How NATO is Praising the "Forest Brothers"
On Wednesday on its official twitter page, NATO posted an 8-minute video about the so-called "Forest Brothers," who after WWII led the so-called "partisan struggle" in the Baltics against the Soviet regime. The video is filmed in the style of a documentary, but it has nothing to do with real history, because from the NATO video it shows that the "Forest Brothers" are real heroes and an example for the modern army.
On her Facebook (запрещена в РФ) page, Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs official spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, called the video "a disgusting act." So about whom, in fact, are we talking about? It's known that during WWII most of the "Forest Brothers" were officially in the Waffen-SS divisions. They committed police operations, sabotage. On their conscience are hundreds of thousands of murdered Jews and all the locals they suspected of loyalty to Soviet power. Even old people, women, and children weren't spared. They were shot, burned alive, and whole villages were massacred.
The killing squads also fought with the Red Army partisans. The Baltic SS men fought on the fascists' side not only in the Baltics, but also in Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, and the Pskov region. Among their other duties was the guarding of prisons and concentration camps. They were also engaged in prisoner executions. It was at the hands of the Nazi accomplices that in the Baltics 80% of the Jewish population died. Just in Latvia in 1941-1945, 46 prisons, 23 concentration camps, and 18 Jewish ghettos were created. According to the Emergency Republican Commission of the Latvian SSR on the atrocities of the German fascist invaders and their accomplices, in Latvia, they killed 313,798 civilians, including 39,835 children, and on top of that 330,032 Soviet prisoners of war were also killed. After the war, the former fighters of the Baltic SS battalions went into the woods and continued to kill. These are the those very same "Forest Brothers." According to the Russian Military Historical Society, just in Lithuania, from 1944-1956 the so-called "Lithuanian patriots" brutally killed 25,000 people, including about a thousand children, at least 80% were Lithuanians themselves.
The numbers in the neighboring republics were more modest, but even there the number of innocent victims went into the thousands. The last units of the "Forest Brothers" were liquidated only in the mid-1950s. The Ukrainian equivalent of the "Forest Brothers" were the Banderovtsy. NATO will probably make a glorifying movie about them as well. Poland will appreciate it. Daria Grigorova reporting from Latvia with some historical details. According to Jewish tradition flowers aren't brought to the cemetery. Stones are placed on the tombstone in memory of the deceased. Those who were in the ghetto were forced into columns, and marched to this place, where they found their last refuge. They were stripped, put in front of the ditches, and simply shot with machine guns.
The SS commander in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, Friedrich Jeckeln, called this the "sardine method" and was even proud of the invention. The condemned were forced to undress, lie down in the pit face down on those already killed. This was to save the executioners from carrying corpses. For me, this is really a difficult place, because if today 8,000 Jews live in all Latvia, then the remains of about 50,000 Jews are under our feet where we stand. The Rumbula forest on the outskirts of Riga is the Latvian Babi Yar. No one can accurately calculate how many people died here. It's known that only two women survived. With the help of local collaborators, as is written at the entrance, the whole population of the Riga ghetto was destroyed.
Riga is the only city in the world where the territory of the ghetto has been preserved almost completely to the present day. 80% of the remaining houses even in the 21st century look almost the same as during the war. And this is how the ghetto looked from the inside: the walls covered with newspapers, furniture, the people didn't know what was waiting for them, and tried to set up their life as best they could. In one house lived 30, and sometimes 40 people. The men went to work from the perimeter fenced with barbed wire. People with a yellow star on their chests and backs were forbidden from walking on the sidewalk, only along the road. They didn't know then that this was the last month of their lives.
In the Riga Ghetto Museum, it was estimated that more than 70,000 Jews were killed in Latvia. 90% of the entire Jewish population was killed. But this is far from being all the victims. 24,603 people were brought, 24,603 Jews, from the so called Reich, and those who did it, by whose order were all these monstrosities committed, are these people on the platform of the Riga train station. The documents in Czech, and the date of death, 1942, is the same for everyone. These 3,000 people came to Riga from the model camp, Terezin, which the Nazis demonstrated to the Red Cross and the journalists.
A whole propaganda film was made titled "The Führer Gives the Jews a City," where, to the sound of the cancan, healthy and happy people are working and resting. All Terezin prisoners were killed in different death camps, including in Riga. They were told: you will receive new documents on the spot, and travel to either Brazil, or Portugal, or somewhere else, but somewhere warm, but the fate that awaited them was just one, forests next to Riga. Or in the best case, a concentration camp. Here are the ruins of the synagogue burned on July 4, 1941 by the infamous Arajs Kommando, which was practically responsible for the beginning of the holocaust in Latvia. Riga's Crystal Night. 3 days after German troops entered the city, 8 synagogues were burned, along with the Jews who were hiding there.
Firefighters were forbidden to put out buildings and save people. The operation was carried out by the local "security teams," which included young people, students, and former military, although Hitler considered the Latvians themselves unworthy, the non-Aryans. It was planned to replace the Baltic people from their lands with Germans, relocating 3/4 of the inhabitants to Western Siberia. When the Red Army came here, a lot... ...of these police officers, they were practically part of killing squads and involved in some kind of dark affairs, somehow they had to survive, and they began to join these groups, units.
As modern historians write, it was a more non-violent struggle. So the publication of newspapers, leaflets... It's portrayed as peaceful. But in reality, it was mainly robbery, as it was necessary to intimidate the population so that they didn't support the Soviet power that had arrived. It was about such "freedom fighters" that the documentary "Forest Brothers" was made. Officially presented by the North Atlantic Alliance. But historians called this movie science fiction. For example, the battle in the Latvian forests apparently did not exist, says the former SS legionnaire, and then a partisan, Bluzmanis.
The national partisans very often overstate the NKVD and Red Army casualties. In reality, they weren't that high, by the highest estimate for all the years it probably was from 1945-1953 only a few hundred people. And here we remember the civilian casualties, especially the Latvians, from 1,500-3,000. So we see that they were mainly engaged in fighting not with occupational troops, as they considered them at the time, but with their own fellow citizens who simply had a different point of view, other political beliefs. In the video, the modern Baltic military-men also call the "Forest Brothers" their founding fathers. The main question that those who remember history well ask themselves: which specific traditions do they want to adopt?
