Sixty years ago, reporting on the Eichmann Trial, Hannah Arendt propounded her flawed theory on the banality of evil – by which she meant, inaccurately as it turned out, that Eichmann and other Nazis like him were “neither perverted nor sadistic,” but acted merely as efficient amoral bureaucrats within a machinery of death. The ongoing controversy over the role of the king of Bulgaria during the Holocaust years illustrates not the banality, but the moral ambiguity of evil and good. 

There is an intellectual and emotional sense of security, a complacency, if you will, in dealing with and confronting absolutes, whether it be absolute evil or absolute good. We are comfortable with the idea that the perpetrators of the Holocaust, or of any genocide or crime against humanity for that matter, embody and epitomize absolute evil. And we are equally secure in recognizing that the men and women who, often at the risk of their own lives, try to help, protect, or rescue the victims of such atrocities embody and epitomize absolute good. 

The relevant underlying two-pronged principle, first articulated in the Talmud (Sanhedrin 37a), is that whoever saves one life is considered to have saved the entire world, and that whoever takes a life is deemed to have destroyed the entire world. This tenet of faith certainly covers the Righteous Among the Nations. It also covers genocidaires and other mass murderers as well as anyone who knowingly facilitates their crimes against humanity.

But what are we to make of individuals who do not fall neatly into either of these categories? How do we deal with someone who saved lives and had blood on their hands? In 1963, my father was asked to be a witness for the defense at the Tel Aviv trial of Hirsch Barenblat, who had been the head of the Jewish police in the ghetto of Bedzin in Poland. Barenblat was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and assisting in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. His defenders argued that he had worked with the Jewish underground in the ghetto and that he had on occasion used his position to try to save Jews. My father declined the invitation to testify. One of his reasons, he said, was that he knew for a fact that both Barenblat’s accusers and his defenders were right: he had collaborated and he had tried to help. 

In Bulgaria during World War II, as Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum has accurately noted, “at one and the same time . . . some Jews were saved, others – persecuted, and still others – deported and destroyed.”

Consider whether King – or Tzar – Boris III of Bulgaria should be hailed as the rescuer of 48,000 Bulgarian Jews, or whether he should be condemned as the man ultimately responsible, or at the very least co-responsible, for the deportation to their death of 11,343 Jews from Thrace, Macedonia, and from the formerly Serbian district of Pirot, or whether the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

These questions have a particular urgency in light of what appears to be a coordinated campaign within Bulgaria to depict Boris as an entirely positive, heroic figure. Earlier this year, leaders of the Bulgarian Jewish community boycotted a government-organized ceremony meant to mark the 80th anniversary of the rescue of Bulgarian Jewry during the Holocaust, including a tribute to Boris and Queen Giovanna. Dr. Alexander Oscar, president of the Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria “Shalom” explained their absence from the event by saying, “Nobody from the community would have taken part in an event honoring the imaginary role of King Boris in rescuing the Bulgarian Jews and presenting a distorted history of the Holocaust.”

As Bulgarian Jewish journalist Emmy Barouh wrote in an open letter to Bulgarian President Rumen Radev on March 9 of this year: “There is no morality to be found in the sinister arithmetic that the lives of 50,000 were ‘paid for’ by the lives of 11,343. Omitting half of this somber ‘equation’ turns the ‘80th anniversary of the rescue’ into another episode of political exploitation of Bulgarian Jews.”

​Two Letters, Two Views

This debate is hardly new. Two letters to the editor published in The New York Times almost 30 years ago encapsulate and epitomize the essence of events that occurred in Bulgaria between 1940 and 1943.

The first of these, published on Oct. 16, 1993, was by Michael Bar-Zohar, at the time a visiting Israeli scholar at Emory University’s History Department in Atlanta, Georgia. Beginning from the premise that the Bulgarian rescue of that country’s Jews was “less known but more dramatic” than “the Danish rescue of Jews from the Nazis during World War II,” Bar-Zohar proceeded to set out – for the first time in print, at least to my knowledge – his rather romanticized and factually challenged presupposition on the fate of Bulgarian Jewry during the Holocaust:

“Bulgaria was Nazi Germany’s ally; its king, Boris III, was a personal friend of Hitler. The Fascist party was in power and the country swarmed with German troops.

“Nevertheless, when Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, Theodor Dannecker, came to Bulgaria to deport the Jews, this small Balkan nation refused to let them go. The young secretary of the Commissar for Jewish Questions, Liliana Panitza, discovered the secret agreement between her employer and the German envoy and hurried to inform Jewish and Bulgarian leaders of the forthcoming deportation.

“The news triggered an unprecedented effort led by the Eastern Orthodox Church, several Fascist leaders, intellectual and professional groups, and the King himself. Many Bulgarians considered their Jewish compatriots’ deportation a stain on Bulgaria’s honor. In open defiance of the Reich, Bulgaria refused to hand over its 50,000 Jews.”

The first problem, of course, is that these 134 quoted words contain a fair number of not-insignificant inaccuracies. To begin with, Bulgaria did not swarm with German troops – the country was not occupied by Nazi Germany in the winter and spring of 1943; while SS Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Dannecker was an aide of Eichmann’s and his representative in Bulgaria, Eichmann’s actual deputy was SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Rolf Günther; Liliana – or Lily – Panitza, the secretary and lover of Alexander Belev, Bulgaria’s Commissar for Jewish Questions, did alert some Bulgarian Jews to Belev’s and the Bulgarian government’s secret plans to deport them, but the second part of Bar-Zohar’s reference to her – that she also provided this information to ethnic Bulgarian (i.e., non-Jewish) leaders – does not appear to have any basis in fact, and there is no evidence to suggest that King Boris III “led” the efforts to prevent the deportation of Bulgarian Jews – at most, he was a reactive participant.

On Oct. 23, 1993, The New York Times published the second letter to the editor, this time by Hebrew University Professor Yehuda Bauer – still today one of the doyens of Holocaust historians. He pointed out in that letter that, while Bar-Zohar was “right to extol the humanity of Bulgarians during the Holocaust,” there was more to the story. It was true, Bauer wrote, that:

“An unlikely alliance of King Boris III, the Eastern Orthodox Church, members of the Fascist establishment and underground Communists and Socialists managed to save the Jews of “Old” Bulgaria from deportations to the death camps.

“However, the Bulgarian regime deported Jews from Sofia and other cities to exile locations within the country and despoiled the Jews of much of their very unimpressive property. Professor Bar-Zohar does not mention that the rescue action came after Stalingrad, and that the Bulgarians could read the writing on the wall.

“Most important, he also fails to mention the fact that the Bulgarians delivered 11,343 Jews from Bulgaria’s newly conquered territories in Yugoslav Macedonia and Greek Thrace to the Germans, who killed every one of them in the death camps in Poland. It is hardly an untarnished record.”

One significant difference between the two letters is their respective characterizations of those involved in preventing the deportation of the 48,000 Bulgarian Jews. Bar-Zohar wrote about the “unprecedented effort led by the Eastern Orthodox Church, several Fascist leaders, intellectual and professional groups, and the King himself.” Bauer, meanwhile, gave credit to an “unlikely alliance of King Boris III, the Eastern Orthodox Church, members of the Fascist establishment and underground Communists and Socialists.” As I already indicated, Bar-Zohar significantly overstated – and, for that matter, continues to overstate – the role played by Boris in this regard. In contrast, Bauer accurately included Boris among those individuals and groups – what Bauer insightfully called an “unlikely alliance” – who made the rescue possible.

Of course, the mere fact that someone belongs to a collective does not mean or imply that they are a driving or even a motivating force of that collective. 

A Human Drama

A brief summary of some of the highlights of this human drama seems in order here. Details of the relevant and complex chronology can be found in, among other works, “The Bulgarian Jews and the Final Solution, 1940-1944” by Frederick B. Chary; “The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust” by the late Franco-Bulgarian philosopher and literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov; Jacky Comforty’s “The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian Jews and the Holocaust,” written with Martha Aladjem Bloomfield; Nadège Ragaru’s “Et les juifs bulgares furent sauvés;” and Lea Cohen’s recently published “Salvation, Persecution, and the Holocaust in the Kingdom of Bulgaria (1940-1944).”

King Boris III ascended to his country’s throne on Oct. 3, 1918, following his father’s abdication. Beginning in 1935, he was the authoritarian ruler of Bulgaria until his sudden and suspicious death on Aug. 28, 1943. Boris himself does not appear to have been a fascist, but even while professing neutrality during the 1930s, he developed a friendship of sorts with Hitler – Boris was Hitler’s special guest at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

In February 1940, Boris appointed Bogdan Filov, who had studied archaeology at German universities and had an affinity for Germany, as Bulgaria’s prime minister. Filov, unquestionably with Boris’ knowledge and consent, appointed the openly pro-Nazi and antisemitic Petâr Gabrovski to the influential position of minister of the interior. Gabrovski, in turn, brought another outspoken fascist and virulent antisemite, the aforementioned Alexander Belev, into his ministry. Shortly thereafter, several significant events occurred in relatively rapid succession. 

First, Belev drafted and Gabrovski engineered the enactment of the Law for the Defense of the Nation which, like the Third Reich’s notorious Nuremberg Laws on which it was modeled, imposed significant legal restrictions on Bulgaria’s Jews. Its purpose, according to Gabrovski, as cited by Lea Cohen, was “to protect the national purity of the Bulgarians from the Jews, who, as part of international Jewry, are alien to the Bulgarian national spirit.”

In Nadège Ragaru’s words, this law, which was signed by Boris on Jan. 15, 1941, (a) “set the stage for identifying and socially and economically marginalizing Jews,” and (b) “ensured the segregation of Jews and non-Jews, including the banning of mixed marriages and of Bulgarian household staff being employed by Jews.” The Law for the Defense of the Nation, incidentally, was followed in short order by the Law for the Settlement of Land Property for Persons of Jewish Origin and the Law for the Taxing of Jewish Population. As Professor Rumyana Marinova-Christidi of Sofia University observed, antisemitism had become “state policy.”

Second, on March 1, 1941, Bulgaria formally allied itself with Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan. Third, in April 1941, following Germany’s and Italy’s military defeat of Yugoslavia and Greece, Bulgaria assumed military and administrative control over Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot. By a Bulgarian government decree of June 5, 1942, “All Yugoslav and Greek subjects of non-Bulgarian origin” residing in these territories acquired Bulgarian citizenship. However, Article 4 of this decree expressly excluded “persons of Jewish origin” from such Bulgarian citizenship, except for married Jewish women, presumably married to non-Jewish husbands.

Then, on Aug. 29, 1942, the die was effectively cast for the Jews of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot with the establishment of the Commissariat for Jewish Questions headed by Belev. 

On Feb. 22, 1943, Belev signed an agreement with Eichmann’s representative, Theodor Dannecker, to deport 20,000 Jews the following month – all the Jews living in Thrace, Macedonia, and Pirot, and the balance from Bulgaria proper, often referred to as “Old” Bulgaria. Plans for these deportations were meant to be kept secret, but at the beginning of March, news of the imminent tragedy independently came to the attention to a number of individuals. Lily Panitza, Belev’s secretary and lover, separately informed the vice president and a former president of the Central Consistory of Jews in Bulgaria of what was about to happen. The mayor of the southern Bulgarian town of Kyustendil alerted a Jewish friend that a train with empty box-cars had arrived at the station and that the town’s Jews were about to be taken away. 

A delegation from Kyustendil then traveled to Sofia, where they enlisted the help of Dimitâr Peshev, the deputy speaker of the Bulgarian National Assembly and a former minister of justice. Peshev, who had already been told of this development by Iako Baruh, a Zionist activist in Sofia, went all out to try to stop the deportations, in effect sacrificing his political career by confronting Filov and Gabrovski, eventually enlisting other parliamentarians as well. Peshev would write, “I made the decision to do everything in my power to prevent the execution of a plan that was going to compromise Bulgaria in the eyes of the world and brand it with a mark of shame that it did not deserve.”

