And Estonian patriots enthusiastically helped[0] German Nazis make Estonia the first judenfrei (free of Jews) country if you don't count Luxembourg.[1]
These patriots had to flee to the forests when the time came to answer for their part in Holocaust and other crimes.
I don't think anyone would disagree there weren't people who committed terrible crimes in those days but I don't think its fair to paint all who fled into the forests in such broad strokes.
>I don't think its fair to paint all who fled into the forests in such broad strokes
That's what Estonians nationalists tell.
"The findings of this article have implications for understanding Baltic and European collective memory. The studied memoirs consistently share the same themes: the Baltic states were purely victims of the Soviets and Nazis; Soviet occupation was worse than Nazi occupation for the titular ethnicities; the Baltic Waffen-SS legions did not commit atrocities; and the Holocaust was solely a German crime. As scholars have argued (Katz Citation2016, Citation2017; Mälksoo Citation2014; Radonić Citation2018; Subotić Citation2019), these rhetorical strategies represent an adaptation to, rather than an acceptance of, the Western narrative of the Holocaust in Estonia and Latvia. This is evident in the omission of Jewish Bolshevism as a threat to Europe and the distancing of Estonians and Latvians from involvement in genocide, which produces a clear-cut story of patriotic defense against the genocidal Soviet Union. The adaptation has had an effect on the wider European narrative, as increasingly more European politicians and commentators buy into the argument that communism was equal to fascism. In striving to emphasize the European credentials of the Baltic states, without accepting any responsibility for assisting – knowingly or unknowingly – in the genocidal Nazi project, Estonian and Latvian Legion veterans have produced a revisionist version of World War II history. In their narrative, which mimics wartime Nazi propaganda, collaboration with Nazi Germany demonstrated their essential Europeanness in the face of Asian Bolshevism. While they may lack some of the political correctness of official discourse, their arguments, with the exception of one author, correspond to the hegemonic narrative in the Baltic states today." [0]
> And Estonian patriots enthusiastically helped[0] German Nazis make Estonia the first judenfrei (free of Jews) country if you don't count Luxembourg.[1]
They famously didn't. The German occupation authorities' preferred method of dealing with Jews was to instigate pogroms, but they failed to do so in Estonia, and fearing the same pushback from civilians they had seen earlier in Latvia, instead fell back on using German paramilitary units like Sonderkommando 1a, attached to the Army Group North.
Judenfrei Estonia is a shared credit between the USSR and Germany. USSR occupied Estonia 1940-1941 and disproportionally targeted Jews because of their social class (doctors, lawyers, etc). Germans finished the job when the German army arrived in 1941 and stayed until 1944. Of the 4500 pre-war Jews, about 1000 remained by German arrival. Their tragedy was that they had an opportunity to flee with retreating Russians, but did not use it, believing that Germans couldn't possibly treat them worse than Russians.
> These patriots had to flee to the forests when the time came to answer for their part in Holocaust and other crimes.
Russians didn't care about the Holocaust one bit. Anti-semitism was rampant in the USSR and remained so until the very end in the early 1990s. The purpose of these actions was to destroy the professional classes who could run a country and organize resistance to Russians (1941), and to punish rural farmers who resisted giving up their land, animals and tools to collective farms (1949). It's notable that these actions targeted entire families. The mother of Kaja Kallas, the current EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, was a six-month-old baby when their family was deported to Siberia. I wonder what her role in the Holocaust was.
In the early 1960s, the USSR authorities held a war crimes trial of Estonians as Cold War propaganda to reinforce the Soviet narrative of "liberation", legitimize their occupation, discredit émigré movements and accuse Western governments of harboring fascists, but they could not find more than a literal handful of defendants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_war_in_the_Baltic_st...