Estonian PM Accused of “Trying to Write the Holocaust Out of History” to Visit Yad Vashem
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Andrus Ansip Israel Andrus Ansip Yad Vashem Daily Mail Estonia Waffen Honor Eastern Europe Holocaust revisionism Estonia Estonia anti-Semitism Estonia Holocaust revisionism Estonia Waffen SS Former Soviet Republics anti-Semitism
Andrus Ansip. Photo: Wikipedia
On Tuesday Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip will visit Yad Vashem. His itinerary includes a tour of the Holocaust History Museum, a memorial ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance and a visit to the Children’s Memorial.
The trip draws into focus Estonia’s history on Holocaust remembrance, including a controversy earlier this year surrounding the recognition of former Waffen SS officers.
According to Dovid Katz, a human rights activist, Algemeiner blogger and editor of defendinghistory.com, Estonia’s position is more-or-less similar to that of many Eastern European countries, who rightly view Stalin’s Soviet regime as evil and hold those who fought his regime as heroes. The problem, many say, is that some of those nationalists were Nazi collaborators and vicious anti-Semites.
For his part Ansip has denied any systemic anti-Semitism in Estonia, telling a group of Jewish organizations on 2011, “There has never been any anti-Semitism in Estonia at the state level. Even with the Estonian people, who suffered terribly under totalitarian regimes over the years, anti-Semitism and racism are simply not in their nature.”
“Of course Israel needs to engage constructively the East European countries that have been supportive of Israel. That goes without saying. But Israel can do so without giving something it must not give: supposed legitimacy to the revision of Holocaust history that the Baltic states are pursuing with such zeal (and money). They are trying effectively to write the Holocaust out of history with a new bogus model of ‘two equal genocides, Nazi and Soviet’ without denying a single death,” Katz told The Algemeiner.
Katz continued: “In the case of Estonian officials visiting Jerusalem, the simplest solution is to also invite Dr. Efraim Zuroff, head of the Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, to be on hand to offer a polite rebuttal to the revisionist models, which incidentally have deep roots in East European antisemitism.”
6:57 pm
In Estonioa, like Latvia and Lithuania, there needs to be mandatory Holocaust History Classes to educate the teenages that their grandparents were articipants and not bystanders in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. There was a genocide of Jews called the Holocaust but not that of those of the Baltic States – their population grew under Soviet times, they now have their own state with their own language and culture. There can be no forgiveness until they come to terms and arrest those murderers who are still alive, even if this means arrresting thousands. Estonians, Latvvians and Lithuanians behaved like the worst people who walked this earth during the year 1941, even worse than the majority of Germans who lived in that year.
3:11 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idel_Jakobson
Idel Jakobson (12 August 1904 in Jēkabpils, Latvia – 12 September 1997 in Tallinn, Estonia) was an Jewish Estonian NKVD investigator. According to the materials of Kaitsepolitsei, Jakobson took part in sentencing around 1,200 people to death and persecuting at least 1,800 people.[1][2][3]
Jakobson was at first a citizen of Latvia, but moved to Estonia in 1930s. He participated in the activities of the Jewish cultural society Licht. In 1931 he was arrested in Tallinn, being accused of subversive activities directed against the Republic of Estonia.[2] In 1938, together with a number of other communists, he was granted amnesty and deported to Latvia. He returned to Estonia after the June 1940 communist coup and became an investigator of the NKVD, since September 1941 leading the investigations’ department of the NKVD of the Estonian SSR. Idel Jakobson was notorious for his sadistic methods (beatings, other methods of torture) during interrogations. .[2]
Jakobson fled Estonia in July, 1941, and worked as a chief investigator in Russia and Ukraine. His ‘investigations’ were carried out in the framework of the so-called ‘Vyshinsky doctrine’, in effect presumption of guilt[4][5]: without any trial, he arranged death sentence to 621 people.[4] Most of his victims were ethnic Estonians, including well-known politicians like Ado Birk and Jaan Hünerson.[2] He returned to Estonia in 1944, working as the head of investigation department until 1950. He was expelled from CPSU in 1953 for having visited a private Jewish canteen and concealing that fact.
In 1990s, an investigation on I. Jakobson’s activities during his NKVD ‘career’ was launched, but the case never reached the court, as Jakobson died.
And why Mossad can kill without court? Why are these killers heroes in Israel?
6:18 am
So isn’t it a good thing he’s going to Yad Vashem to learn about the Holocaust?
5:54 am
My father(and his 4 brothers) were born in Aizpute, Latvia, not too far from Estonia. I have been there, met a few of the people and my two daughters were there about a year ago. We felt a coolness when people found out that we were Jews. Many Jews were killed Aizpute and Riga; the Nazis brought Jews from other cities in Europe to be killed in Latvia; many Latvians were willing accessories to the killings. There are many Jewish cemeteries thruout Latvia. However, in recent years groups of German youths have come to Latvia to help restore these cemeteries which were desecrated. I met a wonderful Latvian woman on my first trip to Latvia many years ago and we keep in touch; she and others are writing a documented book about the Jewish experience in Latvia.
5:56 am
Thanks for considering my comment.