Meanwhile, two metropolitans of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Stefan of Sofia and Kiril of Plovdiv, also got wind of the impending deportations and spoke out forcefully, both publicly and privately, against them. Kiril went so far as to threaten in a telegram to Boris that he would lie on the railroad tracks to prevent the trains from leaving.

In due course, Peshev, Metropolitans Stefan and Kiril, and other members of Bulgarian civil society prevailed on Boris not to allow the deportation of the Jews from “Old” Bulgaria but he adamantly refused to block or even speak out against the deportation of the Jews from Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot. Boris also agreed to have the Jews expelled from Sofia and several other cities, and many Bulgarian Jews were sent to labor camps. 

No one should be left with any doubts regarding the harsh conditions Bulgarian Jews were forced to endure after being forced to leave Sofia at the end of May 1943. Lea Cohen writes:

“In the deportation sites, the Jews were placed in terrible conditions, accommodated in houses and barracks in the Gypsy and Turkish neighborhoods, without the right of free movement, deprived of all means of subsistence, and even without household goods. They remained in these conditions until the Red Army entered Bulgaria, after which they began their chaotic return to their native places, where they found their homes occupied and their belongings stolen. They did not have any money, as their bank accounts had been blocked as early as 1941 and subsequently confiscated for the use of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs. All ready money and valuables had also been seized.”

“Some of My Best Friends”

In a way, Boris is emblematic of the inherent difficulty in coming to terms with what occurred in Bulgaria during the years of the Holocaust. While he may have held antisemitic views and on at least one occasion expressed these views quite forcefully, he does not appear to have disliked Jews viscerally or even ideologically. On the contrary, he apparently interacted positively with the Bulgarian Jewish community as late as the summer of 1942 and maintained cordial relationships with individual Jews. This is reminiscent of the classic protestation by many an antisemite that “some of my best friends are Jewish.”

At the same time, there is no question that Boris owned the Law for the Defense of the Nation, the establishment of the Commissariat for Jewish Questions, the discriminatory measures taken against Bulgarian Jews, and, at the top of his antisemitic credentials, the deportations from Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot. These deportations, incidentally, were planned and directed by Belev, who reported to Gabrovski and thus was subject to Boris’ ultimate control, and implemented by Bulgarian police and military units that were also under his control. 

Contemporary protestations, such as those by former King Simeon II – who, as Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was prime minister of Bulgaria from 2001 until 2005 – that Bulgaria’s and hence Boris’ “influence over the so-called ‘new lands’ . . . was very limited,” or that “In the years of World War II it was the Wehrmacht and Gestapo that had the decisive word on the fate of the ‘new lands’” are, to be charitable, unsupported by the facts. Far more authoritative is Dimitâr Peshev’s unambiguous assertion that “in fact there were no differences between these territories [that is, Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot] and other regions of Bulgaria in terms of their administration.”

It is also noteworthy that at a meeting with Stefan, Kiril, and the other metropolitans of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Boris expressed what were probably his true views about the Jews. According to the protocol of Boris’ speech to the Small Cabinet of the Holy Synod on April 15, 1943, he emphasized

“the enormous harm inflicted on humanity for centuries by the profiteering spirit of the Jews. This spirit has created hatred, loss of faith, moral degeneracy, and treason among men everywhere. This spirit of profiteering and negation has created and still creates discontent, quarrels, conflicts, wars, and calamities among peoples and societies. The present global cataclysm is in large measure the fruit of this profiteering spirit . . .”

Justice Jackson at Nuremberg

In order to place Boris’ attitudes and actions in context, an often-overlooked paragraph of Justice Robert H. Jackson’s opening address at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg is instructive. Jackson, as we all know, was chief of counsel for the United States at the historic trial of Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentropp, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, and 17 other senior officials of the Third Reich (plus Martin Bormann, who was tried in absentia). Referring to the defendants in the dock, Jackson said: 

“I know very well that some of these men did take steps to spare some particular Jew for some personal reason from the horrors that awaited the unrescued Jew. Some protested that particular atrocities were excessive, and discredited the general policy. While a few defendants may show efforts to make specific exceptions to the policy of Jewish extermination, I have found no instance in which any defendant opposed the policy itself or sought to revoke or even modify it.” 

I believe the caveat expressed by Jackson is helpful in our consideration of Boris’ behavior with regard to Bulgarian Jewry as well as the ultimately doomed Jews of Thrace, Macedonia, and Pirot. 

No one denies that he played a role and, to paraphrase Justice Jackson, “did take steps” in saving not just “some particular Jew for some personal reason” but 48,000 Jews from annihilation. But there also appears to be a broad consensus that Boris only did so after Peshev, Metropolitans Stefan and Kiril, and others in Bulgarian civil society had publicly expressed their outrage at the planned deportations. Even Bar-Zohar, who is one of the most prominent Boris apologists, conceded in a 2013 videotaped talk at the American University in Bulgaria that “under the pressure of the pro-fascist majority of the parliament, under the pressure of the church, after all these petitions of the people, he suddenly realizes that he can’t be the king of the Bulgarians and behave against the Bulgarian spirit. And then, two hours before the deportation, he issues the order, not one Jew leaves Bulgaria.”

How We “Do the Right Thing” Matters

Does it really matter, should it matter in this context whether Boris was the catalyst or a catalyst of the chain of events that led to this result, or whether his role was dictated by pragmatism, political opportunism, or some other reason? How we answer this question is an essential consideration in our assessment of Boris. In the final analysis, there is a pronounced difference between someone who does what we would call the “right thing” independently, proactively, out of a sense of moral or humanitarian urgency, and someone who does so reactively, as a matter of calculated expediency, or because they do not want the public opprobrium for not having done so. 

Still, to quote the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, “From 10 March 1943 until his death on 28 August of that year, the king held firm to the position that the Jews were not to be deported.” Fair enough, but, as Bauer pointed out in his 1993 New York Times letter to the editor, there is more, far more, to this story. 

While Boris was involved in the maneuvering to keep the Jews of “Old” Bulgaria in Bulgaria, he did not, to paraphrase Justice Jackson, take any steps whatsoever to spare the Jews of Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot from the horrors that awaited them. Metropolitan Stefan, for one, begged him to do so on several occasions, but to no avail. Boris could, for example, have accorded these “foreign” Jews Bulgarian citizenship since it was a decree from his government that had precluded them from acquiring this citizenship. Or he could have simply ordered that they not be deported. Or he could have at least spoken out publicly on their behalf.

It is safe to assume that he considered these Jews to be expendable and the price – perhaps, in his view, a small price – he and Bulgaria had to pay to at least somewhat satisfy his friend Hitler and Bulgaria’s ally, Germany. Thus, Boris consciously allowed them to be rounded up, detained in tobacco warehouses, and ultimately put on trains bound for Treblinka by Bulgarian soldiers and policemen. 

The record is clear that Boris did nothing, absolutely nothing, and uttered not one word to help the Jews in Macedonia, Thrace and Pirot. Instead, as Todorov stated categorically, “the king was in fact responsible for the deportation to the death camps of 11,343 people . . . .” 

Incidentally, under Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal and under Articles 7 and 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, this deportation falls four square within the definitions of both a war crime and a crime against humanity. ​And the failure on the part of the present-day Bulgarian government to publicly and unequivocally acknowledge that Bulgarians perpetrated this war crime and crime against humanity is a gross dereliction of its responsibility to the murdered Jews of Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot and to history. It also violates the government’s obligation to “safeguard the historical record” on which Bulgaria’s membership in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance is predicated.

Absolute Demonization vs. Mythologized Glorification

All of which leaves us with the realization that, while there are absolutes of good and evil, the human condition also inevitably incorporates an ambiguity in both good and evil.

Dimitâr Peshev, Metropolitan Stefan, and Metropolitan Kiril represent absolute good. All three have long been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Israel’s Holocaust remembrance center Yad Vashem.

Petâr Gabrovski and Alexander Belev, meanwhile, represent absolute evil. Gabrovski was executed and Belev killed after the Red Army took control of Bulgaria in 1944. I don’t think anyone is shedding any tears over either of them.

And King Boris III? He falls somewhere in between. He has check marks on both sides of the ledger – a ledger which, as Emmy Barouh points out, must be considered in its entirety. Accordingly, both the absolute demonization of Boris and the blind mythologized glorification of his actions during World War II, especially in the late winter and spring of 1943, are unconscionable distortions of history. 

To be valid, history must be predicated on absolute, uncompromising truth, not manipulation. Eighty years ago, 48,000 Jews were not deported from Bulgaria while 11,343 other Jews were cruelly loaded on trains bound for Treblinka, where they were murdered. These are two interdependent realities that cannot be and must not be allowed to be uncoupled.

The fact that 48,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved in no way diminishes the tragedy and in no way mitigates the horror of the 11,343 Jews who were sent to their death at the behest of the government of King Boris III. And the fact that the Jews of Macedonia, Thrace, and Pirot were deported to be killed takes nothing away from the equal truth that the same King Boris was part of, in Bauer’s words, the “unlikely alliance” that kept the Jews of “Old” Bulgaria from suffering the same fate.

IMAGE: Men from the Bulgarian Jewish community pray during a commemoration ceremony at Sofia’s synagogue on March 10, 2013. Bulgaria’s parliament, for the first time, admitted failing to save 11,343 Jews from territories under its control as it commemorated the start of deportations 70 years earlier. Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II “refused the deportation of over 48,000 Jews — Bulgarian citizens — to the death camps,” parliament said in a declaration. (DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images)

The post The Ambiguity of Evil and Good: A Tale of Holocaust Rescue and Deportation in Bulgaria appeared first on Just Security.

I want to lay out the case, including some of the gruesome details, regarding Karl Linnas not because I would ever suggest that he was representative of the Estonian people or Estonian society during the years of the Holocaust. He was not. I am doing so because he and a host of other Nazi collaborators like him are very much a part of Estonia’s recent past, a past that must be confronted and cannot be ignored or glossed over. His case serves as a starting point for placing the Holocaust in Estonia into a broader historical context, especially in light of today’s International Conference 105-75-35 in Tallinn, Estonia, marking the 105th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia, the 75th anniversary of the State of Israel, and the 35th anniversary of the rebirth of Jewish life in Estonia. (See related author’s note at bottom.) The conference is organized by the Jewish Community of Estonia, an affiliate of the World Jewish Congress for which I work.

Linnas had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1951, when he was in his early 30s, under the Displaced Persons Act, a statute enacted by the U.S. Congress shortly after the war to enable eligible European refugees who had fled from or been driven out of their countries of origin to enter the United States. The key word here is “eligible,” in that individuals who had participated in the Nazi atrocities against Jews and others during the Second World War were not covered by the Displaced Persons Act.

In his application, Linnas claimed that he had been a university student and a technical artist in Tartu, Estonia, between 1940 and 1943, that he had never served in the German military, and that he had not been a member of any political group or organization. On May 21, 1945, in Munich, Germany, and then again on August 17, 1951, upon entering the United States, Linnas twice stated in writing that he had “never advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person because of race, religion or national origin …”

Linnas then went on to live on Long Island, New York, with his family, working as a land surveyor. In 1960, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

A Murderous Nazi Collaborator

In fact, Linnas did not study at the University of Tartu – or anywhere else for that matter – between 1941 and 1943, and during those years he did much more than merely participate or assist in the persecution of people. In the early summer of 1941, he was an officer in the paramilitary organization known as the “Omakaitse” that assisted the troops of Nazi Germany in arresting, imprisoning, and executing unarmed civilians in German-occupied Estonia. And from August 1941 until May 1942 he was the commandant of the Tartu concentration camp.

