The Seventy Years Declaration was a declaration initiated by academics Dovid Katz and Danny Ben-Moshe and released on 20 January 2012 to protest against the policies of several European states and European Union bodies on the evaluation , remembrance and prosecution of crimes committed under communist dictatorships in Europe , specifically policies of many European countries and the EU treating the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe as equally criminal . Presented as a response to the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism initiated by the Czech government in 2008 to condemn communism as totalitarian and criminal , it explicitly rejects the idea that the regimes of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler can be compared , i.e. the totalitarianism theory that was popularized by academics such as Hannah Arendt , Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski and became dominant in western political discourse during the Cold War , and that has gained new momentum in many new EU member states following the fall of communism , resulting in international resolutions , establishment of research institutes and museums , and a day of remembrance . The declaration also claims communist regimes did not commit genocides , citing a 1948 definition that deliberately excluded politically motivated mass killings as demanded by the Soviet Union when it was adopted . More recent definitions do however include such crimes , and e.g . The Holodomor is recognized as a genocide by the United States , Ukraine and other countries . The declaration advances the position that the Holocaust was " unique " as compared to other genocides , a subject of some debate . This position first appeared in discourse in 1967 , but has become less common since the 1994 Rwandan genocide , and was described as a " vacuous " and " deeply offensive " position by Peter Novick . The declaration was signed by 70 , mostly left-wing , parliamentarians from Europe ( MEPs and national MPs ) . It was released on the 70th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference in Berlin
Rwandan genocide
Rwandan genocide
The Seventy Years Declaration