Hitler's Foreign Executioners by Christopher Hale Page B

Italy, to confer with Mussolini who was by then holed up in the fascist Republic of Salo. WhenAmery arrived in nearby Como, he was captured by Italian partisans and handed over to British Military Intelligence. In November, Amery was repatriated, tried at the Old Bailey and, on 19 December 1945, hanged in Wandsworth prison. His distinguished father Leo Amery claimed that his son had been ‘inspired by a desire to save the British Empire’. Thomas Cooper, who had served in an SS Death’s Head unit, had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
    Suppose that seventy years after John Amery’s fatal encounter with hangman Albert Pierrepoint, the leader of a far-right British political party proposed commemorating Amery and his ludicrous handful of followers as prescient Cold War warriors, who understood long before most British citizens that ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin was a tyrant infinitely more terrible than Adolf Hitler. Did not the crimes of the Soviet Union far outstrip those of Nazi Germany? Amery, this political party claims, was no treasonous villain, but a hero whose execution in a British prison was a travesty of justice. This counterfactual scenario is by no means unimaginable.
    In 2008 many of the far-right parties of Europe backed the Prague Declaration on Conscience and Communism. This was hatched up by Baltic scholars and politicians. Its authors demand that the European Union ‘equally evaluate totalitarian regimes’. In other words, the crimes of the Soviet regime and the Nazi Holocaust should have equivalent moral status. This is often summed up by the slogan ‘red = brown’. The Prague Declaration proposes replacing Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January with a ‘Day of Remembrance’ to be held every 23 August, the day on which the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939. This ‘equal evaluation’ may appear seductive. After all, how often does one hear that ‘Stalin was just as bad or worse than Hitler’. But the apparently reasonable claim that ‘there are substantial similarities between Nazism and Communism in terms of their horrific and appalling character and their crimes against humanity’ is not what it seems. 5 The authors of the Prague Declaration grossly distort the historical record and seek ultimately to tear down the unique moral status of the Holocaust. The concept of ‘double genocide’ lumps together heinous Soviet practices such as summary execution, deportation, imprisonment and loss of employment with the deliberate and planned attempt to liquidate an entire human group. Soviet crimes should indeed be properly memorialised, but they are not equivalent either in intent or result to the ‘Final Solution’.
    The consequences of rendering the crimes of the Soviet Union equivalent to the German Holocaust are already becoming clear in many Eastern European nations. In the Baltic States, Hungary and Ukraine it is now commonplace to hear politicians imply that wartime collaboration with the Third Reich should no longerbe regarded as a moral catastrophe – a stain on the nation. Instead collaboration is increasingly reinterpreted as a pragmatic means to oppose the destructive power of the Soviet Union. This inevitably means that the tens of thousands of men who volunteered to serve the German occupiers as policemen and soldiers can be reinvested as heroic nationalists – no longer vilified as collaborators in genocide. Compelling evidence that this historical lie has begun to take root in Europe can be observed every 16 March in the capital city of Latvia.
    In spring 2010, I travelled to Riga to observe the annual ‘Legion Day’ – a parade by Latvian Second World War veterans. Nothing remarkable about that you might suppose. But you would be wrong; the veterans’ parade I witnessed commemorates the ‘Latvian Legion’ recruited by Heinrich Himmler’s private army, the