There is no question or doubt regarding Linnas’ actions in that capacity. As I wrote in The New York Times on March 31, 1987, Linnas was a “brutal murderer” who “directed and participated in numerous mass executions of Jewish men, women and children.”

In 1979, a U.S. federal court stripped Linnas of his American citizenship on the grounds that he had lied on his visa application. In upholding an order for Linnas to be deported to the Soviet Union, which had sought his extradition and where he had previously been tried and convicted in absentia for war crimes, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that:

“Linnas’ duties as a concentration camp chief were such as to offend the decency of any civilized society. Eyewitnesses testified that Linnas supervised the transportation of prisoners from his camp to a nearby anti-tank ditch. On such occasions innocent Jewish women and children were tied by their hands and brought in their underwear to the edge of the ditch where they were forced to kneel. The guards then opened fire. The ditch became a mass grave. “There was also eyewitness testimony that Linnas on at least one occasion announced his victims’ death sentence at the side of the ditch and gave the order to fire. Linnas was also said to have then personally approached the edge of the ditch and fired into it.”

On one occasion, Linnas told a group of Jews at the camp that they would be leaving by bus for Riga in Latvia and therefore had to take all their belongings with them. The historian Anton Weiss-Wendt wrote in “Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust,” his book examining the Holocaust in Estonia, that “Linnas said the same thing to a little girl with a life-size doll, whom he helped onto the bus.” Later that day, Weiss-Wendt continued, a witness saw that same bus back in the camp, “yet empty; one of the guards had the doll.”

I became involved in the case of Karl Linnas in the winter and spring of 1987, when the Reagan administration was under pressure from Estonian and other émigré groups in the United States not to deport Linnas to Estonia – that is, in those days, to the Soviet Union. These groups objected on two grounds: they considered the anti-Communist Linnas and others like him to be heroic figures regardless of their collaboration with the Nazis; and they objected on principle to anyone, even a murderer, being extradited to a Soviet bloc country. Linnas’ lawyer and supporters were trying to find another country, possibly in Latin America, that might agree to give him sanctuary.

Need for Accountability

My firm position, and that of Holocaust survivors and their families generally, was that it was unacceptable for anyone who had brutally shortened the lives of thousands of Jews to be allowed to live out their days in comfort surrounded by family and friends. Linnas needed to be deported and held accountable for his crimes. “Anything less,” I wrote in my New York Times article, “would blatantly mock justice.”

On April 15 that year, the second day of the Jewish festival of Passover, I received a call from Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman that the government of Panama had publicly announced that it would take in Linnas. Presumably, the expectation was that because it was a Jewish holiday, Linnas could have been spirited out of the country before anyone had the time or opportunity to object.

I called the Panamanian Embassy in Washington, D.C. from my office in New York City and succeeded in reaching the ambassador’s deputy, who told me politely but firmly that his country had agreed to grant Linnas asylum on humanitarian grounds.

When I asked why they would help a war criminal who had been committed atrocities in a Nazi concentration camp, the diplomat replied that the Panamanian authorities had not been told anything about this.

I immediately telephoned a colleague at my law firm’s Washington office and asked him to copy and hand deliver two lengthy U.S. federal courts decisions regarding Linnas to the Panamanian diplomat. I did not want the Panamanians to be able to say that no one had provided them with evidence of Linnas’ crimes.

I then traveled to Washington with District Attorney Holtzman and Eli Rosenbaum, the general counsel of the World Jewish Congress at that time, to meet with the Panamanian ambassador to the United States, who assured us that indeed, they had not previously been advised of Linnas’ true history and that his government was reconsidering the matter. By the time we left the embassy, we were assured that Panama had withdrawn its offer of asylum.

Less than a week later, on April 20, I was at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport and watched as Linnas, 67, was put on a plane on his way to Tallinn, where he would die several months later in a prison hospital.

I felt a need to see for myself that a murderer of Jews was being brought to justice, a justice he had denied his victims 45 years earlier.

From Tolerance to Complicity

Estonia is different from other European countries, including other Baltic countries, in that it did not have a large, deeply rooted Jewish presence before the outbreak of World War II. The Jewish community of Estonia was only established in 1830, and between 4,200 and 4,500 Jews lived in the country in 1939, in contrast with more than 200,000 Jews in Lithuania and over 90,000 in Latvia. It must be emphasized here that government and civil society of the inter-war independent Republic of Estonia were extremely tolerant of their Jewish minority, and the Estonian Jewish community enjoyed substantial cultural autonomy under law after 1925.

All this changed drastically after the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940, followed by the German occupation beginning in 1941. An estimated 400 Estonian Jews were arrested and deported as class enemies during the Soviet occupation, and several thousand more fled as the Germans advanced eastward in the summer of 1940. Then, German SS and police mobile killing units, the so-called Einsatzgruppen, assisted by Estonian auxiliaries, methodically murdered most of the country’s remaining Jews so that by the Wannsee Conference on Jan. 20, 1942, at which the implementation of the Nazi Final Solution of the Jewish Question was formally set in motion, Estonia was the only German-occupied country declared to be Judenfrei, that is, free of Jews.

It did not remain so. In 1942, the Germans proceeded to deport tens of thousands of Jews from other parts of Europe to forced-labor camps inside Estonia, where many of them perished. As we have seen from the case of Karl Linnas, these camps were staffed by Estonians who zealously aligned themselves with the Nazi cause.

They were not alone. Many Estonian anti-Soviet — that is, anti-Communist — partisans adopted the Nazis’ toxic conspiracy theory — more accurately, false conspiracy myth — that Stalinist Bolshevism was in fact a Jewish-run and Jewish-dominated threat to both Germany and Estonia. Perhaps as a result, Estonian Jews were arrested in the summer of 1941 by members of the Estonian Omakaitse home guard or of the Estonian Security Police. Many, if not most, were executed almost immediately. Any purportedly political or ideological motivation fades rather rapidly when one realizes that children were among the murdered.

Let us also not lose sight of the fact that Estonia provided SS chief Heinrich Himmler with an Estonian SS Volunteer Brigade that eventually became a full-fledged Waffen-SS division, the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian).

A Different Estonia Today

In sharp contrast, Estonia today is at the forefront of Holocaust awareness and education in Europe. Speaking at the Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Anti-Semitism in October 2021, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas said:

“Crimes against humanity must be remembered and addressed so that future generations would know how to prevent them from happening again. The Estonian people have also suffered due to the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes and that is why we understand the victims of the Holocaust well. Learning from each lesson from history is important and as they say: those who do not remember the past live without a future. Often, however, someone’s personal experience or story is what has the largest impact – this is why we pay increasingly more attention to addressing the issue in Estonia in public spaces, exhibition halls, museums, and classrooms.”

There is little antisemitism in modern-day Estonia. The Jewish Community of Estonia enjoys strong support from its government, and we are grateful to the Estonian authorities for their support and protection of Jewish institutions in their country.

I want to commend Prime Minister Kallas and her government for their commitment to fighting manifestations of antisemitism in all parts of Estonian society. We are confident that they, working closely with the leaders of the Estonian Jewish community, will affirmatively and fully implement the pledges made in this regard at the 2021 Malmö Conference. The World Jewish Congress for its part will do all it can to help ensure that antisemitism, the hatred of Jews, is not able to spread in Estonia ever again.

Worrisome Signs

And yet, there are worrisome phenomena that we must not ignore.

What are we to make of the fact that Alfons Rebane, an Estonian army officer who fought in both the Wehrmacht’s 658th Eastern Battalion and the already mentioned 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian)? We know, of course, that Rebane was for many years after the war in the service of British intelligence, but that makes his glorification as a heroic figure no less troubling. As Alla Jakobson, the chairperson of the Jewish Community of Estonia, correctly noted when the plaque was unveiled in 2018, even though there is no evidence that Rebane murdered Jews, anyone who served in the SS in any capacity “is hardly worthy of commemoration.”

And by the way, Rebane was hardly some random apolitical soldier. In the 1930s, he was an Estonian military informant providing strategic information to the Abwehr, the Nazi German intelligence Service.

And then there is the bust of Harald Nugiseks in a school in the Estonian town of Bauka. Nugiseks was a decorated Oberscharführer, or squad leader, of the same Estonian 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.

We know from similar glorifications of Nazi collaborators in other European countries that they are far too frequently exploited by neo-Nazi and other extreme-right movements to promote antisemitism and other forms of bigotry and xenophobia.

In this context, it is worth noting that both Rebane and Nugiseks are prominently featured on Metapedia, an online encyclopedia that promotes fascism, neo-Nazism, antisemitism, white supremacism, white nationalism, anti-feminism, Islamophobia and Holocaust denial, among other bigotries.

Which brings us to a far-right former member of the Estonian parliament named Ruuben Kaalep, who used to be an editor of the Estonian language section of the aforementioned Metapedia encyclopedia. In one of his entries, he argued that the term “Holocaust” “is commonly used to refer to the alleged systematic extermination of Jews in World War II-era Germany,” and that “Zionists” are using these “allegations . . . to subjugate the peoples of Europe through a lasting sense of collective guilt.”

According to a 2019 article in the Eesti Ekspress, Kaalep maintains contact with a host of international white supremacist personalities like the American Richard Spencer and refers to himself as a “fascist non-Jew.”

Kaalep is dangerous for other reasons. He is a fascist who promotes fascism as a political ideology. “Supranational institutions like the EU,” he wrote in 2022, “are like parasites feeding off the life energy of a nation. When a nation is isolated from its roots it is no longer capable of resistance, then begins the actual extinction process. The Great Reset comes together with the Great Replacement.”

I focus on Kaalep because he and others like him are the symptom of a virus that in many ways is as dangerous as the Covid-19 pandemic, only there are no effective vaccines to counteract it. He reminds us that antisemitism and fascism go hand in hand – they are two faces of the same coin – and we have seen the result of this particular virus. Eighty years ago, Karl Linnas epitomized it. Today we see the same dangerous mindset in the Ruuben Kaaleps in our midst.

If we do not want the past to become prologue, we ignore him and his ilk at our peril.

(Author’s Note: This article is based on the keynote address I planned to give today at the International Conference 105-75-35 in Tallinn, Estonia, marking the 105th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia, the 75th anniversary of the State of Israel, and the 35th anniversary of the rebirth of Jewish life in Estonia. When the organizers of the conference asked me not to address the period of the Holocaust in Estonia, I declined on principle, and they cancelled the speech, which had been scheduled – and the subject of which had been known – for weeks. Just Security has agreed to proceed with the planned publication of this article based on the speech.)

 IMAGE: The only remaining survivor of Convoy 73, a train that left German-occupied France in May 1944 carrying 878 Jews, Henri Zadjenwergier (center), with Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet (third from right), Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo (second from right) and Tallinn mayor Edgar Savisaar, as they unveil a monument in Tallinn on June 2, 2010, during a ceremony honoring the memory of hundreds of French Jews who were killed by Nazi Germany in Estonia during the Holocaust. “Here, before this memorial, I am torn with feelings of unease because I survived, and by sadness in the face of the pain of the families,” said Zadjenwergier, 83. (Photo credit should read Arthur Sadvoski/AFP via Getty Images)

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Most Just Security readers probably haven’t yet heard or read about Vincent James Foxx. He hasn’t yet become nationally prominent, but he is a far-right, white supremacist, antisemitic provocateur who could be heading soon to a fascist get-together near you.

At the moment, Foxx is particularly relevant as an ideological soulmate – unfortunately, one of a whole host – of the by-now notorious Nick Fuentes. The same Nick Fuentes whom Ye, the antisemitic (“I’m going Death con 3 on Jewish people”) rapper formerly known as Kanye West brought to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The same Nick Fuentes who brayed, “All I want is revenge against my enemies and a total Aryan victory … I’m just like Hitler.”

