Missed Opportunities in Stockholm
Comment / Efraim Zuroff

HOT AIR IN STOCKHOLM: Why was there no stated commitment to bringing the perpetrators to justice? (Gunnar Ask / AP)

(February 28, 2000) On January 26 in Sweden, representatives of 46 countries - including no fewer than 20 prime ministers and presidents - gathered for the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, designed to promote Holocaust education and call for the prevention of such disasters in the future. Initiated by Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, the gathering sent a powerful message to anti-Semites, racists, and Holocaust deniers the world over. And if, as Elie Wiesel suggested, it is to become an annual event, it will be remembered as a watershed in Holocaust education and commemoration.

But the conference had serious shortcomings, the most significant of which concerns the cynical manner in which it was exploited by some East European leaders to deliver sanitized presentations of their history and the role played by their countrymen in the implementation of the Final Solution.

Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, for example, made the ludicrous claims that there was no anti-Semitism in his country before the Holocaust and that Lithuanian Jewry had been the "happiest" Jewish community in Europe. (Of the 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania under the Nazi occupation, 212,000 were murdered during the Holocaust, many - if not most - by local Nazi collaborators.)

And Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga blamed Nazi racist propaganda exclusively for the participation of Latvians in the murder of Jews, which is grossly inaccurate. She also minimized the scope of Latvian complicity in the crimes of the Holocaust. (Ninety-five percent of Latvia's 70,000 Jews were murdered, many by the thousands of Latvian Nazi collaborators; so too were 14,000 of the 20,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jews deported to Latvia.)

Both of these leaders also delivered the expected platitudes about bringing local Nazi war criminals to justice - platitudes that are totally hollow in their cases. Since gaining independence, neither country has ever convicted a local Nazi collaborator.

Even the host country, Sweden, has chosen to ignore the judicial dimension of the Holocaust and has refused for years to investigate, let alone prosecute, the Nazi war criminals who live there. Three weeks before the conference, a documentary film by Swedish journalist Bosse Schoen revealed that at least 260 Swedes had served in the Waffen-SS, among them several who admitted to having participated in war crimes (The Jerusalem Report, January 17, page 9). Prime Minister Persson called for an investigation, but no operative decision on this has been made and the subject was studiously avoided by the visiting dignitaries who preferred to praise their host. Nor was it discussed in any of the numerous panels and lectures.

In that respect, it is sadly significant that Simon Wiesenthal, who more than anyone else symbolizes the efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, was not even invited to the conference. That sent a clear signal that Holocaust education - la Stockholm will not include the efforts to hold perpetrators accountable.

The gathering would have had so much more impact and value had it coincided with a decision by the Swedish government to investigate its own failings, and featured a call by all those world leaders to do whatever is still possible to bring those responsible for Holocaust crimes to the bar of justice.

Dr. Zuroff is the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office.

Related articles:
The Holocaust on Trial - A Hitler apologist claims there were no Nazi death factories
Confronting Hitler's Defender - An interview with David Irving
Britain Wakes Up - Government establishes annual Holocaust Memorial Day