•

For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/st-mary-ukrainian-catholic-cemetary-ss-memorial-20230903.html?ICID=ref_fark

Elkins Park in Montgomery County has several synagogues ... and one large monument to Nazi collaborators. Many people had no idea it existed until recently.

For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage.

120 comments

news

!news

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

::: spoiler 1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

:::

::: spoiler 2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.

:::

::: spoiler 3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

:::

::: spoiler 4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.

Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.

:::

::: spoiler 5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

:::

::: spoiler 6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.

:::

::: spoiler 7. No duplicate posts.

If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

:::

::: spoiler 8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

:::

::: spoiler 9. No link shorteners.

The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.

:::

::: spoiler 10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community. :::

TrismegistusMx

•

There's a confederate monument with a huge coward's flag at mile marker 16 on I-24 in West Kentucky. I hate it and wish somebody would do something about it.

Kbobabob

•

Oh won't someone rid me of this racist sign?

grabyourmotherskeys

•

Stochastic altruism.

Granite

•

This is a fine example of stochastic Shakespeare.

SheeEttin

•

I don't think that that quote ever appeared in Shakespeare.

Erasmus

•

I-40 going thru NC around I think Morganton but I may be off on my towns there is a giant traitors flag right on the edge of the Interstate. Largest I have ever seen.

Also if you are ever in SC traveling toward the coast near Hilton Head you will get the luxury of seeing these billboards.

slumlordthanatos

•

...Sherman didn't burn them enough.

calebcharles

•

They call it the war of northern aggression. There “ain’t nothing civil about it”.

KevonLooney

•

The South sure was civil after they had their asses kicked. That's about it though.

bobman

•

If I lived nearby, I'd take care of it myself.

TrismegistusMx

•

It being on an interstate, pretty much anybody could be a suspect.

bobman

•

It's not like they have round-the-clock security for these places. It'd be pretty easy to just walk in at night and do the deed.

TrismegistusMx

•

Could even be a fun team building exercise.

vacuumflower

•

Shouldn't this be as simple as spraying something inflammable at the cloth and lighting it up? One needs a sprayer, a couple of canisters of gas (maybe diesel is better, though, cause gasoline evaporates too fast, various dangers due to it), and matches.

TrismegistusMx

•

The flag is too high to spray with anything other a drone. There are some ugly stupid coward statues at the bottom.

Unrelated, did you know that thermite is nothing more than rust and aluminum powder?

vacuumflower

•

There's nuance to that, though generally correct, and you also don't have to make it, I think it's available for purchase.

some_guy

•

I think we should start an online campaign to have it removed. It’d be real interesting to see who shows up trying to protest its removal.

jeffw

•

I can drive there in 20-30 mins. If the pay is right… just saying

Mandarbmax

•

Road trip! I'll bring pretzels!

jeffw

•

Not just any pretzels are acceptable

Neon

•

they're swastika-formed

bobman

•

If I lived nearby, I'd just show up with a sledgehammer and go to town myself.

Probably dump my cats' litter boxes all over it, too.

SulaymanF

•

Especially since the cemetery claims they don’t know who owns it.

some_guy

•

I thought the church owns the land and they don't have records for who installed it / paid for it. I think the church could still sanction it's removal, given that they own the cemetery and it's not like they'd be removing a tombstone from a person's grave.

bobman

•

All nazi/confederate monuments should be taken down.

Scotty_Trees

•

The only place they belong, if any, is in a museum.

Pipoca

•

More confederate monuments were built in 1999 than in 1869. The year with the most confederate monuments built was 1911, 46 years after the end of the war. That's like as if there were now a sudden spree of building Vietnam War monuments everywhere.

Confederate monuments were overwhelmingly built during the Jim Crow era. The Daughters of the Confederacy built most of them as part of their revisionist lost cause project, trying to write slavery out of the war. Then there was also a lot of them built during the civil rights era, to send a message to civil rights activists.

Sure, it's worth saving a few of them to put into places like the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, the National Civil Rights Museum, America's Black Holocaust Museum, or the National Civil War Museum. But there's many more monuments than appropriate museums for them. Getting rid of the least historically s significant ones isn't a big issue.

Bytemeister

•

Gotta back urinals with something.

yata

•

This one was only erected 30 years ago. It hardly qualifies for a museum.

nutsack

•

that would be a really boring museum

wallabra

•

You're thinking about a circus. Not your fault, that's really where most conservative politicians belong.

vacuumflower

•

This particular kind of Nazi collaborators is actually all the rage now, since Western public has found THE conflict of our age in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, immediately conveniently forgetting all other conflicts and genocides going on where every Western power has consistently shat its pants. I'm pleasantly surprised that there is, in fact, outrage at this.