Foxx and Fuentes – and too many like them — epitomize the existentialist threat posed by xenophobic white supremacists and neo-Nazis. And their impact is amplified by many others in supposedly mainstream circles who embrace them, or at least fail to firmly repudiate their actions.

Just two weeks ago, on Jan. 6, Foxx was the featured speaker at a gathering of the North Idaho Pachyderms Club, an organization of Republicans in Coeur D’Alene. As noted less than a year ago in The New York Times, northern Idaho, also known as the Idaho panhandle, has become “home to white supremacist groups and people ready to take up arms against the U.S. government.” Foxx was hardly the first repugnant figure embraced by the North Idaho Pachyderms Club. In May 2019, the group canceled an appearance by Brittany Pettibone, an alt-right white supremacist and anti-Muslim YouTuber banned from the United Kingdom, after activists announced that they were planning to hold an anti-hate rally outside the restaurant where Pettibone was scheduled to speak.

In his speech, Foxx warned against a plot by unnamed conspirators to “replace” white Americans and change the demographics of the United States “because they know that certain groups vote a certain way, and they know they can use that, that’s a benefit to them.” While he did not specifically say that by “they” he meant Jews, the allusion was unmistakable to anyone who followed Foxx on social media (more on that later).

The world is experiencing the most dramatic antisemitic upsurge since the Third Reich was reduced to rubble at the end of World War II. The trend is illustrated not only by the fact that an off-the-charts extremist like Foxx is welcome in an ostensibly respectable civic organization but also in a broad range of statistics from within the United States and abroad.

A recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that, “Over three-quarters of Americans (85 percent) believe at least one anti-Jewish trope, as opposed to 61 percent found in 2019. Twenty percent of Americans believe six or more tropes, which is significantly more than the 11 percent that ADL found in 2019 and is the highest level measured in decades.” This poll is decidedly not an outlier. According to the FBI’s hate crime statistics for 2021, anti-Jewish incidents accounted for 31.9 percent of religion-based hate crimes in the United States, more than 10 percentage points ahead of the next categories (anti-Sikh incidents, 21.3 percent; anti-Islamic incidents, 9.5 percent). Data collected by the New York City Police Department showed reports of 263 antisemitic hate crimes  in the city in 2022, compared with 121 and 196 such crimes in 2020 and 2021, respectively; and in 2021, neighboring New Jersey experienced a 25 percent increase in antisemitic incidents over the previous year.

Jews outside the United States confront conditions that are, if anything, even more dire. Speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on May 12, 2022, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, noted that, “something is very wrong in our world when, according to European Commission (EC) data, nine out of ten European Jews consider antisemitism as a serious problem. France, Germany, the Czech Republic together with other European countries too numerous to enumerate have all witnessed upticks, if not surges, in antisemitism. Conspiracy theories – whether they concern COVID-19 or an array of other charges – abound. In many countries, Jewish parents whose children attend Jewish schools instruct their children to remove their school uniforms when walking in the street.”

In June 2022, the German government reported that 3,027 antisemitic incidents occurred in 2021, up from 2,351 the previous year. The overwhelming majority of these were attributed to right-wing extremism, with a handful ascribed to Islamist groups. The British charity Community Security Trust recorded 2,255 anti-Jewish hate incidents in that country in 2021, up from 1,684 in 2020. France similarly experienced a rise in antisemitic and racist incidents, causing French President Emmanuel Macron to declare in December: “Let us open our eyes to the rise of xenophobia and antisemitism, tune our ears to the resurgence of racism. Let us never be fooled by the new clothing adopted by the same ideologies of division.”

Which brings us back to Foxx and the other white supremacists who are part of the toxic brew that constitutes, in Macron’s words, the present-day “rise of xenophobia and antisemitism…the resurgence of racism.” Foxx’s bile, which he regularly spews on ultra-right social media channels and platforms, is instructive. A few nuggets (followed by links to the source, with the “t.me” links being posts on the social media forum Telegram):

• “Jews do have a disproportionate amount of control over the media and this is something that cannot be denied. … The fact that Jews have a significant amount of control over the mainstream media can be concerning for some people. This is because it can lead to an unbalanced perspective on certain issues, as well as a lack of diversity in the media.” https://archive.ph/vc54U#selection-1603.0-1606.0

• “If we cut through the bull shit, we can find out that Jewish groups across the west are not only the biggest but also the most powerful proponents of third world migration into western counties [sic].” https://t.me/RealVincentJames/393

• “What’s with all these Israelis and American/European Jews trying to shape western societies?” https://t.me/RealVincentJames/1850

• The Holocaust “did produce a positive result later on for Jewish people in terms of financial gain and all sorts of things, they can use the Holocaust to shut down speech or any criticism of them and … the Holocaust led to the creation of the state of Israel, like it was an overall positive, like a net positive for Jewish people.” https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-attitudes-america-topline-findings

• “We are the Christian Taliban. This is the era of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is on the rise. … We are the Christian Taliban and we will not stop until The Handmaid’s Tale is a reality, and even worse than that.” https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1541796574325506053?s=20

• Slavery “was probably mostly kind of like camping. Society completely overblows it.” https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1569367085117231106?s=20&t=zuZT3bGIax8uxcPfuJiZWA

You don’t say.

Foxx’s invective echoes that of Fuentes, who calls Jews “a hostile tribal elite.” On another occasion, with a smirk on his face, he denied the Holocaust by asking how long it would take to make “six million batches of cookies.” And they are equal opportunity bigots. Similarly to Foxx’s prejudices extending to slavery above, Fuentes’ includes women – he declared in one of his rants that, “We need to go back to burning women alive.” The same Nick Fuentes made no secret of his agenda when he wrote in a Facebook post that “You can call us racists, white supremacists, Nazis, & bigots. … But you will not replace us. The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming. And they know that once the word gets out, they will not be able to stop us. The fire rises!”

Emulating their Brownshirt predecessors in pre-Nazi Germany, Foxx and Fuentes pride themselves on functioning outside the political mainstream as a destructive force whose goal is to reshape the United States in their image – with the tiki torch-carrying Charlottesville marchers chanting “Jews will not replace us” as their opening act.

True, Foxx and Fuentes are still on the periphery, but nowhere near as much as they used to be. They emerge more and more frequently and brazenly from the shadows and constitute a vociferous, synergistic core element of a mushrooming anti-democratic wave that wants to turn back the clock to before civil rights, before equal rights, before women’s suffrage, before the enfranchisement of anyone who is not a white Christian according to their definition of the term. These are the folks who would want to roll back segregation, for whom Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down laws banning interracial marriage, is anathema, and who look back on the Jim Crow era as the good old days. They are also truly hostile homophobes. Foxx, for example, advocates “kidnapping the children away from gay people.”

Foxx, Fuentes, and their ilk are also particularly dangerous because there are far too many politicians who recognize them for who and what they are, but who refuse to repudiate them for fear of antagonizing them or their followers. Remember the conservative German politicians who were convinced that they could control Hitler? Remember how far that got them? Foxx and Fuentes also are cast in the same mold as David Duke, the erstwhile Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1989 and ran, albeit unsuccessfully, for the U.S. Senate and Governor of Louisiana.

Foxx similarly could make a credible run for public office in, say, Idaho with the backing of not only the North Idaho Pachyderms Club, but also My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell. This past September, Lindell gave viewers of Foxx’s social media platform, DailyVeracity.com, a generous discount. “Big shoutout to Mike Lindell,” Foxx announced in a livestream on his website. “Because he has given us an opportunity to sell some pillows on DailyVeracity.com, which is awesome. We get like 50 percent of whatever you get from MyPillow.com with the [code] ‘VinceJames.’” Just imagine the extent to which Lindell might be inclined to finance Foxx’s future political ambitions, assuming, of course, that he has any money left at that point, considering the lawsuits against him.

I am not suggesting that contemporary antisemitism emanates only from the extremist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi right. Far from it. As Julia Jassey, the CEO and co-founder of the student activist organization Jewish on Campus, said succinctly, “All over the country, Jewish students face unjust treatment due to their identities.”

Still, as the son of two survivors of the Nazi death and concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the hate-filled ideology espoused by the likes of Foxx and Fuentes resonates ominously. Simply put, it was men like Foxx and Fuentes who, speaking German rather than English, murdered my grandparents, my mother’s son, my parents’ siblings, and millions of other European Jews during the Holocaust.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on Jan. 27, reminds us that Vincent James Foxx and Nick Fuentes do not exist in a vacuum, and that we ignore them at our collective peril. For remembrance not to be a hollow, ritualized exercise on that day and going forward, we must consciously view the present through the prism of the past. And that demands that we – individually and as a global society – do everything in our power to fight against any and all manifestations or personifications of the antisemitism, white supremacism, and overall bigotry that paved the road to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

IMAGE: Police monitor the scene from a nearby rooftop as demonstrators gather near the site of a planned speech by white nationalist Richard Spencer, who popularized the term ‘alt-right’, at the University of Florida campus on October 19, 2017 in Gainesville, Florida. (Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images)

The post Coming Soon to a Fascist Get-Together Near You appeared first on Just Security.

On July 10, 1995, 26-year-old Nihad ‘Nino’ Ćatić delivered his last radio broadcast from Srebrenica:

“Srebrenica is turning into a vast slaughterhouse. The killed and wounded are being brought to the hospital continuously. It is impossible to describe it. Each second, three deadly projectiles are falling on this town. Seventeen casualties have just been brought to the hospital, as well as 57 severely and lightly wounded people. Will anyone in the world come and witness the tragedy that is befalling Srebrenica and its residents? This is an outrageous crime against the Bosniak population of Srebrenica. The people of this city are disappearing.”

The following day, as troops from the breakaway predominantly Serb part of Bosnia, Republika Srpska, began implementing the final horrific stage of the genocidal slaughter of Srebrenica’s Bosniak inhabitants, Nino told his mother that he and his friends planned to escape through the woods. Hajra Ćatić remembered watching her son and the other young people walking away. “I kept looking at them as they faded away through the forest. That is the last time I saw Nino. At the petrol station. Then he faded away into the column.”

Hajra Ćatić kept a recording of Nino’s last broadcast on her mobile phone. “When I lie down and when I get up,” she said, “I lie down with that sentence: ‘Srebrenica is turning into the biggest slaughterhouse.’ I mean, it never goes out of my head, I can’t forget.”

Hajra Ćatić spent more than 26 years searching in vain for Nino’s remains. She founded and headed the Association of the Women of Srebrenica, devoting herself tirelessly to ensuring that the horrors and suffering endured by the Bosniak people in the Srebrenica genocide would never be forgotten. She was a driving force behind the creation of this powerful and moving Memorial here at Potočari.

Sadly, Hajra Ćatić died last November without ever having the closure of being able to bury her child.

Numbers and statistics are by definition anonymous and can be simultaneously overwhelming and desensitizing. We have difficulty visualizing 8,372 murdered men and boys, their images and faces merging into one another, just as we are unable to conceptualize the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

The survivors, of course, and the families of the victims, carry their loved ones in their hearts and in their minds, today and every day.

In order for the rest of us to be able to truly relate to the enormous human tragedy of the Srebrenica genocide, especially on a day like today, we, too, must think of the individual victims, and try to imagine their fear, their anguish, their pain, and the monstrous way they were killed.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to dedicate my remarks here today to the memory of Nino and Hajra Ćatić in the hope that through them we can expand our remembrance to encompass all those whose lives were so brutally cut short in and around Srebrenica by individuals who showed no human compassion or decency, and to enable us to empathize, if not identify with, all those who suffered so terribly during and in the 27 years since the Srebrenica genocide.

What can I, the son of two survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, tell you, the survivors of the Srebrenica genocide and your families that you don’t already know and feel?

