Adolf Hitler featured positively in Kazakh nationalist magazine, Star House. Photo: SWC.

Jewish human rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Friday wrote a letter to Kazakhstan President  Noursultan Nazarbayev to protest Kazakh nationalist magazine Star House for venerating the Nazi symbols and Adolf Hitler, and threatening to besmirch the country’s reputation.

Dr. Shimon Samuels, the SWC director for international affairs, wrote, that “the offensive magazine is dedicated totally to Hitler’s so-called ‘positive contribution’ to history, which would perversely include the Holocaust. This is a publication that violates Kazakhstan’s obligations as a State Party member of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.”

Samuels said “your Public Prosecutor and other official authorities have ignored domestic protests” and he urged Nazarbayev “to take immediate measures against Star House and its publishers and contributors.”

Samuels said this flagrant support of Nazism was opposed to other steps taken by Kazakhstan, particularly its “policy and success in containing Jihadi/Islamist infiltration” and history of having “provided refuge to many Jews fleeing the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in World War Two.”

But the threat should also be understood to go beyond Jews to the Kazakh people. Samuels said that, “only last year, a Kazakh man was killed by neo-Nazis at a Bavarian folk festival in Germany.”

“Silence in the face of this Nazi incitement will be perceived as an official endorsement of their views,” the SWC director said.