In Russian-speaking (those supposedly liberal) parts of Reddit everybody would be justifying this memorial. Cause most of people you'd consider liberal in Russia and Ukraine are in fact disgusted with Putin etc mostly because of weakness and lack of development and corruption.

Not because of any crimes, plenty of them support ethnic cleansing (say, supporting Russian central government against Chechnya is not cool anymore among them, but for most it was like 10 years ago) and even military aggression (say, Azeri aggression against Artsakh). They just want those things to look cool, and Putin's empire of decay, theft, incompetence and general despair is not what they'd like to see.

You know, a bit like people from Hungary/Poland/Baltics just love to say that Soviets were "worse than Nazis", and have that slightly hidden irritation at being reminded that there are Jewish people in the room.

orrk

•

to be fair, the soviets, especially after Stalin took over, were indistinguishable from fascists.

The cult of tradition. soviet iconography literally everywhere
The rejection of modernism. modernism is after all the spawn of the western capitalist.
The cult of action for action’s sake.
Disagreement is treason. off to the gulags with the dissident.
Fear of difference. other than them having created some of the most racist groups in Europe...
Appeal to social frustration.
The obsession with a plot. fucking anti-revolutionary on every corner!
The enemy is both strong and weak. just look at the propaganda.
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. second verse, same as the first.
Contempt for the weak. the modern soviet man.
Everybody is educated to become a hero. and sacrifice yourself for the revolution
Machismo and weaponry. have you seen the soviet leaders? or their weaponry on display everywhere?
Selective populism. literally deporting ethnic groups because they might create a contrary populist opinion.
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

I invite you to fill out the remainder 3, 6, 14

SasquatchBanana

•

And this is why I call tankies fascists. They are just fascists who disguise themselves with socialist populism. And guess what? It is something the Nazis did as well.

vacuumflower

•

Nice to see somebody who likes Eco`s definition, but that'd be circular logic - his Ur-Fascism criteria were a result of optimization based on a selection of axiomatically fascist regimes, Stalin's explicitly included. (Sorry for this sentence being clumsy)

Also Stalin's regime became much more fascist in the middle of war and immediately after it. As an attempt to counter the "national liberation" offering of Nazis, with their national legions etc. So all the republics' anthems are quite pretentious and proud, and Soviet propaganda in the middle of war also turned to nationalism from just revolution and communism and globalism.

About your invitation - well, 3 and 6 are actually not so easy for me. I'd say these were present before Stalin, as in 3 would be basic Bolshevism, and 6 would be basic Marxism. 14 - see my first paragraph, it was (for Orwell) first and foremost inspired by USSR, and while Nazis or Italian fascists also had distinct public language (Klemperer's Lingua Tertii Imperii comes to mind), they never went as far.

orrk

•

well it's not circular, it’s definition, for example, the Armenian Genocide fulfills every definition of a genocide, of course this was also the event that defined genocide

vacuumflower

•

Yeah, I meant that it's a truism, it's not adding new information. I'm clumsy with words, sorry.

One person (similar for me to the one described as "hell on earth" in the Disco Elysium game) also advised me long ago to read "Homo Ludens" by Johan Huizinga, it approaches (not as the main subject, just in the end a bit, it was written in the 30s) the similarity between various fascist (including Stalin's) regimes from another direction - sublimation of games, as in imagining and playing and then abandoning games which involve fighting and loss. In addition to manifestations of the 30s noted by the author, one can also look at today's more militant and generally inhumane societies and see that they have consistent traits in relation to fantasy and sci-fi literature, and fairy tales, and anime and so on, and also that their representatives are often unable to honorably accept defeat in sports.

I feel that there's truth to that criterion.

SocialMediaRefugee

•

So leave it up because these weren't Nazis

triplenadir

•

what in tarnation are you talking about?

The monument, in a Montgomery County community known for its synagogues, is dedicated to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel — the Nazi military branch often referred to simply as “the SS.”

magnetosphere

•

The only thing more surprising than this monument’s existence is the fact that it took thirty years for people to actually notice and start making an issue of it.

SheeEttin

•

I'm not really surprised. The text is Cyrillic, not something most Americans can read, and it says:

1st Ukrainian division
To the warriors for the freedom of Ukraine

Nothing about the SS unit, only the dates 1943-1945 and the shield of the lion and crowns. It's not explicit.

Cleverdawny

•

Also, it's a monument to Ukrainian soldiers who fought for the German endorsed military of Ukraine, serving with the SS. It's a more complex story than just celebrating Nazi collaboration, because while they were definitely collaborators with the Nazis, they were doing so because they wanted a free and independent Ukraine and wanted to fight the USSR.

So, they're recognizing these soldiers because they fought for Ukrainian independence, not because the people supporting Ukrainian independence at the time were the Germans.

vacuumflower

•

They also willingly participated in mass murders of civilian population (Jewish and Polish). By "free and independent" the narrative also stuffs this.

