Sixty-five
years after many fascist leaders were sentenced to execution
or prison, Estonia is in the spotlight for neo-Nazi activity
acting as a shelter for several convicted war criminals.
With SS marches regularly held throughout the state, many fear the country is
increasingly embracing one of history’s darkest chapters.
One of the marchers – Mikhail Gorshkov
– is ranked eighth on Simon Weisenthal’s list of most wanted
Nazi war criminals.
“He directly participated in a murder
of 3,000 Jews in Belarus in 1940s. Documents proving it were
provided to the Estonian authorities,” says the chairman
of anti-fascist committee of Estonia, Andrey Zarenkov.
Estonia’s anti-fascist committee says
the proof of Gorshkov’s atrocities in a Belarusian concentration
camp is solid and undoubted. But instead of seeing off his
days from behind bars, he now lives the life of a free man
in this Baltic state.
“Gorshkov was deported from the US
and stripped of US citizenship. That says a lot, doesn’t
it? Tallinn gave him shelter and tried to hide him here,
but then under international pressure the authorities had
to initiate an investigation,” Zarenkov reveals.
However, the probe yielded no results.
After months of investigation, Estonian authorities closed
the case.
The advisor of the Office of Estonian
Prosecutor General Carol Merzin said that “A well-grounded
doubt remains that the Gorshkov mentioned in the materials
is not the Mikhail Gorshkov who is at present a citizen of
the Republic of Estonia. The case will be closed, as it has
been impossible for the investigative team to to find any
additional evidence.”
The decision raised eyebrows in Israel
– at first. But then Simon Wiesenthal’s center recalled which
country they were dealing with.
“I called Washington, spoke the people
who handled his prosecution case whether they had any doubt
about [Mikhail Gorshkov’s] identity. And they said no, none
whatsoever,” insists Efraim Zurov from the Simon Wiesenthal
Center. “This doesn’t surprise me personally, because for
the last 15 years I’ve been dealing with the Estonians. The
Estonians have totally failed in terms of prosecuting Nazi
war criminals. It seems there’s no will in Tallinn to bring
these people to justice.”
And the Gorshkov story is not a one-off
case. From sanctioning SS veterans’ marches to glorifying
former Nazi collaborators – this has been Tallinn’s policy
for the past decade.
Recently, one man made just about
every headline in Estonia. Almost on a scale of a national
holiday, in October the country marked the 90th birthday
of Harald Nugiseks, the only remaining holder of the Iron
Cross, one of the highest awards in Nazi Germany.
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 not been fully learned. rt.com
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