Czech Hell (Estonian: Tšehhi põrgu) was an episode of vigilante justice during the Prague Offensive and the Prague Uprising, World War II in May 1945. It involved the imprisonment and summary executions of 500−1,000 unarmed soldiers and officers of the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) by Czech partisans.

Unarmed is an interesting choice over surrendered. The Baltics truly are a strange realm.

The surrendered German troops included thousands of officers and soldiers of the Estonian Division… They had been forcibly drafted into the Waffen SS and had received no special training apart from regular military drills; it is also claimed that they did not commit war crimes. [Emphasis mine]

I suggest reading the article, but this amazing line really sums it up. It’s just such obvious whitewashing. ‘They didn’t want to join the SS and anyway they didn’t do any SS stuff.’ Remember, the Nuremberg Tribunal said that “It is impossible to single out any one branch of the SS which was not involved in these criminal activities.” While “Heydrich was able to report that Estonia had already been cleared of Jews and… the Einsatzgruppen operating in the occupied Baltic States killed over 135,000 Jews in three months,” [1] it is hard to find specific condemnations of the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division. The fact of collaboration is however undeniable. Overall, it is hard to find any sources on Estonian SS members. We’ll get to that in a second. Why don’t we look at the citations for “it is also claimed that they did not commit war crimes.”

First of all, they’re all Estonian secondary sources from 2005-2008. Estonia was installed (see, I can use deceptive words too) into NATO in 2004. More important than the book written by a clear propagandist (Hiio) or a literal neoliberal politican (Laar), a major source is The White Book: Losses inflicted on the Estonian nation by occupation regimes. 1940–1991. I would love to go into this book, its methodology, everything, but I hope the “Black Book” title and nationalist framing summarize adequately. First, it’s a report by the newly westernized Estonian government, attempting to resolve the past. How this can be done when NATO, and the western bloc more broadly, utilized and had its fair share internally of postwar Nazi criminals, confounds me. As well, this paper champions what will later be known as double genocide theory. This ‘theory’ minimizes the role of collaborators, lauds ‘heroes,’ and works to conflate Nazism and ‘Stalinism’ into a totalitarian unity. Jewish critics have rightly called it out as a form of minimization and soft Holocaust denial.

About the lack of scholarship on Baltic collaborators, one big problem is that publication mills paid for with all that western capital flowing in create research that supports nationalist narratives. Who in western academia, especially the humanities, especially in the Baltics, would and could investigate the crimes of these legions? Who’s going to write about the terrorism of the Forest Brothers? The historic fascism in the country, no foreign import? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

[1] INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL (NUREMBERG) Judgment of 1 October 1946 crimeofaggression.info/documents/6/1946_Nuremberg_Judgement.pdf

Also read this article by the Russian government when Estonia joined NATO. Yes, I’m a bot.