So no, whoever put that there knew very well whom they are celebrating. They are just fine with ethnic cleansing for some perceived benefit of their nation.

Which can be shortened to "a memorial to Nazi collaborators", which is the title.

Cleverdawny

•

Except they're not celebrating Nazi collaboration. They're recognizing people who fought and died for Ukrainian independence. However tainted that struggle is by the people they fought for and with, and even sometimes the actions of those armies, it's not them celebrating or recognizing Nazi collaboration. It's a recognition of the fight for independence.

To me, this is like recognizing Thomas Jefferson's contributions to the founding of the US. Is someone who makes that recognition endorsing slavery and rape? No, they're not. Because he's a more complicated historical figure than just a random slaver and rapist, and it's hard to tell the story of the foundation of the US without talking about his positive contributions.

vacuumflower

•

I can't say anything about Graeco-Catholic or just Catholic Ukrainians in the USA, but most Ukrainians from ex-USSR I've met celebrate both. They're just kinda modest with the Nazi part, but they are fine with it, and see it as something naughty all big boys have done, not to boast about, but important. They do have a problem as a nation.

draneceusrex

•

I'm as anti-NAZI as the next guy, but I swear some people have no idea of the nuances of history. I am sure we will start to get a rash of people protesting against Finland soon. We sided with the Soviets because of the convenience of a common enemy, AFTER they had invaded and partitioned and annexed half of Poland right beside the NAZI Germany. The invasion of Poland is what kicked off WWII btw. After the war, the West almost immediately entered into the Cold War with the USSR.

I get it, this is an SS squad, and they contributed to atrocities of NAZI Germany, but I can understand some Ukrainians considering them to be freedom fighters against the Soviets, especially in 2023. It is also a memorial in a church cemetery, and not a statue of Lee in the middle of a town square. A debate is warranted, but I hope some people will learn a little bit more about how history is not black and white with the conversation.

vacuumflower

•

This is about one particular unit with history of war crimes. Different national legions of Wehrmacht and even Waffen SS have different record. I'm aware of some not so bad.

but I can understand some Ukrainians considering them to be freedom fighters against the Soviets, especially in 2023

I can agree that some "forest brothers" in1960s really were freedom fighters. But these guys - sure as hell not.

draneceusrex

•

And Zelenskyy agrees with you. Any part they had in torching Polish villages or other atrocities are horrendous.

To be honest, i am a bit conflcted about it all. This wasn't a statue put up to help bolster segregation 100 years after the fact, and I just wanted to point out that the Ukrainian struggle for independence has been ongoing and real, regardless of how ugly it may look. It is stuff like this that is fueling the propaganda of Russian's invasion as an attempt to de-nazify Ukraine.

Pipoca

•

Finland was a democratic country that the Soviet Union invaded, and they cooperated with the later Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

That seems more akin to the US allying with Stalin against Germany. They were allies of strategic convenience and it didn't mean that the US approved of Stalin, gulags, etc.

By contrast, this was a group in German- occupied Ukraine who enlisted in the literal SS. History isn't black and white, but at best this is a very dark shade of grey.

Scotty_Trees

•

This is going to get lost by a lot of people, but thanks for sharing a very informative, yet quick history of it all.

Cleverdawny

•

You're welcome

To be clear a lot of the Ukrainians serving in those units were aligned intellectually with the Nazis. It's a complex story, you know. Not all a good one.

Scotty_Trees

•

I had no idea Ukraine's history until Moscow invaded them over a year ago. Since then I've learned a lot about Ukrainian history, which helps immensely provide better context in an area I otherwise would know very little. Still not an expert, but when you know more of the complexities like you mentioned, it helps to show the bigger picture so things end up making more sense. Thanks again.

vacuumflower

•

Including most of their leaders, so the title of the post is correct. Yeah, surely every group of Nazi collaborators has its history.

Cleverdawny

•

It's like Americans celebrating the people who founded that country, even the slaveowners. They're not celebrating that part of the life of the founders, and it certainly colors the perception of people like Thomas Jefferson, speaking noble ideals about freedom while owning and sometimes raping his slaves.

These are people who fought for Ukrainian independence. That's something to celebrate, even if it's tainted by who they fought for and with, and at times, what their personal beliefs were surrounding issues like race and religion.

This is a complicated historical topic to Ukrainians. It's not them celebrating Nazi collaboration.

vacuumflower

•

I've met plenty of Ukrainians, it's literally too common (notably more than for Russians in general, which is already an achievement) for them to ascribe personal traits to genes and thus characterize whole peoples as good or bad (I'm not doing that now, cause I'm talking about society and education). I mean, really, it irritates you.

The issue is that their idea of nationalism is not yet separate from typical Nazi one. Just much more moderate. It shows in various more nuanced conversations on ethnic conflicts, state policies on minorities, centralism, civil rights etc.