We understand, of course, how heartbreaking this anniversary is for you. But it is also of momentous significance for all who care about international human rights, for all who have a conscience.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel said, “Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

In July of 1995, Srebrenica indeed became the center of the universe, and the international community must be forced to remember the crime against humanity, the genocide, that it allowed to happen here because of its abject failure and refusal to prevent it from happening.

It’s not that the world did not have ample warnings. Nino Ćatić was far from alone in trying to sound the alarm. Samantha Power, David Rohde, and other war correspondents had covered the gruesome developments of the war in Bosnia. But their words failed to set the world on fire, just as 42 and 43 years earlier, the reports of the systematic annihilation of European Jewry fell largely on deaf ears.

Where, then, do we go from here? What do we – both you who suffered through this genocide and we who were not there – need to do together going forward?

My friend Dunja Mijatović, the commissioner for human rights of the Council of Europe, has called for July 11 to be declared an official Remembrance Day of the Srebrenica genocide.

Just as Jan. 27, the date that the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945, is observed around the world as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is critical for the entire international community to follow the example of the European Parliament and formally commemorate the Srebrenica genocide every year on July 11. This should be done not just out of respect for its victims, but as a public countermeasure to the repeated efforts, especially — but by no means exclusively — in Republika Srpska, to deny this genocide.

Let me make myself very clear. We all want reconciliation; indeed, we need reconciliation for society to move on after genocides and other crimes against humanity. But any genuine reconciliation must be rooted in truth, in a common understanding of established facts. And the facts are that, over the course of several days beginning on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb paramilitary thugs commanded by General Ratko Mladić murdered more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys between the ages of 12 and 77 from Srebrenica and its surroundings, which the U.N. Security Council had previously designated “as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or other hostile act.”  Bosnian Serb forces also forcibly and viciously expelled 25,000 Bosniak women, children, and elderly men from the Srebrenica enclave.

We cannot allow the deniers of the Srebrenica genocide to continue to spread their lies with impunity, or to try shamelessly to shift the blame to the victims, as was done last year in a report by a self-styled “independent” commission appointed by authorities of the Republika Srpska, now an “entity” cemented into the 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the fighting but created a dysfunctional system of governance for Bosnia that threatens the peace to this day. That report was an intellectual and jurisprudential abomination that flies in the face of unambiguous and consistent findings by the International Court of Justice and numerous panels of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that a genocide was indeed perpetrated at Srebrenica.

Nineteen years ago, when the first 600 victims of the genocide whose remains had been identified were buried here, a survivor, Almedina Dautbašić, expressed the moral imperative that must be our guiding principle in confronting the perpetrators of all genocides and crimes against humanity and in challenging the unscrupulous genocide deniers who seek to falsify and desecrate history:

You did kill our children, our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, our husbands. You did try to kill a whole people. But remember, you did not kill our memory, because as of today, it will be stronger than any evil that you did to us … Our remembering your crime is our right and our pledge.

Today and tomorrow, we who were not there stand in full solidarity with the survivors and their families. Let us dedicate ourselves together to permanently enshrining the genocide that occurred at Srebrenica and Potočari in the annals of humankind, for the sake of remembrance, of course, but also, equally importantly, as a warning.

IMAGE: Bosnian Muslim women, family members of victims of Srebrenica 1995 massacre, gather prior to the burial ceremony of caskets with body remains of their relatives at the memorial cemetery in village of Potocari, near Eastern-Bosnian town of Srebrenica, on July 11, 2021. The date marked the 26th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. (Photo by ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP via Getty Images)

The post Commemorating the Srebrenica Genocide: A Warning for Humankind appeared first on Just Security.

As the son of two survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen who were deeply committed to transmitting to future generations evidence of the crimes perpetrated against European Jewry during the Holocaust, I am especially appalled by the report’s shameless manipulation of the truth. It is a document that deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history, used only to demonstrate the moral failing of individuals — the proverbial “useful idiots,” as it were — who engage in genocide denial and distortion.

The report is an embarrassment to scholarship and flies in the face of the established record in international law. In addition to being a legal and factual abomination, it blatantly ignores one judgment after another by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The commission instead props its report heavily on one dissenting trial opinion in an early ICTY case. It also depicts as gospel the writings of largely discredited Srebrenica genocide deniers, without addressing the writings of historians and legal scholars who have reached diametrically different conclusions.

In more than 1,000 pages, this report single-mindedly rejects or ignores the findings of a succession of international tribunals, including not only the ICTY but also the International Court of Justice at the Hague, that the slaughter of some 8,000 Bosniak – that is, Bosnian Muslim – men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica in July 1995 at the hands of Bosnian Serb paramilitary troops and the simultaneous forcible deportation from there of more than 25,000 Bosniak women, children, and elderly men constituted genocide.

The paramilitary forces in question were in the service of ultra-nationalist Bosnian Serbs who in 1991-1992 refused to be part of the newly established Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and instead set up the separatist Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, known as Republika Srpska. The Serb-dominated Republika Srpska subsequently became one of the two entities that make up the multi-ethnic state of Bosnia and Herzegovina pursuant to the 1995 Dayton Accords, the peace agreement that ended the brutal Bosnian armed conflict but has maintained and reinforced ethnic divisions.

The report also repeatedly casts the Bosniaks as aggressors and the Bosnian Serbs as victims in a rewriting of history reminiscent of Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’ justifications for Nazi German antisemitism.

The report constitutes the desperate continuation of a quarter century of efforts by Bosnian Serb nationalists and their acolytes to persuade the world that what happened at Srebrenica was not a genocide. These efforts range from attempts to dispute the death toll to blaming the victims for the slaughter by claiming that it was a reaction to Bosniak provocations. In 2018, the Republika Srpska parliament rejected a 2004 report by a previous Republika Srpska government that acknowledged the Srebrenica massacre.

Cynical Choice of Commission Head

A particular cynical feature of the ongoing genocide-denial campaign was the appointment of Israeli academic Gideon Greif to head the Independent International Commission of Inquiry, presumably to lend an aura of pseudo-scholarship to what was clearly intended to be yet another refutation, or at least whitewashing, of the widespread violations of international law – among them horrific crimes against humanity and genocide – committed by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries and their handlers during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Greif has long been a popular figure among Serb nationalists, and his appointment as head of this particular commission in 2019 came as no surprise. Over the years, Greif has made a point of wildly exaggerating the number of Serb victims during World War II at Jasenovac, a complex of five concentration camps often referred to as the “Auschwitz of the Balkans.” Jasenovac was the most notorious of a network of such camps run by the fascist Ustaša movement in the Independent State of Croatia, an autonomous Nazi puppet state established in 1941. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, somewhere between 77,000 and 99,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma, and Croat opponents of the Ustaša regime were brutally murdered at Jasenovac. The Jasenovac Memorial Site has identified by name 83,145 victims who perished there. And yet, Greif has repeatedly inflated the number of Jasenovac victims, to the dismay of responsible historians. In 2019 alone, he set the number at “at least 800,000,” and “at least 700,000.” – as if the actual record of Ustaša crimes wasn’t bad enough.

In the case of this latest report on the Srebrenica genocide (hereinafter referred to as the Greif Report), the commission members claim that “we kept our distance from all views and policies of any official institution, so as to maintain our strict neutrality and independence” (p. 18). Other members of the commission included, among others, a professor of political science at the University of Vienna; a professor of political science at the Graduate School of Social Design Studies at Rikkyo University in Tokyo; a licensed clinical psychologist who is an affiliate professor of justice at the University of New Hampshire-Durham; an official of the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Nigeria holding the rank of general; and a German lawyer “with a special interest in international litigation cases as well as cases of international humanitarian law.” (Greif Report, p. 1105) Yet their product is essentially nothing more than an elaborate regurgitation of the decades-long Srebrenica genocide denial by Republika Srpska and Serb nationalist politicians, pseudo-academics, and others.

The report concludes “after a thorough investigation . . . that neither the individual crime of genocide nor genocide in general took place in Srebrenica” and that “there is no indication that there was a special intent to commit genocide. Furthermore, no substantial part of the protected group of Muslims in Bosnia was destroyed.” (Greif Report, p. 86.)

A parallel commission headed by Professor Raphael Israeli issued an earlier report dated October 2020 “on Sufferings of Serbs in Sarajevo between 1991 and 1995.” This report was similarly designed by all appearances to exonerate the Republika Srpska leadership and armed forces of responsibility for the carnage they brought upon the Bosnian capital. It concluded broadly (at p. 1004), that, “[t]he Bosniak nationalist myth of the intended Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims has definitively been dispelled.”

The two commissions were set up at the initiative of Milorad Dodik, a former prime minister, then president of Republika Srpska and now the Serb member of the tripartite presidency of Bosnia. The commissions were formally appointed by consecutive decisions (04/1-012-2-345/19 and 04/1-012-2-346/19) “of the Government of Republika Srpska … dated February 7, 2019.”

Twisted Logic

A point-by-point dissection of the Greif Report’s chain of specious arguments might lend too much credence – and test the patience of readers of this article. But some elements are particularly illustrative of the twisted logic.

First, some background seems in order. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was created in the aftermath of World War I out of Balkan regions of the defunct Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Between 1945 and 1980, the independent Communist and former anti-fascist partisan leader Josip Broz Tito kept Yugoslavia’s internal domestic tensions, fueled in part by ethnic rivalries, largely under control. Within a decade of Tito’s death, however, the nationalist Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, pushed the envelope with respect to Serbian domination of the country, effectively blowing up the intricate and delicate balance of power that had been maintained since the end of World War II.

As I have previously written in Just Security, during the brutally fought 1992-95 Bosnian War, the paramilitary forces of what was then the Bosnian Serb breakaway proto-state of Republika Srpska, with the support of the neighboring Serbian government, engaged in a savage campaign to expel non-Serbs from the predominantly ethnic Serb part of Bosnia. It should be noted that war crimes were commonplace in this tragic conflict, and that Bosnian Serbs were not the only ones who committed them.

In 1993, the U.N. Security Council designated the eastern Bosnian town of “Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or other hostile act.” Over the course of several days beginning on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Ratko Mladić murdered approximately 8,000 Bosniak men and boys between the ages of 12 and 77 from Srebrenica and forcibly expelled around 25,000 Bosniak women, children, and elderly men from the Srebrenica enclave.

Beginning with the July 2001 conviction of Republika Srpska Major General Radislav Krstić, the ICTY has found six Bosnian Serbs, including Mladić and former Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadžić, guilty of genocide in connection with the Srebrenica killings. The International Court of Justice also held in 2007 that “the acts committed at Srebrenica … were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina as such; and accordingly that these were acts of genocide.”

True to form, the Greif Report engages in the age-old rationalization of blaming the victims for the racial, ethnic, or religiously motivated decimation committed by the Serb perpetrators, and, for good measure, disparages as illegitimate and politically biased not just the ICTY but just about all war crimes trials beginning with the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (which the report annoyingly persists in miscalling “Nuremburg” – see Greif Report, pp. 712, 713, 719, 724, 725).

The chapter entitled “Legal Findings on Srebrenica” begins with the proposition that the ICTY “has failed to demonstrate that the killings were committed with the special intent to destroy a substantial part of the protected group of all Muslims in Bosnia.” (Id., p. 55.) The report then concedes that:

It is well established that where a conviction for genocide relies on the intent to destroy a protected group “in part,” the part must be a substantial part of that group. The aim of the Genocide Convention is to prevent the intentional destruction of entire human groups, and the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole.” (Id., p. 58.)

Selective Citations

Among the authorities selectively cited for this proposition is the highly respected Nehemiah Robinson’s The Genocide Convention: A Commentary. The Greif Report cites Robinson three times for the proposition that, “a perpetrator of genocide must possess the intent to destroy a substantial number of individuals constituting the targeted group.” (Id., pp. 59, 86, 1035.)

