The Estonian weekly Eesti Express has published a wartime photo of emaciated death camp inmates, saying in a caption that Doctor Mengele had apparently cracked the secret of anti-obesity treatment.
The publication attracted immediate condemnation from the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Nazi hunters. Both described it as an instance of sadistic mockery which should have been seen as ethically inadmissible in an EU country. They also called attention to the fact that Estonia glorifies former Estonian collaborators with the Nazis.
Interfax
...............TALLINN - Jewish organizations have denounced an Estonian newspaper for publishing a mock ad for weight-loss pills depicting emaciated prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem on Sunday called the mock ad in the Eesti Ekspress weekly a “perverted attempt at humour at the expense of the Nazis’ millions of victims.”
Alla Jakobson, spokeswoman for Estonia’s Jewish community, said in newspaper Postimees that the incident shows Estonian society is experiencing “major problems with moral and ethical values.” Sulev Vedler, deputy editor of Eesti Ekspress, says the mock ad, which ran in the paper’s humour section, was poking fun at an Estonian gas company that recently used an image of Auschwitz to promote its services. Vedler says the ad “was not targeted against Jewish people.”
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
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