"The canonization of the SS" is the front page headline for the 11 January issue of the Tageszeitung, the left-liberal Berlin daily.
Illustrated by a photo of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler inspecting members of the Estonian division of the Waffen-SS, the TAZ story reports that a bill before the Estonian parliament seeks to grant Estonian members of the SS the status of "freedom fighters."
While similar bills failed in 2006 and 2010, "majority support appears to be guaranteed” during this legislative session, the TAZ reports. A second article appears on page 4 and reports the Russian embassy in Tallinn has described the bill as “blasphemous,” while the German Green Party has criticized a "retrospective justification of the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler’s henchmen in the Soviet Union."
Die Welt has the story also. On 12 Jan in "Estland denkt über Ehrung der Waffen-SS nach" it reported on the details -- and provided a very good history of the Estonian division of the SS. Worldcrunch offers a summary in English of the article here.
As an aside, Worldcrunch paraphrases stories, it does not translate them in a strict sense. This can lead to differences of meaning and shading. For example the Die Welt title in Worldcrunch is "Push To Honor Estonian SS Nazi Unit Sparks Outrage." The Die Welt title in German I would translate as "Estonia is thinking about honoring the Waffen-SS after [70 years]." No "outrage" in the German title, nor does "push to honor" have the same meaning as "thinking of honoring" while the German title has "after" tagged on at the end, to which I would add "70 years" or "further tries in parliament." Do bookmark Worldcrunch as it is a great source for overseas reporting.
Die Welt offers this additional history (my translation):
The Holocaust began in the Baltic states at the same time as Estonia was occupied by German troops. Jews had to flee the country, but as Estonia is the northernmost and easternmost of the three small states, they had the best chance to escape. Approximately three-quarters of the small Jewish population either left with the retreating Red Army or fled to Finland.
The remaining thousand who were classified as Jews according to Nazi racial criteria were killed -- mainly by Einsatzkommando 1a under the command of Martin Sandberger, who until his death in late March 2010 was the last living top SS leader. At the Wannsee Conference [held on 20 Jan 1942] Estonia was declared judenfrei [free of Jews] by the Nazis after the murder of 963 people. ...
In addition to the approximately one thousand Estonian Jews, at least 250 Roma and six to seven thousand Christian Estonians were killed during the German occupation. Tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of wars as well as Jews from other states were also killed during the occupation in internment caps built on Estonian soil during the war.
Die Welt examines the Estonian SS involvement in the Holocaust and in anti-partisan campaigns, but notes:
Unfortunately all that remains of the records of this unit are three meager files in the German federal archives. There is a book about Estonians in the Waffen-SS, but it was written by an admirer of the military arm of the SS and was published by a small, far-right-leaning publisher. Its contents should clearly be viewed with caution.
However, the campaign to honor SS men as freedom fighters, supported mainly by nationalist parties in Estonia, comes from their role in trying to hold back the tide of the Red Army in the first six months of 1944. The daft legislation is expected to come before parliament in Tallinn in March.
Both newspapers do a good job in bringing this story to light. While Die Welt gives a great overview to this corner of history, the TAZ is more forthright in its condemnation. It warns against “beatifying the SS,” and reminds readers that the Simon Wiesenthal Center described the Baltic SS units as being part of the Nazi “structure of blood and death.”
There are enough religion and ethical ghosts in this story to keep me occupied for weeks. However, I want to raise a few surface items as well as a deeper issue that is being played out in Europe -- who owns the Holocaust?
"Provide both sides of the story" is a mantra each journalist learns early in his career. One of the most frequent criticisms offered by GetReligion is the lack of balance in a story -- of providing only one set of facts. However, is this criticism valid when dealing with Nazis? Neither paper offers space to neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers or right-wing nationalists to defend the pro-SS legislation. Die Welt offers the history, as does the TAZ to a lesser extent, that would explain motivation, but Mr. A. Hitler is not given a platform. And I believe the papers were correct in this decision.
The TAZ use of the language of religion is significant. Religion is almost always absent from the left-wing TAZ's pages, but its use here is more than that of an arch or facile description. To my mind it symbolizes the moral and psychological uneasiness Germans (and Estonians) feel with this issue. The SS is being beautified, being canonized as modern saints by Estonian nationalists in their crusade against the Russians and the Communist past. While the vocabulary is used, there remains strong tie here between nationalism and religion that is left unaddressed in the stories.
To my ears, the story also raises the vexed question of who owns the Holocaust? Die Welt reports that almost ten times as many Christian Estonians as Jewish Estonians were murdered by the Nazis. Yet all of the Jews were killed. Is there an equivalence of suffering here? Because more Christians died than Jews -- and because the Soviets killed more Estonians than the Germans, does that give moral ownership of this issue to Estonian nationalists? Where can the line be drawn between wholesale murder of innocents and the unique evil that was the Nazi's Final Solution?
This episode reminds me of the "War of the Crosses" that began at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1979. Following Pope John Paul II's mass at the Nazi death camp, which he described as being the "Golgotha of the modern world," local Catholics erected a small cross by Bunker 2 to honor Edith Stein -- a converted Jew who had become a Carmelite nun before her death in the gas chambers.
In 1984 the controversy escalated when Carmelite nuns opened a convent in a brick building that had been used by the Nazis to store Zyklon-B gas crystals. The 26-foot cross used in John Paul II's 1979 service was then moved by the nuns to a spot just outside the Auschwitz I wall where more than one hundred Polish partisans had been shot. Jewish leaders complained of the impropriety of Christianizing the site of the extermination of European Jewry, but the nuns refused to go.
Jewish complaints prompted a response by Polish nationalists who erected a further three hundred crosses. The Polish parliament then ordered the extra crosses to be removed but allowed the papal cross to remain. John Paul II resolved the issue in 1993 by ordering the nuns to leave Auschwitz.
Can one be human and be impartial when writing a story about the SS? Is it wrong for Christians to dispossess Jews of the Holocaust? Who owns history and how should faith groups handle public expressions of faith in a pluralistic society? (Does the World Trade Center mosque controversy spring to mind to anyone?) How should reporters handle this issue when writing about the Holocaust and the SS? Is it even possible?
What say you GetReligion readers on this point?