A reader recently wrote that he felt that post-war Soviet era trials lacked credibility in the eyes of Estonians. Accordingly, he questioned the conclusion of the International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity, commissioned by former president Meri, which were based essentially on these records. He quoted the Director of the Estonian Security Police as saying that there was no evidence that any of the men on a list supplied by the Wiesenthal Centre, or any other member of the 36th Police Battalion participated in any crimes. The accusation resulted from an incident in 1942 where it was alleged that 2,500 Jews were shot in a town in Belarus by Nazi forces.The article was posted on this paper’s electronic edition one day after Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Meelis Ratassepp, deputy director of Estonian Security Police said “a historical commission is one thing, and a criminal investigation is another”. He also mentioned that of the 16 men on the list, 9 died during or immediately after the war and the other 7 couldn’t be located.
Pursuing a 60 year old wartime alleged mass murder case where the victims are either all dead or otherwise unavailable and the problems of positive identification of individuals is something the Estonian Police wisely declined to do. One needs only to recall the “Ivan the Terrible” show trial fiasco suffered by the Israelis a few years back and the resulting damage to the perceived fairness of their justice system. That only involved one individual, not a battalion of several hundred men on a battlefield.
Evidence from Soviet era trials should indeed be regarded with a grain of salt, but mass horrendous crimes were in fact committed by Nazi Germany and its allies during the Second World War and massive evidence of this was not fabricated by the Soviets from thin air purely for propaganda value or for revenge. One only needs to visit sites such as Klooga and Vaivara to realize this first hand.
That the Soviets were expert at fabricating show trials with the flimsiest of evidence, beaten confessions, fantastic improbable charges and lying for decades about their own crimes such as Katyn Forest is well accepted. However, most people also accept that the officially sanctioned Nazi treatment of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs in the occupied territories was criminally inhuman.
Surely the writer is not suggesting that all Soviet post war trials should be regarded as having absolutely no evidentiary value and that the distinguished panel with no apparent axe to grind with either side got taken in by a Soviet/Russian disinformation campaign. The panel is headed by Max Jakobson, of the members Paul Goble is well known internationally for his realistic writings about the Soviets and what they were capable of, and the rest of the Commission is not noted for being “pink”.
We should perhaps stop and ask ourselves what exactly were the duties of a Second World War Nazi Police Battalion in Belarus and other occupied countries? This was not set out by Mr. Leivat in his article except perhaps that they were not regarded as “fascists” by Estonians. Some either ignorant simpletons or former KGB types) might even go so far as to maintain that its duties would be similar to that of the NKVD units charged with dealing with Estonian partisan “bandits” (known by most Estonians as “metsavennad”).
Whether or not individual members of the 36th Police Battalion committed acts that could be considered crimes will never be known for certain. Possibly the unit was simply unlucky by being at the wrong place at the wrong time or it was a simple case of unit misidentification in the heat of battle. Also, it is possible that organized Soviet partisans engaged the battalion in a pitched battle which they lost with collateral damage and they just also happened to all be Jews. In any event the unit would have been under direct German armed forces war time discipline exercising little discretion.
Nobody has been charged, most of the participants have probably long departed and we readers here don’t have access to the materials reviewed by the Commission in arriving at their judgment nor do we have their expertise. If we start “nit picking” its conclusions after the fact about Nazi crimes, others could do the same about the even more horrendous crimes committed by the Soviets.
Drawing conclusions (1)
Archived Articles | 11 Feb 2005 | Peeter BushEWR
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