Kirman and Adam Bentley journeyed to the three Baltic States and to Finland in order to track and unearth monuments to Nazi collaborators displaying a hero-worship in these countries, eighty years after the war. In their own words, the purpose of the documentary is ‘exposing monuments that commemorate Nazis and their local collaborators.’ In the documentary, of one hour and twelve minutes, Kirman is our guide and narrator.
First up is VILNIUS, Lithuania. A city imbued with an “undigested past for the historical memory shared by Western society at large,” as the first interviewee, Professor Per Anders Rudling, expresses it. The first moral shock is when the narrator sees the statue of Jonas Žemaitis, a hero of the anti-Soviet partisan struggle after 1945, right in front of the Ministry of Defense building, where NATO’s flag hangs alongside the Lithuanian tricolor.
Further, strolling along, she comes upon a plaque in the name of Jonas Noreika in front of the Library of the Academy of Sciences (the Wroblewski Library). Acclaimed Lithuanian truth teller and documentary film master Saulius Beržinis adds the names of Nazi collaborators Krikštaponis and Baltūsis-Žvejas, expanding on that theme, saying that “if you go to any Lithuanian province, you get the monuments for the ‘anti-Soviet partisans’ where in many cases you can find the names of the perpetrators.” Interviewed, Dovid Katz affirms that ‘in Lithuania thousands of Jewish people were murdered by locals before the Germans came, by white-armbander’ of the Lithuanian Activist Front.’
There is a long sequence devoted to Ponar (Ponary, Paneriai), with beautiful piano music as background, where Kirman lets her emotion show at the sight of that terrain where so many victims died. She further guides us to the Varnikai site where 1,500 Jews were murdered, a majority of them children and women.
Returning to the city, she shows us the “23rd of June Street” about which she made the following statement: “The Lithuanians banded together and drove the USSR out of Lithuania, this tragically paved the way for Nazi Germany to invade the country and accelerate the Holocaust.” Frankly, I was dismayed hearing that. First, the June Uprising is itself a fiction of the ultranationalists’ concocted history. When the Soviets were in power, they did not fire a single shot at anyone. The Soviets were fleeing Operation Barbarossa – Hitler’s invasion of the USSR – the largest invasion in human history, not the local white-armbanders who were busy murdering Jewish neighbors before the arrival of the first German forces. That this film would accept the Holocaust apologists’ narrative is a major blunder. See for example Dovid Katz’s review of the (since renamed) Genocide Museum in Vilnius, and his papers on Holocaust Obfuscation in the Baltics and the revisionism in regional museums.
◊The second port of call is RIGA, Latvia, where the narrator shows us Liberty Monument as well as a statue of President Ulmanis, who, she tells us, suppressed the rights of the Jews by closing Jewish schools and stopping publications in Yiddish. She went through the Occupation Museum and rightly criticized the lopsided views on what happened during the war, the largest part devoted to Soviet crimes. My own review of this museum appeared years ago on the pages of this journal.
Aleksandrs Feigmanis, a noted guide and historian, is interviewed, telling us about the first days of the German occupation in Riga, on July 1, 1941 and the beatings of Jews, and also about the Synagogue fire with 400 Jewish victims (including some, refugees from Lithuania). We are shown a remembrance plaque to the victims as well as the site; Feigmanis reminds us that a large majority of Latvians whose fathers and grandfathers fought with the Waffen SS find it quite normal to have commemorative monuments and commemorations (for instance, the March 16 marches in Riga).
◊Then, Kirman leads us to BAUSKA, also in Latvia, a town down south near the Lithuanian border, where the visitor finds a monument to the Latvian Legion (in other words: Latvian’s Waffen SS), and a memorial to the Jewish victims. Kirman explains that “…the formation of the Waffen SS and as such [it’s being] associated with war crimes, this included the destruction of the Jewish community in Bauska and other parts of Latvia.” May I add that as far as the Latvian Legion – with their Waffen SS uniforms – is concerned, the soldiers were both volunteers and conscripted and this happened in 1943. There was no direct link between these formations and the Holocaust because when they had been formed, the vast majority of Latvian Jews had already been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the Arājs Kommando, other semi-military units as well as civilians. Nevertheless, it is a historical fact that among the volunteers and the conscripted members of the Legion, many had previously been implicated as civilians or as members of units in the murder of the Jews.
