Moscow has shown solidarity with the European Union’s rebuff to the recent news article that appeared in Lithuanian press.

In a recent newsbyte the publication had termed the Holocaust as ‘legend’ and the Nuremberg war crime trials as ‘farcical’. Moscow has openly condemned such statements and expressed serious reservations about the news of former SS members conducting annual marches in some countries.

Clearing its position on such sensitive issues, Russia congratulated the EU ambassadors in Lithuania for taking a tough stand against the article published in the Veidass weekly magazine.

“We are glad to hear that finally our partners have responded to mass media publications in Lithuania and other Baltic countries that have whitewashed Nazi criminals. Russia calls for the counteracting of unscrupulous attempts to rewrite the history of World War II and encourage pro-Nazi supporters”, according to ITAR TASS. “This encroaches upon the memory of those who died during WWII and humiliated the feelings of WWII veterans, the statement added.

“There is no doubt that the Nuremberg Tribunal is a leading political and judicial achievement of the epoch”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had said on November 21, at the opening ceremony of Nuremberg Trials Museum. Lithuania, apparently don’t agree with Russia’s viewpoint.

“There is no other explanation for annual marches of former SS members in a number of European capital cities, prosecution of anti-fascist veterans or recognition of the swastika by a court as part of the cultural heritage of the Balts, Lavrov concluded.

Professor Dovid Katz of the World Without Nazism Movement thinks that Holocaust denial in the Baltic States is politically motivated.

“It’s a sort of by-product of a much wider problem that I call ‘Holocaust obfuscation’ – the movement in the Baltic states that does not deny the Holocaust, but tries to write it out of history, minimize it, trivialize it, relativize it,” said Katz.

“Its intellectuals, politicians, academics, media people, who are ultranationalists, don’t want any stain on their history. And are confusing it with current political issues, trying to use Holocaust issues in East-West relations as a stick against today’s Russia”, he added.

Efraim Zuroff, Head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, California thinks that the EU has to stand up against distortion of History.

“I think that this is an outgrowth of an atmosphere in Lithuania in which the narrative of the history of the WWII is being consistently distorted. I think it’s high time that the countries of Europe, the countries of the world, of the civilized world make clear to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and these other post-communist countries that the attempt to distort the history of the Holocaust will not be tolerated, the attempt to equate communist and Nazi crimes will not be tolerated.”

“You cannot say and you can’t minimize the role of the Soviet Union in the victory over Nazi Germany and you can’t try and claim that the people that liberated Auschwitz were just as responsible for its establishment and the mass murder that went on there, he said.

Professor Katz though agrees that Soviet communists committed horrific crimes against humanity, says that the Russian people were the first victims of communists’ atrocity.

“It was not a war of ethnic destruction, murder, genocide, annihilation of the people. The two are very different. And I think that the nations of the world have to be steadfast in not allowing the Holocaust obfuscation that’s now emanating from Eastern Europe to succeed”, he observes.

bsr-russia.com