The report takes note of but dismisses peremptorily the finding of the ICTY Appeals Chamber in the Kristić case that “[b]ecause most of the Muslim inhabitants of the region had, by 1995, sought refuge within the Srebrenica enclave, the elimination of that enclave would have accomplished the goal of purifying the entire region of its Muslim population.” (Id., p. 65.)

Applying tortured sophistry, including an artificial and legally baseless attempt to determine whether the Bosniaks of Srebrenica constituted a “substantial” or “significant” part of Bosnia’s Bosniak population as a whole, the Greif Report then concludes: “It is clear that the definition of a substantial group given by the chamber of appeals in Krstić and the later verdicts does not indicate that a real genocide had happened in Srebrenica.” (Id., p. 66.) The report continues in this bootstrapping vein with the wholly conclusory contention that:

Genocide as such could not have taken place in Bosnia. As the crime of genocide by its very nature requires the intention to destroy at least a substantial part of a particular group, genocide as such can only occur if a substantial part of a particular group is physically destroyed. This destruction must be established as an objective fact. (Id., p. 85.)

What the Greif Report fails to mention is that Robinson, the director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the World Jewish Congress, where I work, is recognized to this day as one of the leading authorities on the Genocide Convention, and wrote in the very commentary cited in the report that:

[T]the intent to destroy a multitude of persons of the same group because of their belonging to this group, must be classified as genocide even if these persons constitute only part of a group either within a country or within a region or within a single community, provided the number is substantial . . .. It will be up to the courts to decide in each case whether the number was sufficiently large. (Nehemiah Robinson, The Genocide Convention: A Commentary, New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress, 1960, p. 63, emphasis supplied.)

In other words, Robinson, the authority cited repeatedly by the Greif Report, stated unambiguously that whether or not the number of victims was “sufficiently large” to constitute a genocide was a matter for the courts to decide. And even though the Greif Report turns a blind eye to the decisions that followed the Krstić judgment, they are in fact determinative, both with respect to substantiality and as regards whether a genocide occurred at Srebrenica. In the interest of at least some measure of brevity, I will only highlight two of these ICTY judgments here.

ICTY Judgments

In Prosecutor v. Zdravko Tolimir (8 April 2015, IT-05-88/2-A), for example, the ICTY Appeals Panel held decisively and unambiguously that “the killing of at least 5,749 Bosnian Muslim men from Srebrenica” constituted a genocidal actus reus, perpetrated with the requisite genocidal intent. (¶ 190.) The Appeals Panel in Tolimir also affirmed the Trial Chamber’s holdings that (a) the infliction of serious bodily or mental harm on these Muslim men and boys prior to their being executed constituted a separate act of genocide; and (b) that the “the suffering of the women, children, and elderly forcibly transferred from Srebrenica amounted to serious mental harm under Article 4 of the [ICTY] statute” (¶ 195) – that is to say, another of the acts constituting genocide under both the ICTY Charter and the Genocide Convention.

The ICTY Trial Chamber convicted Ratko Mladić of genocide, holding that the Bosnian Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina constituted a protected class within the meaning of the ICTY’s statute. (Prosecutor v. Ratko Mladić, ICTY, Judgment, Trial Chamber, 22 November 2017, IT-09-92-T, ¶¶ 3442, 3538.) Among the bases for Mladić’s conviction were findings that Respublika Srpska units terrorized and abused the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica (Id., ¶ 3541); “that these acts constituted cruel and/or inhumane treatment (Ibid);” and that “the suffering endured by the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica in the period before they were killed, was intense, prolonged, and serious. Many spent their last moments in a state of desperation.” (Id., ¶ 3543.) The Trial Chamber concluded:

that thousands of Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica were subjected to serious bodily or mental harm which included: threats of death or treatment which brought them to the point of death or suicide; knowledge, in many cases, of impending death due to the terrible manner in which they were treated prior to being killed; and long-lasting physical and mental damage. The harm inflicted upon the victims by the perpetrators preceded the suffering which was inherently part of the acts of killing. The Trial Chamber, therefore, finds that the serious bodily or mental harm suffered by thousands of Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica contributed to the destruction of the targeted group as a result of actions of the physical perpetrators. (Id., ¶ 3544.)

The Mladić Trial Chamber also explained why the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica met the substantiality threshold for a finding of genocide despite the fact that they “formed less than two per cent of the Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole.” (Id., ¶ 3541.) The Trial Chamber made clear “that in determining the substantiality of the group, numerical size of the part in absolute terms is one factor among many.” (Id., ¶ 3550.) Among other factors to be taken into account are the “numerical size of the part in relation to the overall size of the group; the prominence of the part of the group within the larger whole and whether it is emblematic of the overall group or essential to its survival; the area of the perpetrators’ activity and control; and the perpetrators’ potential reach.” (Ibid.)

In finding substantiality, the Mladić Trial Chamber considered the joint impact of

the murder of many thousands of Bosnian-Muslim males, the destruction of political or religious monuments and homes, and the forcible transfer of Bosnian-Muslim women, children and the elderly. The physical perpetrators of these acts carried them out knowing that they would be demonstrative of the ultimate fate that awaited Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This demonstrative effect would be due to the symbolic impact of the murder of Bosnian Muslims in a designated safe area, the destruction of a number of religious buildings and Bosnian-Muslim homes in the region, and the forcible transfer of all or substantially all of the remaining Bosnian-Muslim population. (Id., ¶ 3553.)

Highlighting Dissent, Ignoring Court Majority

It would have been one thing if the Greif Report had addressed the substance of the Tolimir and Mladic judgments, as well as others (Karadžić; Popović, Beara, et al.) in which both trial and appeals chambers of the ICTY explained in detail why the crimes committed at Srebrenica indeed constituted genocide. But the authors of the report ignore them out of hand, choosing instead to hang their collective hat on a dissenting opinion, and from a trial judgment at that. The report devotes the better part of six pages (Greif Report, pp. 624-629) to Judge Prisca Matimba Nyambe’s dissenting opinion in Tolimir, in which she maintained that she would have acquitted the defendant. This is, of course, a wholly academic exercise in pseudo-intellectual futility, since it makes little sense to herald the merits of a dissenting opinion without giving any consideration to the facts and legal arguments set forth by the majority, or to the appellate judgment that affirmed the trial chamber’s finding of genocide.

This is akin to pretending to discuss California v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court’s most recent decision on the Affordable Care Act, by citing exclusively to Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent and studiously ignoring Justice Stephen Breyer’s majority opinion in which he was joined by six of his colleagues, including Chief Justice John Roberts. Or even worse, discussing a dissenting opinion of a lower federal court, in which the majority opinion was upheld by the Supreme Court with no Justice giving credence to the anomalous dissenter below. Or, for that matter, holding up Plessy v. Ferguson as the judicial authority on the constitutionality of racial segregation laws while ignoring the intervening decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

If a student of mine at Columbia or Cornell Law School were to present this type of argument in a term paper in my course on the law of genocide, they would not receive a passing grade.

The Greif Report goes to considerable and unbearable lengths to dismiss as “victor’s justice” and “retributive justice” not just the ICTY but the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo and the very rationales on which they were predicated. According to one of the more odd passages of the report, retributive justice “is designed to pay back suffering with proportional suffering, although proportionality can be very difficult to gauge … It is intended to be payback in kind or lex talions [sic]. Ironically, in the case of Bosnia and the ICTY retributive justice has pitted ethnic groups against each other, actually making ethnic hatred worse.” (Id., p. 680) It’s difficult to conceive of any purpose to including this argument except to undermine the legitimacy of the ICTY and its judgments, a goal popular in Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska, and among Serb nationalists in Belgrade in neighboring Serbia. But it is unlikely to find traction elsewhere.

Blaming the Victims

Yet another distasteful aspect of the Greif Report is its authors’ apparent determination to hold the Bosniaks responsible for the actions of the Bosnian Serbs, essentially blaming the victims. A large part of the report is devoted to the genocide perpetrated by the Croat Ustaša movement against Serbs and Jews in the Independent State of Croatia during World War II, as well as lengthy accounts of purported Bosniak aggressive actions beginning in 1991. According to this particular argument, Bosnian Serbs killed Bosniaks at Srebrenica not as part of a genocide but either (take your pick) as retaliation or to prevent future military actions by the said Bosniaks.

Blaming the Bosniaks for the atrocities committed against them is reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels’ justification of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies. Accusing Albert Einstein and the German Jewish writers Emil Ludwig and Lion Feuchtwanger of waging an “atrocity campaign” against Germany, Goebbels declared in April of 1933 that “the German nation was ready to leave [the Jewish] question in abeyance if Judaism will leave the German nation alone.”

Eight and a half years later, in November 1941 with the early stages of the Holocaust underway, Goebbels wrote in the weekly newspaper Das Reich:

If international finance Jewry should succeed in plunging the world into war once again, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the world and thereby the victory of the Jews, but rather the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe. . .. Every Jew is our enemy in this historic struggle, regardless of whether he vegetates in a Polish ghetto or carries on his   parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg or blows the trumpets of war in New York or Washington. All Jews by virtue of their birth and their race are part of an international conspiracy against National Socialist Germany. . .. [W]e must win the war. If we lose it, these harmless-looking Jewish chaps would suddenly become raging wolves. They would attack our women and children to carry out revenge. . .. There is no turning back in our battle against the Jews — even if we wanted to, which we do not. The Jews must be removed from the German community, for they endanger our national unity.

This is precisely the type of obscene argument we see in the Greif Report as a subliminal justification for what occurred in Srebrenica: the Bosniaks brought the genocide (which the report denies was a genocide) on themselves – don’t blame Mladić, don’t blame Karadžić, don’t blame the Republika Srpska soldiers who shot thousands of unarmed men and boys to death. At its roots, blame the Bosniaks instead.

Adding insult to the considerable injury inherent in actually having to plow one’s way through the Greif Report is its reliance on avowed Srebrenica genocide deniers. The commission members seemingly went out of their way buttress their arguments with quotations from individuals who have made a career of playing in Republika Srpska’s nationalist ideological sandbox.

To give only one example: the Greif Report cites Andy Wilcoxson for the proposition that that the “number of prisoners that the Bosnian Serbs executed is about 3,900, which is less than half of the 8,000 that have been alleged.” (Greif Report, p. 671.) As far back as 2011, Wilcoxson wrote that “evidence supporting the [ICTY’s] finding of genocidal intent is weak to non-existent.” But wait, there’s more. Somehow, the authors of the report neglected to mention that Wilcoxson has called the ICTY “the brainchild of the U.S. State Department and the CIA.” According to Wilcoxson, “the United States has used the Tribunal to advance its interests in the Balkans. . .. A verdict from the ICTY has the same credibility and conflict of interest problems as a study on the health effects of smoking that’s published by an institution that gets funding from the tobacco companies.” Yet, Gideon Greif and the rest of the commission overlooked this particular nugget or failed to fully inform their readers of Wilcoxson’s viewpoint.

The Greif Report is now a permanent part of the brazen refusal by the Republika Srpska authorities to own up to the atrocities committed in their name. Interestingly, on July 23, the Associated Press reported that Valentin Inzko, the top international official in Bosnia under the Dayton Accords in his capacity as head of Bosnia’s Office of the High Representative, imposed changes “to the country’s criminal code, introducing prison sentences of up to five years for genocide denial and for the glorification of war criminals, including naming of streets or public institutions after them.”

In the end, the saving grace of the Greif Report is that it is drafted so abysmally badly that it will appeal only to other Srebrenica genocide deniers, which may in the end be the report’s only positive attribute.

IMAGE: Bosnian Muslim women, family members of victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, gather prior to the burial ceremony forcaskets with remains of their relatives at the memorial cemetery in the village of Potocari, near the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, on July 11, 2021, which marked the 26th anniversary of the massacre. (Photo by ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP via Getty Images)

The post Deceptive Report Escalates Srebrenica Genocide Denial Campaign appeared first on Just Security.

