Disinformation and antisemitism: Holocaust denial in the Baltic States, 1945-1999

Fewer than 6% of the Baltic countries' 350,000 Jews survived World War II, most of them murdered by local Nazi sympathisers. This was the highest rate of wartime Jewish deaths anywhere. Since then, authorities in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have sought to blur the uniqueness of the Holocaust, employing techniques including partial and total denial, disinformation and the propagation of new forms of anti-Semitism. A particularly insidious propaganda weapon has been the so-called "symmetry formula," an attempt to rationalise Jewish murders as payback for the Jews' alleged wartime unpatriotic acts.