Kaja Kallas’s Greater Europe seems to stretch from Stalingrad to the Atlantic Wall...
A few days ago, Kaja Kallas, the charming European Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, threatened retaliation against any European who might attend the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Moscow. At the same time, Ms. Kallas praised the good relations between Europe and Azerbaijan. For the record, Azerbaijan is a dictatorship that has carried out ethnic cleansing in Armenia. And Ms. Kallas welcomed the fruitful relations with this dictatorship right around the anniversary of the Armenian genocide, perpetrated back in the day by an ally of the Second Reich.
Kaja Kallas is emblematic of the political drift of Europe. She is Estonian, from a country of just over a million people; yet she now steers the foreign policy of a European Union representing half a billion citizens. One must take a closer look at the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—former Soviet republics with a combined population of only six million. A speck in comparison to the rest of Europe. And yet...
Let’s take Latvia first. Last month, the country’s Attorney General dropped the case against Herberts Cukurs. Who is this oddly named man? A Latvian citizen who joined the German SS during the Occupation with the rank of captain. He played a significant role in the genocide of Latvia’s Jewish community before fleeing to South America after the war. The prosecutor’s decision echoes the ongoing rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators in Latvia. Cukurs, for instance, was recently honored with a postage stamp and an exhibition celebrating him.
For those following the Ukrainian conflict, these kinds of actions resemble the policies in place in Kyiv. Since the Maidan coup in 2014, the authorities have also rehabilitated collaborators with the Third Reich, including perpetrators of the genocide of Ukrainian Jews. Numerous streets have been renamed after Stepan Bandera, the most well-known of these collaborators. One such street is an avenue in central Kyiv, near Babi Yar, the infamous ravine where the SS executed more than 100,000 Jews. One might also recall the existence of the Azov Regiment within the Ukrainian army, which has been accused of war crimes in the Donbas. Its official emblem is the Wolfsangel, a symbol once used by the SS “Das Reich” division, responsible for the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. This didn’t prevent Paris from discreetly hosting some of these soldiers for training within the French army.
The rehabilitation of these countries’ Nazi past goes hand in hand with the discrimination of local minorities. For Jews, it is too late—virtually none remain, as nearly all were massacred between 1941 and 1944. But other minorities still exist. Since 2014, Ukraine’s nationalist government has cracked down not only on Russians but also on the rights of Romanian and Hungarian minorities in the western part of the country. In the Baltic states, Russians are the main targets. Latvia has just banned the use of the Russian language in education. It had already made a Latvian language exam mandatory for Russian speakers, with deportation for those who failed. In Estonia, just a month ago, the president approved the removal of voting rights in local elections for the country's large Russian minority. Estonia, incidentally, is the country where Kaja Kallas served as Prime Minister until recently. The political party she just stepped down from still leads the ruling coalition—the same one that stripped Russians of their voting rights.
Kaja Kallas left her position in Estonia to join the European Commission led by the German Ursula von der Leyen. It’s a sort of Baltic female alliance. It’s worth examining the background of these political women. Ms. von der Leyen had a turbulent youth. In 1978, she had to hide in London under a false name. Why? Because of her father, a German Catholic politician, who was targeted by the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction), a far-left terrorist group. This episode was part of the Cold War struggle between international communism, backed by Moscow, and the Catholic bourgeoisie of Atlanticist Europe. From this crucible emerged today’s president of the European Union. Von der Leyen, née Albrecht, represents that old bourgeois class for whom the Russian is the communist threat—and for whom any regime is better than that threat. Another woman of the Baltic sphere is German Annalena Baerbock, outgoing Foreign Minister. A fierce warmonger (despite being a Green—go figure) and a committed Russophobe. Last year, the newspaper Bild revealed that her grandfather, contrary to her earlier suggestions, was not only a colonel in the Wehrmacht but also a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi. You might say one isn’t responsible for their grandfather’s actions; true, but one is responsible for pursuing warlike policies against a country where her grandparents’ generation, under Hitler, sent 20 million people to mass graves. As for Kaja Kallas, before taking charge of EU foreign affairs, she publicly proposed a very “diplomatic” measure: to make Russia disappear and replace it with a multitude of small states.
Without going back to the Teutonic Knights and the cradle of Prussia, it must be acknowledged that ties between Germany and the Baltic states are close. One such link is the Baltikum. The Baltikum refers to German Freikorps soldiers who refused to accept the 1918 defeat. They went to the Baltic countries to fight the Bolshevik enemy—the red Russian. Eventually, they returned to Germany and joined Hitler’s nascent movement.
The campaign by Kaja Kallas and the von der Leyen Commission against the May 9th commemoration in Moscow is part of this trajectory. I don’t recall Moscow threatening anyone for participating in the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings last year. For those unfamiliar with the history of the war whose end we are commemorating, here are some clarifications. First of all, the USSR of the time included not only Russia but also Ukraine, the Baltic countries, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. After the Jews, the Soviets were the primary enemy of the Nazis. The Nazis considered Slavs an inferior race and communism the devil incarnate. Hence the 1941 invasion of the USSR, which launched the most violent and bloody struggle in human history. Nazi Germany lost World War II on the Eastern Front. That’s where Hitler’s troops suffered the vast majority of their casualties (4.3 million dead, compared to 600,000 on the Western Front). That’s also where they committed mass atrocities against civilians, Jews, and prisoners. It was the Red Army that drove the Nazis out of half of Europe (including the death camps like Auschwitz) and took Berlin and Hitler’s bunker, reduced to ashes. The war cost the USSR 14 million military deaths alone—compared to 320,000 American deaths (forty times fewer!). Whether or not one sympathizes with the Soviet regime at the time doesn’t change those facts.
The ladies of the Baltic—Kallas, von der Leyen, Baerbock—have their own reading of history. The problem is, they’re dragging an entire continent along with them. All under the pretense of building a “Greater Europe.” A Europe that, for them and their followers, seems to stretch from Stalingrad to the Atlantic Wall...
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