Surprise: Moscow found Nazis in the Baltics

At the initiative of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office, a Russian court declared several Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian historical figures and organizations to be accomplices in Nazi Germany's war crimes and crimes against humanity – reported the Russian State Archive on October 6. The decision concerns acts committed during World War II, and lists those named in it by name.

The Prosecutor General's Office backed its request, submitted on September 21, with documents from the Russian Federal Security Service, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the State Archive; the statement on the decision mentions, among others, the names of the Latvian Viktor Arājs and Herberts Cukurs, as well as the Estonian organization Omakaitse and the Lithuanian Activist Front. The State Archive presented the ruling as a decision flowing from the legal conclusions of the Nuremberg trials and as the fulfillment of a historical duty toward the victims of the war — and the ceiling didn't fall in on them for saying so, which only proves the Lord's own cynicism. In any case, Moscow doesn't need to go next door for a bit of Nazi-hunting, that is..., oh wait, yes it does. Moscow only ever finds Nazis among its own neighbors — it would never dream of looking for them inside the Kremlin.

Rant