Further, she brings us to a huge monument in honor of the Latvian Legion and quotes the declaration of the Minister of Defense who when it was inaugurated in 2019 said it was “the pride of the Latvian nation.” A search of Lev Golinkin’s exhaustive study of monuments to Nazi collaborators internationally, gave me the answer. It was in More, commemorating the battle the Latvian Waffen SS fought there in September 1944. A plaque alongside the monument intrigued me, the first line being “Daugavas Vanagu”. In fact, that is the name of an association of old Latvian Legion members (read: former ex-Nazi collaborators), founded – paradoxically – in Belgium, in a camp for German prisoners of war where more than 20,000 Latvians had been detained, in Zedelgem in West Flanders. (My own work on Zedelgem appeared on these pages over a number of years.)
Still in Latvia, Kirman next leads us to RUMBULA, some sixteen kilometers southeast of Riga, imparting the information that 28,000 Jews had been killed there, though not mentioning that it was accomplished in just two days. Then came the Salaspils KZ where the Soviet Union built an impressive memorial park with statues (in typical Soviet style). Local expert Aleksandrs Feigmanis tells us that in his school days, they practically never heard anything about the Holocaust and the involvement of the local population. May I add that under Stalin, it had not been allowed to make a distinction between Jewish and other ethnic groups, all were considered as “Soviet victims of Nazism”.
We move north to TALLINN, capital of Estonia. First, there is a visit to the Jewish Museum. Its director Gennadi Gramberg tells us that the establishment of the Jewish community in the country largely transpired at the beginning of the nineteenth century, mostly via ex-Jewish soldiers from the Russian army, explaining that there was barely any antisemitism in the country except during the war, it “having been caused by the Germans”.
In LIHULA, 135 kilometers to the south, there is a monument in honor of the Nazis. After much public criticism, it was purchased by a private person and moved to the “Museum of the Fight for Estonia’s Freedom” in Lagedi, a privately owned park and museum. Kirman lets us see the interior of the museum, which is filled with German army, SS and Nazi paraphernalia and memorabilia. She lets us hear and see the owner telling us about his twisted view of history (for him Hitler died in Argentina in the 1970s with Eva Braun and four children). She fled finally and said that it had been scary (because of dogs barking mainly, I think). At the end of the sequence in Estonia, we see and hear an old man playing an out-of-tune piano with one finger of the right had and several of the left, without explanation.
After the three Baltic states comes HELSINKI, capital of Finland. First, academic specialist in Yiddish Simo Muir shows us a monument erected in honor of the eight Jews deported in November 1942 to Tallinn (of whom one survived). They were deported, he assures us, because of criminal activities. Muir explains that the Finnish Jews had been protected. In other sequences, he concludes that in the end, Finland sought to sign a peace treaty with the USSR when the German army left the country in order to go and fight in the Baltics. He asserts that Finland had never been ideologically allied with Germany during or after the war. He also explains that there had been opposition to the monument to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, even as late as the year 2000. He adds that there had been a taboo in Finland about “Finland and Germany,” including the matter of the Holocaust, during the Cold War. But the year 2000 is a decade after the end of the Cold War…
John Simon, an American expatriate living in Finland who has published books, inter alia, on Jews in the Finnish army, explains that there had been 200,000 German soldiers in Finland during the war. To Kirman’s question as to whether those Jews who fought in the Finnish army – allied to Nazi Germany as Kirman repeats many times in her questioning – would have been aware of the concentration camps and what was being done to their fellow Jews, Simon replies that at the end of what he several times called the “continuation war” there would have been general knowledge.
There is a sequence where we hear about three Jewish heroes within the Finnish army (medical major Skurnik, Captain Klass and nurse Poljakoff) who were to receive a German medal for their bravery, but all three refused. He tells us also that there had been Finns who fought in the Baltics and further on the southern front and there had been actions against human rights and against Jews – a recent historical revelation that the Finns did not appreciate. But he does not share, in his appearance in the film, the names of places or dates or anything more precise.
Per Rudling explains in one sequence about Finland that the Waffen SS were not really part of the German Army but were in a sense Hitler’s personal army. They fought for him, they swore an oath to him. May I add that from late 1934 onward, all soldiers, in other words also the Wehrmacht and the SS units, had to swear an oath of obedience to Hitler, not to Germany. And that with the onset of the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), the Wehrmacht, too, was engulfed in an ideological war against Judeo-Bolshevism, as well as the Waffen SS and Einsatzgruppen. On this, it is important to see the 1995 exhibition, “The German Army and Genocide” and the associated book published by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research with a foreword by Omer Bartov.
There are some sequences in the company of Oula Silvennoinen, an academic specialist on Fascism and the Holocaust, who accompanied Kirman, showing and explaining to her the significance of tombs of slain Finnish soldiers, also for German soldiers who died in Finland, monuments in honor of volunteers from Scandinavian brother countries during the USSR-Finland war of 1939-1940. There was also a visit to a Jewish cemetery where there were tombs of Jews fallen during the war wearing the Finnish uniform. Also a monument to the Finns who were active as Waffen SS.
