The following may sound bizarre but is absolutely true.
This Saturday, the town of Kuremaa in Estonia is to host a conference marking 100 years since the birth of SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Harald Rijpalu, a local Nazi collaborator who helped his German superiors exterminate anti-Nazi resistance fighters and also Estonian and Belarusian Jews. There will be officials in attendance, a jamboree of Rijpalu’s surviving ‘brethren-in-arms’ and the presentation of a well-illustrated book, written by Estonian Defence Minister Mart Laar, which offers a sympathetic account of the bloody deeds of the Estonian Legion of Waffen SS. Interestingly, police in Germany and other European countries have already been confiscating copies of this book as neo-Nazi propaganda material.
We have an opinion from Director of the Historical Memory Foundation Dr. Alexander Diukov:
"That SS officer committed heavy crimes against humanity. He led a unit which killed thousands of Jews in Belarus alone. Russia, Belarus, Israel and Estonia possess documentation which provides ample proof of this. Printing sympathetic books about Nazis and commemorating them at officially-attended conferences is a symptom of the Estonian state being at variance with European values."
Head of the Moscow-based Ethnic Russians Support Centre Mikhail Ioffe sees a worrying trend:
"There are forces in Baltic countries which translate their sympathies towards Nazism into persecuting anti-Nazi resistance fighters and exonerating former Nazis. They are making people like Vasili Kononov criminals and the people who fought alongside the Nazis against the Soviet Union heroes of the struggle against Communism. This smacks of cynical misinterpretation of history aimed at hounding and besmirching true heroes who saved Europe from perish at Nazi hands."
Since 1996, Estonia’s neighbour Latvia, too, has seen annual reunions of former Nazis and militarized marches by neo-Nazi sympathizers. Latvian marches if this kind usually mark the anniversary of the Latvian Legion of Waffen SS.
These and other similar developments expose Latvia and Estonia as states whose claims to be European are grossly premature.
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