On Nov. 20, 1945, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg began with the reading of the indictment. In the dock sat 20 of the most prominent leaders of the Nazi German Third Reich as well as the publisher of a semi-official antisemitic tabloid. Among the charges leveled against the defendants, alongside war crimes and crimes against peace, was a cause of action newly minted in the tribunal’s Charter, crimes against humanity. The charge encompassed “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war,” as well as “persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds.”

Equally important, the victims of this newly codified category of crimes were brought out of the shadows and accorded the dignity of formal recognition of their suffering. In a global environment still rife with antisemitic mindsets, the indictment charged the defendants with engaging “in a program of relentless persecution of the Jews, designed to exterminate them.”  The indictment went on to specify that:

The program of action against the Jews included disfranchisement, stigmatization, denial of civil liberties, subjecting their persons and property to violence, deportation, enslavement, enforced labor, starvation, murder and mass extermination. . . . Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in the parts of Europe under Nazi domination, it is conservatively estimated that 5,700,000 have disappeared, most of them deliberately put to death by the Nazi conspirators. Only remnants of the Jewish population of Europe remain.

From the perspective of 2020, with institutions such as the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in our rearview mirror, holding national leaders such as Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadžic and Rwandan Prime Minister Jean Kambanda accountable for atrocities committed against national, religious, or ethnic groups has become unremarkable, if not the norm. Both were tried for and convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity and are serving life sentences.

In 1945, however, the very concept of bringing senior German government officials like Hitler’s designated successor, Hermann Göring, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Armaments Minister Albert Speer to justice for any reason before an international tribunal such as this one was unprecedented. Formally charging them with the mass murder of millions, including their own nationals, constituted a 180-degree turn in jurisprudence.

Turning a Blind Eye to Barbarity

The conventional understanding that national leaders could act with impunity within territories under their control had been expressed succinctly in 1915 by Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau had alerted the State Department from Constantinople that “Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress.” He subsequently wrote in his memoirs that, “Technically, of course, I had no right to interfere. According to the cold-blooded legalities of the situation, the treatment of Turkish subjects by the Turkish Government was purely a domestic affair; unless it directly affected American lives and American interests, it was outside the concern of the American Government.”

Following the end of World War I, the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties, appointed at the second plenary session of the Paris Peace Conference, issued a report. It set forth a long series of offenses committed by the so-called Central Powers – that is Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, together with the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria – including murders and massacres, torture of civilians, deliberate starvation of civilians, rape, abduction of girls and women for the purpose of enforced prostitution, deportation of civilians, and internment of civilians under inhuman conditions.

The commission found that the Central Powers had carried out the war “by barbarous or illegitimate methods in violation of the established laws and customs of war and the elementary laws of humanity.” The commission concluded that:

All persons belonging to enemy countries, however high their position may have been, without distinction of rank, including Chiefs of States, who have been guilty of offenses against the laws and customs of war or the laws of humanity, are liable to criminal prosecution.

The commission’s recommendations were never implemented. In a strong Memorandum of Reservations, the U.S. members of the commission, rejecting the very notion that there was such a thing as “laws of humanity” in international law, argued that “moral offenses, however iniquitous and infamous and however terrible in their results, were beyond the reach of judicial procedure and subject only to moral sanctions.”

A `Declaration on Atrocities’

Over the course of World War II, however, political if not yet judicial attitudes began to change. The news from Europe of the carnage being perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its multinational accomplices proved impossible to ignore or side step. On Nov. 1, 1943, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union issued a Declaration on Atrocities, in which they gave “full warning” that “German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in . . . atrocities, massacres and executions” would be tried in the countries where “their abominable deeds were done.” The declaration also served notice that “major criminals whose offences have no particular geographic location . . . will be punished by a joint decision of the Governments of the Allies.”

On May 2, 1945, President Harry Truman appointed U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson “as the Representative of the United States and as its Chief of Counsel in preparing and prosecuting charges of atrocities and war crimes against such of the leaders of the European Axis powers and their principal agents and accessories as the United States may agree with any of the United Nations to bring to trial before an international military tribunal.” Over the course of the following several months, Jackson negotiated with representatives of the British, Soviet, and French governments what would become the Charter of the IMT, including the formal introduction into international jurisprudence of crimes against humanity.

In his opening address on the second day of the tribunal, Jackson set forth in detail why he believed that “The most savage and numerous crimes planned and committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews.” In so doing, he placed what we now refer to as the Holocaust at the core of the charges against the erstwhile leaders of the Third Reich. “The persecution policy against the Jews,” he said,

commenced with nonviolent measures, such as disfranchisement and discriminations against their religion, and the placing of impediments in the way of success in economic life. It moved rapidly to organized mass violence against them, physical isolation in ghettos, deportation, forced labor, mass starvation, and extermination. . . . The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jew was so methodically and thoroughly pursued, that despite the German defeat and Nazi prostration this Nazi aim largely has succeeded. Only remnants of the European Jewish population remain in Germany, in the countries which Germany occupied, and in those which were her satellites or collaborators. Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in Nazi-dominated Europe, 60 percent are authoritatively estimated to have perished. Five million seven hundred thousand Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons. History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.

Nuremberg permanently transformed international human rights law in that it not only legitimized a cause of action for crimes against humanity, but made possible the adoption of the Genocide Convention and the eventual establishment of the International Criminal Court.

That’s the good news.

Seventy-five years later, we must take stock and acknowledge that the international community has not come close to putting an end to genocide and other equally heinous crimes against humanity. One need only recall the genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, and at Srebrenica, or consider the present-day plight of the Rohingya. Still, thanks to the precedent set at Nuremberg, we have at least established the principle that the perpetrators of such monstrous crimes can and must be brought to justice. Scant progress perhaps, but progress nonetheless.

IMAGE: Prosecutor Robert Jackson at Nuremberg Trials, Nov. 21, 1945. Courtesy: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum via Wikimedia Commons.

The post 75 Years Ago at Nuremberg: Giving a Name to Crimes Against Humanity appeared first on Just Security.

Bergen-Belsen was initially intended to be a “residence” or transit camp for Jewish inmates whom the Germans wanted to exchange for prisoners of war held by the Allies. Its population increased dramatically as the Red Army moved rapidly westward in the latter part of 1944 and the Germans evacuated Jewish prisoners from camps in Nazi-occupied Poland to camps in Germany, often on forced death marches. The number of prisoners at Bergen-Belsen grew from around 7,300 in July 1944 to 15,000 in December of that year, 22,000 in February 1945, and 60,000 when the British entered the camp in April 1945.

Many of both the dead and the surviving inmates of Belsen had been brought there from the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland where approximately 1 million Jews were murdered. A substantial number of the SS officers and guards taken into custody by the British after the liberation of Belsen had also been transferred there from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

And yet, when the Belsen Trial, the first Nazi war crimes trial, began before a British military tribunal in the German city of Lüneburg 75 years ago on Sept. 17, 1945, to try the camp’s SS officers and personnel, the prosecutor, Colonel T.M. Backhouse, essentially ignored or glossed over the victims’ identity as Jews in his opening statement. Instead, he euphemistically referred to “the persons interned both at Auschwitz and Belsen” as “persons who had been deported from [Nazi German-] occupied countries . . . either because of their religion, because of their nationality, because of their refusal to work for the enemy, or merely because they were prisoners of war who it was thought might conveniently be used in such places or exterminated in such places.”

Backhouse similarly dejudaized the killings at Auschwitz by speaking generally of the “mass murder of every person unfit to serve the Reich.” He never told the tribunal that the transports that arrived there were made up predominantly of Jews, or that the “persons” who were “gassed deliberately and killed” there were almost exclusively Jewish. He likewise made no mention of the fact that “the old, children, pregnant women, weak, or sick, or those showing signs of unfitness” who were “loaded on lorries and taken straight to the gas chambers where they were scientifically murdered” were Jews who were murdered only and exclusively because they were Jews.

Backhouse’s only mention of Jews on the first day of the trial was a reference to “45,000 Greek Jews” who were taken to Auschwitz. On the second day of the trial, the first prosecution witness, Brigadier H.L. Glyn-Hughes testified that upon arrival at Belsen, the British had found undelivered Red Cross parcels “sent by Jewish societies for the Jews in the camp.” Otherwise, there was nothing throughout the first four days of the trial to indicate that the crimes committed by the defendants at Auschwitz and Belsen were in fact an integral element of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

One can only speculate as to the rationale for the prosecution’s initial reticence to emphasize the antisemitic essence of the crimes with which the defendants were charged. One possible explanation is that the British military authorities did not want to strengthen the political hand of the Jewish Displaced Persons in Germany and Austria, who were fighting to be formally recognized as Jews rather than as nationals of their countries of origin, something the British military authorities did not want to do. While the liberated concentration camp inmates from western European countries like France and the Netherlands willingly returned to their pre-war homes, the Jewish survivors from Poland and other eastern European countries did not want to go back to what they believed were hostile antisemitic societies. The Jewish DPs, who openly asserted their Zionist ideology and aspirations, also repeatedly protested publicly against the British policy of keeping Jewish immigration to Palestine at a bare minimum.

Alexander L. Easterman, the political secretary of the World Jewish Congress who attended the Belsen trial as an observer, wrote in his report dated Sept. 17, 1945, that, “From the Jewish viewpoint, it is a grievous disappointment in that there is a complete absence in the indictment of the slightest suggestion of the colossal crime against the Jews resulting in the annihilation of six million souls. The word ‘Jew’ is not mentioned once in the preliminary formal proceedings.”

A Dramatic Shift

But on Sept. 21, the fifth day of the trial, this state of affairs changed dramatically. That was when my mother, Dr. Ada Bimko (who would go on to marry my father in 1946), took the stand. She was a 33-year-old dentist who had been an inmate at both Auschwitz-Birkenau and Belsen. When asked if she was of Polish nationality, she replied, according to transcripts, “I am a Jewess from Poland.” Asked why she was arrested, she said, “During that week, all of the Jews of the town where I was living were arrested, and because of my being a Jewess, I was sent to Auschwitz camp.”

My mother told the tribunal that upon leaving the train when they arrived at Auschwitz, they were lined up, men on one side, women on the other; that an SS man pointed at them, saying “Right” and “Left;” that all but about 250 women and 250 men were loaded onto trucks and taken away; that “later on I was told that they were sent to the crematorium and gassed;” and that among those taken to the gas chamber were her parents, her first husband, and her six-year-old son.

In light of of her medical training, my mother was assigned to work in the infirmary of the Auschwitz sub-camp of Birkenau, also referred to as Auschwitz II. She has been credited with saving the lives of women inmates there by performing rudimentary surgeries and sending them out of the infirmary in advance of selections for the gas chambers. In November 1944, she was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where she and a group of other prisoners kept 149 Jewish children alive through the brutal winter of 1945. Immediately following the liberation, the British appointed her to organize and head a team of doctors and volunteers from among the healthier inmates to work alongside the British military medical team in an effort to try to save as many of the critically ill survivors as possible.

At the trial, my mother testified that there were “three methods of selection” at Auschwitz: “The first one immediately at the arrival of the prisoners; the second in the camp among the healthy prisoners; and the third in the hospital amongst the sick.”

She said that a camp doctor was always present, as well as other SS men and women, and described the selections she had seen at the hospital: “All the sick Jews were ordered to parade quite naked in front of the doctor, and they had to pass this sort of commission. The seemingly weak people were put aside at once, but other times the doctor looked also at the hands or the arms and any small sort of thing which caught his attention.” She added that other SS men and women were present, and that “Sometimes they pointed with a finger to one or the other, pointing out that those may join those people who were condemned to death.”