As for the Jews who fought within the Finnish Army, Silvennoinen says that their feelings in doing so were to prove that they were good Finns, fighting for the liberty of their country. He says something interesting, in his endeavor to help us understand how the Finns cope with their participation in the war alongside the Germans. He calls it compartmentalization, the attitude of those whose stock phrase is: “The Germans did it, we had nothing to do with it.”
I was perplexed at the moment Kirman asks Silvennoinen, in front of the Mannerheim statue: “Who was he?” There seemed to be a not wholly adequate preparation about what happened in Finland prior to Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, in which Finland would soon join with Nazi forces. In November 1939, the USSR invaded Finland during one of the worst winters in history (there are pictures of frozen Soviet soldiers standing upright like Lot’s wife). In order to accommodate the USSR, Marshal Mannerheim sought a peace treaty, the country lost Karelia and Lapland. Historically, their participation in the war can be seen as their wish to recover both lost regions, even if we may condemn them for, as Kirman correctly puts it during one sequence, “prolonging the concentration camps.”
I was moreover disturbed that none of these specialists in the Holocaust in Finland spoke about the fate of the Jewish prisoners of war (who had fought with the Soviet Army). Yitzhak Arad devotes part of a chapter to that aspect of the Holocaust (chapter 28, page 381: “Jewish POWs imprisoned by the Finnish Army”). He writes
The concentration of the Jewish POWS following Anthoni’s visit to Berlin and in advance of Himmler’s visit to Finland, and after it, coupled with the testimonies of Jewish POWs, supply a basis for the assumption that the Jewish POWs were concentrated in order to transfer them to the Germans, in the same way that the 70 prisoners defined as dangerous elements were transferred.
He further states that it was Mannerheim who saved them, having “appeared to have reached the conclusion in autumn 1942 that Germany was about to lose the war.”
The final sequence of the documentary is about neglected stumbling stones (Stolpersteine), of which three are in honor of a woman and her children who died in Auschwitz, the husband having survived.
As a finale, Kirman reveals one glimmer of hope, that a street named after the Lithuanian theoretician of Holocaust-era ethnic cleansing” Kazys Škirpa, in Vilnius, was renamed Tricolor Avenue. She tells us that that journey had gotten to her emotionally, that “these monuments carry secrets, secrets that some would leave in the shadow of history.”
This film is certainly worth seeing, because Kirman and Bentley’s intent is noble, they want to draw our attention to the cult of past (Nazi) heroes still being pursued in the three Baltic states as well as in Finland, although I think that Finland as ally of Nazi Germany cannot be put in the same historical frame – as far as the Holocaust is concerned – as the three Baltic States, even if it is true that by fighting against the USSR, this, indirectly, contributed for example to the destruction of the whole Hungarian Jewish community.
Personally I do not enjoy the format of the “on the road movie” with sequences on the plane, bus, car and on the boat, when we see Kirman walking, filmed from all angles, although this is a format that historian Sir Simon Schama has taught us to respect. But something deeper bothers me in this documentary, the lack of profound historical knowledge displayed by some of the narrator’s statements. It seems to me she did not entirely grasp the history of the countries she and her project partner Bentley visited. For example, in Vilnius, there were no shots of the streets where the ghetto and for centuries the old Jewish quarter had stood, the same in Riga (where there is now an open air museum commemorating the ghetto). No historical background on any country except in Lithuania, where we had some sound experts to hear and see.
Many in the West who are not knowledgeable about what happened in the Baltic states during the Holocaust and the near total annihilation of its Jewish populations might interpret any criticism of these states over their enduring worship of past Nazi collaborators and perpetrators — via laws, monuments and industrial-scale rewriting of the history of World War II as a kind of disguised Russian propaganda. I, for one, despise and condemn what Russia has become under its current president and the wars he unleashed in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and (let us not forget) against his own citizens. But my moral sense of history and ethics compels me to continue reporting that in many instances the Baltic states have not yet begun to genuinely look at their huge voluntary role in the barbaric slaughter of hundreds of thousands of their neighbors and fellow citizens.
This documentary, notwithstanding its occasional weaknesses on depth of history that varies a lot from country to country, deserves much praise, and should absolutely be seen. This is the work of honest Canadians who went to the Baltic States and to Finland and saw for themselves how eighty plus years after the end of the war, these countries’ elites and governments often glorify men who should be condemned as war criminals and participants in the worst case of genocide in human history.
A truly significant contribution to the gradually spreading international awareness about the persistence of public-space monuments glorifying Holocaust collaborators in countries that are today proud member states of the European Union, NATO, and the wider West.