Baltic States Continue to Receive Criticism for Support of Germans that Served in Second World War

The Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania continue to resist the trend of the rest of the world to demonize and hound former German soldiers that served during World War II.  Recently, I read a few articles regarding criticism by foreign officials of Estonia's policy of offering support to these servicemen.  A Google search for the terms 'Estonia' and 'Nazi' turn up a number of articles, many of them from Russia Today.

Most of these articles are heavily laden with moral language and hypocrisy.  In the article, "Estonia: Nazi safe haven", the author writes that

The Nuremberg Tribunal sentenced the Nazi leadership to either executions or prison terms 65 years ago.  This trial of history was meant to get rid of Nazism for good.  But the SS marches in Baltic states, and other cases of rehabilitation of fascism nowadays, suggest that history lessons have no been fully learned.

Perhaps this journalist's query can partly be answered by pointing to the monumentally hypocritical and unjust nature of the Nuremberg Tribunal itself, as Mark Weber does in this report.  It was a trial conducted by victors in a war, one of which, the Soviet Union, had engaged in large scale atrocities against civilians both in peacetime and during the war.  A sane and moral individual sees the Nuremberg trials for what they were.

It is being claimed that the Baltic countries are motivated by "nationalism" to take a revisionist stance on historical events, including the so-called Holocaust.



Here, American-born Israeli historian, Efraim Zuroff, asserts that "no civilized country" should "tolerate" the deviance of countries or individuals that take a revisionist stance on World War II, including "the attempt to equate Communist and Nazi crimes".  Jewish professor Dovid Katz here asserts that "Soviet crimes were horrendous" but that they were less atrocious because "ethnic cleansing" did not motivate them.

This is the crux of the matter, because what we are being asked to maintain is that crimes that lack racial animus are not as "horrendous" as those that have it, even if a crime of the former sort is, in quantiative terms, greater than one of the latter. 

The Soviet Union had murdered an estimated seven million, or more, Ukrainians, and all told more than ten million Soviets of all nationalities, in 1932-33, during the time Hitler was assuming power in Germany.  Jews, from Leon Trotsky through Lazar Kaganovich, played important roles in the Soviet system and were involved in its crimes.  Both the numbers of deaths involved and Jewish complicity in producing them are relevant.

Though "nationalism" is held to be at the heart of the revisionism of the Baltic states, one rightly ponders the motives of nations critical of them.  The State of Israel is predicated upon the Holocaust myth, and the Russian government is very sensitive about its Soviet past, especially its atrocities.  This creates a confluence of moral interests between Jews and some Russian officials, with obvious historic bridges.

The Baltic states appear to be inconvenienced by nations that have their own political agendas, rather than by being wrong on the relevant moral and historical points.