Clemens Heni: The Prague Declaration, Holocaust Trivialization and Antisemitism

The Prague Declaration is just the central document of an elaborate propaganda machinery of the Baltic States and their followers in the European Union and further afield. It all started in 1998 with the creation of state sponsored Commissions in the Baltics. The Lithuanian commission was established by the President of the Republic of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus and is called “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania”.It consists of two subcommissions, one dealing with Nazi crimes, the other with Soviet crimes. One of its members is German historian Prof. Wolfgang Benz of the Berlin Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA). Just as a footnote: this center had been criticized for equalizing antisemitism and so called “Islamophobia” last December at a conference in Berlin. Benz obviously has no problem with the antisemitic accusations against former Jewish partisans fighting with the help of the Soviet Union, against the Nazi occupiers of Lithuania and their local fascist collaborators, let alone the fact that Benz is not critical about the commission’s endeavors to equalize Nazism and Stalinism. Moreover, Benz published an article last year of another well known historian, Jürgen Matthäus of the Washington D.C. based United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) where he just lapidary (read: en passant) concisely mentions or even praises that commission (he says: “they make an effort”) without asking questions about the unscholarly attempt to equalize the Holocaust with whatever crimes the Soviets committed in that region.
More...