Asked what usually happened to those who had been selected, my mother said that “they had to go quite naked to a very ill-famed block, No. 25, where they were waiting often for days without food or drink, naked, until the trucks arrived to take them away to the crematorium.”

Dec. 1, 1943, she recalled, “was a day of very large selections. Typhus was rampant through the camp and there were in the hospital 4,124 sick Jewish women. Out of this number 4,000 were selected for the crematorium and only 124 remained.”

On cross-examination, my mother said that during her 15 months at Auschwitz-Birkenau, “only Jews were sent to the gas chamber,” adding that “I was told that there was a camp for gypsies [that is, Roma], and they were also sent to the gas chamber.”

Making a Point of Their Jewish Identity

Subsequent witnesses made a point of emphasizing their Jewish identity, and that they had been arrested only because they were Jews. They were neither criminals nor, with one exception, active opponents of the German occupation of their respective homelands.

Asked to state their nationality, Estera Guterman, Paula Synger, and Ester Wolgruch replied, like my mother, “A Jewess from Poland;” Anni Jonas said, “I am a Jewess from Germany;” Helen Hammermasch said, “I am a Jewess born in Poland;” Hanka Rozenwayg said, “A Polish Jewess;” Ewa Gryka said, “I am a Polish Jew;” and Ruchla Koppel and Genia Zylberdukaten answered simply, “Jewish,” as did Roman Sompolinski, who also declared that he was arrested “Because I am a Jew.” Asked why they were arrested, Sofia Litwinska, Anni Jonas, Dora Szafran, Ilona Stein, and Lidia Sunschein all said, “Because I am a Jewess.”

Dora Szafran testified that, “People were sent to the gas chamber for being Jews,” and Anni Jonas told the tribunal that she had attended selections which were “For the purpose of gassing the people.” Asked who were picked for gassing, Jonas answered, “Jews.”

It would appear that these prosecution witnesses and erstwhile concentration camp inmates were determined to do what the prosecution itself was not willing to do: make their Jewish identities and the fact that they had been persecuted and their families murdered only because they were Jews a matter of record.

The prosecution’s reticence to highlight the antisemitic essence of the crimes with which the defendants were charged was derailed when one of the British defense counsel created a furor. Major Thomas C. Winwood represented Josef Kramer, the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, and other senior members of the camp’s SS personnel. In his opening address, Winwood denigrated the Jewish inmates of the Nazi death and concentration camps as “undesirable,” that is to say, inferior. “The object of the German concentration camp was to segregate the undesirable elements,” he said, “and the most undesirable element, from the German point of view, was the Jew.”

Had he stopped there, his words might well have gone unnoticed outside the Lüneburg courtroom, but Winwood went on to add:

by the time we got to Auschwitz and Belsen, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the concentration camps were the dregs of the ghettos of middle Europe. These were the people who had very little idea of how to behave in their ordinary life, and they had little idea of doing what they were told, and the control of these internees was a great problem.

This blatant disparagement of European Jewry as a whole caused an uproar. World Jewish Congress political secretary Alexander L. Easterman sent a telegram to Major General Berney-Ficklin, the president of the Lüneburg tribunal, protesting that Winwood’s statement “constitutes a vile calumny against the innocent Jewish men, women and children deliberately murdered by the Nazis” and that it was a “gross violation of British fairness and transgresses the just limits of British advocacy.” The Board of Deputies of British Jews followed suit, expressing its “deepest indignation” at Winwood’s remarks. In due course, Winwood apologized in open court, explaining that “I have been acting only as a mouthpiece of the accused whom I represent.”

Whether influenced by the testimony of Ada Bimko and the other witnesses, or by the controversy over Winwood’s ill-chosen disparagement of the Jewish inmates of Auschwitz and Belsen, or for other reasons, Colonel Backhouse’s approach underwent a dramatic transformation by the time he delivered his closing address. There, in sharp contrast with his opening statement, Backhouse emphasized that one of the reasons for the internment of people by the Nazis was “the deliberate destruction of the Jewish race.” He told the tribunal that the men, women, and children murdered at Auschwitz “were gassed for no other reason than they were Jews.” The selections at Auschwitz, he argued, constituted

an attempt to murder an entire race – an attempt to murder the whole Jewish race . . . . That martyrdom of the Jews . . . insofar as it was employed on these persons who came into the power of the Germans and into the power of the personnel at Auschwitz, was a war crime which has never been equaled.

The Belsen trial did achieve a modicum of justice. The tribunal found 30 of the defendants guilty, with Kramer and 10 others sentenced to death and executed. In retrospect, however, the way the trial was conducted – with the prosecution’s initial attempt to downplay the genocidal nature of the crimes at issue – highlights the difficulty inherent in reconciling the principles of justice with its far too often brutal realities. As one of the witnesses at Lüneburg, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, wrote in her memoirs, “Is it possible to apply law in the conventional sense to crimes so far removed from the law as the massacre of millions of people, which were perpetrated in the cause of ‘purifying the human race’?”

IMAGE: Members of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone of Germany walk past mass graves at Bergen-Belsen on the opening day of the Second Congress of Liberated Jews in the British zone, April 1947. The author’s mother, Dr. Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft, who was head of the health department at Bergen-Belsen, and the author’s father, Josef (Yossl) Rosensaft, chairman of the committee, are second and third from the left. Photo courtesy of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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Imagine the international outrage if murals of Adolf Hitler were to be prominently displayed throughout Germany, or if a Berlin student dormitory were to be named after Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the systematic annihilation of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Imagine further the across-the-board condemnation of any German government delusional enough to claim as a matter of policy that the Holocaust was not a genocide, and that the Jews brought their mass slaughter upon themselves.

Precisely this type of scenario has been playing itself out with regard to the genocide perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs 25 years ago against Bosniaks – Bosnian Muslims – in and around the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.

During the brutally fought 1992-95 Bosnian War, the paramilitary forces of the Bosnian Serb breakaway proto-state known as Republika Srpska, with the support of the neighboring Serbian government, engaged in a savage campaign to expel non-Serbs from the predominantly ethnic Serb part of Bosnia. In 1993, the United Nations Security Council designated “Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or other hostile act.” This “safe area,” where thousands of Bosniaks sought refuge, was under U.N. protection.

Over the course of several days beginning on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Ratko Mladić murdered approximately 8,000 Muslim men and boys between the ages of 12 and 77 from the Srebrenica enclave, in what U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan later called “a terrible crime – the worst on European soil since the Second World War.” Bosnian Serb troops also forcibly expelled around 25,000 Bosniak women, children, and elderly men from Srebrenica.

The 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention provides that killing members of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” that group “as such” constitutes the crime of genocide under international law.

To date, six Bosnian Serbs, including Mladić and the erstwhile Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadžić, have been convicted of genocide by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in connection with the Srebrenica killings. In 2007, the International Court of Justice held that “the acts committed at Srebrenica … were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina as such; and accordingly that these were acts of genocide.”

“Some Do Not Wish To Know”

Sadly, however, as Dunja Mijatović, the commissioner for human rights of the Council of Europe, has pointed out, “Many people in Europe and the world do not know about the genocide and some do not wish to know. Some even deny it.”

Indeed, Bosnian Serbs and their acolytes have spent the past quarter of a century desperately trying to persuade the world that what happened at Srebrenica was not a genocide. The Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center recently issued a report on Srebrenica genocide denial that documents the revisionist initiatives by politicians and pseudo-academics to distort history. The efforts range from attempts to dispute the death toll to blaming the victims for the slaughter by claiming that it was a reaction to Bosniak provocations.

In the course of 2019, Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the tripartite Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, called the Srebrenica genocide a “fabricated myth,” and said that Bosnian Muslims “did not have a myth, so they decided to construct one around Srebrenica.” Serbian Defense Minister Aleksandar Vulin declared that, “the Serbian people survived genocide rather than committed it.” And Željka Cvijanović, the president of Republika Srpska, which emerged as one of the constituent entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina following the November 1995 Dayton Accords, has pointedly suggested that the killing of Bosniaks by Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica was retaliation for prior anti-Serb “war crimes against Serbs” purportedly committed by Bosnian Muslim forces.

These Srebrenica genocide deniers are far from alone. Five years ago, on July 8, 2015, Russia vetoed a British-sponsored U.N. Security Council resolution that would have condemned the Srebrenica massacre as a “crime of genocide.” Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s permanent representative to the U.N., disparaged the proposed resolution as “not constructive, confrontational and politically motivated.”

In June 2015, Ephraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, lent invaluable support to the Serb and Russian positions when he told the Belgrade-based newspaper Politika that he did not believe that what happened at Srebrenica “fit the description or definition of genocide and I think that the decision to call this genocide was adopted for political reasons.”

In a separate interview on Russian-sponsored Sputnik Serbia radio, Zuroff said, “It is necessary to be very careful while using the concept of ‘genocide.’ I do not deny that the Serbian forces killed Muslims in Srebrenica, this should not have happened, and those responsible must be brought to justice. But there was no genocide in Srebrenica since the Serbs initially released women and children. And then the process of politicization of the tragedy began.”

“A Legal Fact”

Churkin, Zuroff, and all the other Srebrenica genocide deniers are wrong as a matter of law. As Ambassador Peter Wilson, the United Kingdom’s permanent representative at the U.N., declared following Churkin’s 2015 veto, “that genocide occurred at Srebrenica … is a legal fact, not a political judgment.”

Such historical rejectionism flies in the face of a succession of judicial holdings that set forth in detail that the killing of the Bosniak men and boys from the Srebrenica enclave, coupled with the forced deportation of Bosniak women, children and elderly men, evidenced the requisite intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslim presence in eastern Bosnia so as to constitute genocide. In its judgment convicting Karadžić of genocide, the ICTY Trial Chamber wrote that the “only reasonable inference” to be drawn from the killing of the Bosniak men and boys of Srebrenica “is that members of the Bosnian Serb Forces orchestrating this operation intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslims as such.”

It gets worse. The perpetrators of the Srebrenica genocide are lionized in present-day Republika Srpska. Enormous murals of Mladić have become shrines for Bosnian Serbs, and a student dormitory was named with great fanfare after Karadžić. Consider the contrast now to the United States, where Confederate statues are coming down in recognition of the hatred they represent.

Speaking at the site of the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald in Germany, President Barack Obama called denial of the Holocaust “baseless, ignorant and hateful.” “It is beyond question,” Pope Benedict XVI declared, “that any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether unacceptable.”

Denial of the Srebrenica genocide is equally “baseless, ignorant and hateful.” Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner Mijatović has called for July 11 to be declared an official Remembrance Day of the Srebrenica genocide. The U.N., the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and other international bodies should follow suit and mark July 11 with the same reverence accorded to Jan. 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Like Holocaust denial, denial of the Srebrenica genocide cannot be allowed to be portrayed as a legitimate intellectual position. Numerous countries, Germany foremost among them, have criminalized Holocaust denial. At the very least, those who deny the Srebrenica genocide and glorify its perpetrators need to be exposed, publicly condemned, and ostracized. The victims of Srebrenica and their families deserve no less.

As a moral imperative, the international community must once and for all denounce Srebrenica genocide denial, in Pope Benedict’s words, as “intolerable and altogether unacceptable.”

IMAGE: A picture taken on July 9, 2020 shows a prepared grave at Potocari memorial cemetery, near Srebrenica, two days before the commemoration of 25 years since the Srebrenica massacre. Hundreds of sets of remains, found in several mass graves in Eastern Bosnia, believed to belong to Bosnian Muslims, victims of Srebrenica 1995 massacre, still wait to be identified and buried.  As the commemoration of Europe’s worst atrocity since Word War II on July 11 nears, the survivors see the “denial” as part of the massacre itself and the main obstacle for easing tensions between the two ethnic groups.  (Photo by ELVIS BARUKCIC/AFP via Getty Images)

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