How European Countries Treat Their Wartime Past
This first-ever report rating individual European Union countries on how they face up their Holocaust pasts was published on January 25 2019 to coincide with UN Holocaust Memorial Day. Researchers from Yale and Grinnell Colleges have traveled throughout Europe. Local representatives from the European Union of Progressive Judaism have checked their work.
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Key Findings
● Many European Union governments are rehabilitating World War II collaborators and war criminals while minimizing their own guilt in the attempted extermination of Jews.
● Revisionism is worst in new Central European members - Poland, Hungary Croatia and Lithuania.
● But not all Central Europeans are moving in the wrong direction: two countries that live up to their tragic history are the Czech Republic and Romania. The Romanian model of appointing an independent commission to study the Holocaust should be duplicated.
● West European countries are not free from infection - Italy, in particular, needs to improve.
● In the West, Austria has made a remarkable turnaround while France stands out for its progress in accepting responsibility for the Vichy collaborationist government.
● Instead of protesting revisionist excesses, Israel sometimes supports many of the nationalist and revisionist governments.