SocialMediaRefugee

•

Naaah, the subtlies of history require thinking

bdonvr

•

If you know much history, the dates and Ukrainian symbols, along with the cross should set off alarm bells.

n2burns

•

It's in a Ukrainian Catholic cemetery, so I'd expect a majority of visitors could read Ukrainian.

bobman

•

I mean, it's clearly nazi symbolism without having to understand the text.

Ulrich_the_Old

•

A private citizen with a sledge hammer could solve this in seconds.

makingStuffForFun

•

In my mind, these things should not be destroyed. They should be moved to a museum, so people don't forget. Erasing history is a bad idea. We can't learn otherwise.

abbotsbury

•

Why tf should they be in a museum, it's ahistorical. It's not erasing history to remove monuments; never in my life have I ever seen a monument to Hitler, but most people can still give a broad strokes review on why he's infamous. You don't need to memorialize something to teach it.

makingStuffForFun

•

I've been to a stunning transport museum in Germany. Incredible restored vehicles from all over the world. Even a Concorde jet. Super cool.

They also have Hitler's car there. It's stunning, it's historical, it happened, and the modern crime would be to hide it away, or destroy it.

Without our past, we can't learn for our future. Put that kind of stuff in a museum. Have an information display about why it was there. Inform the future generations. Empower them with knowledge.

abbotsbury

•

This isn't Hitler's car though, this is a Neo Nazi monument made in the 80s; it has zero historical value

TheGrandNagus

•

Are you seriously comparing a car personally used by Hitler to a memorial built by neonazis in the 80s?

If I made a swastika statue with a plaque saying the Jews and Slavs must be exterminated, would you back me up? Because it's the same thing. Neither are actually part of the history, they're just contemporary fetishism of Nazis.

Pipoca

•

To be fair, this seems to have been made by people related to the unit - veterans and their families. Which honestly might make it worse.

The slab was erected by veterans groups about 30 years ago at St. Mary’s Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the creation of the unit ...

The division surrendered to the Allies in 1945. Facing the possibility of deportation to the Soviet Union, about 8,000 former soldiers from the division were allowed to emigrate and others followed later, settling in such places as Toronto, Chicago and Philadelphia

Ukrainians want to pretend that this group had nothing to do with the holocaust or naziism, but keep in mind that only a couple decades before during the Russian Civil War there were over a thousand pogroms in Ukraine which murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews. Murderous antisemitism wasn't a fringe thing in Ukraine then.

Pipoca

•

That's what holocaust museums are for.

There's many, many better exhibits there than something like this would be. Pictures of holocaust victims, stories from survivors, artifacts, etc. Auschwitz has a room with tens of thousands of shoes in a heap that had been taken from murdered children.

We shouldn't forget history, but that doesn't mean we need to preserve every Nazi memorial and every peice of Nazi propaganda.

SocialMediaRefugee

•

Sort of like what ISIS did

Pipoca

•

There's a world of difference between destroying a 2000 year old temple, and destroying confederate memorials made in the 60s or Nazi memorials made in the 80s.

For one thing, neoconfederate and neonazi propaganda isn't rare. There's not that much historical value to it, either, except to document the neoconfederate and neonazi movements themselves.

And holocaust victims still exist, while I don't think the same is true of any victims of ancient Iraqi pagan gods.

CCatMan

•

This article was a nice hiatory leaaon on something I didn't know about. While a monument to honor these people should be removed, i think it is important to have something educational come out of this.

bobman

•

The lesson that should be learned is monuments aren't sacred just because they're monuments.

wallabra

•

This just in: Nazis materialize out of thin air!

sqw

•

here’s the Lev Golinkin article for the curious. https://forward.com/news/558622/ss-galichina-ukraine-nazi-monument-memorial-detroit-elkins-park/

fugepe

•

Hello based department?

Mindlight

•

Wikipedia:

I got curious about the last statement in the article about war crimes and wanted to find information on what war crimes the division was responsible for.

According to Wikipedia there has been numerous investigations which all (as I understood it) has been unsuccessful in finding hard evidence.

Now, I'm not defending Nazis and I'm not saying this division was nice in any way or not guilty of war crimes. I'm just concluding that most things in life are not just black or white.

K1nsey6

•

Ukraine is littered with these type of memorials.

Twig

•

Source?

r3dhalo

•

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commemoration_of_Stepan_Bandera

Fades

•

One instance ain’t littered

Twig

•

The article lists more.

Compactor9679

•

No phili, outside of an ukranian school. Keep sending aim to ukraine!!!

wheeldawg

•

I wonder if any harm at all would be caused if a time traveler caused early miscarriage of every fetus that would become a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.

Like any harm, at all. I highly doubt it. Other than losing a clear example of what not to do in life.

Edit: forgot a clarifying word

AngryAnusHornets

•

Permanently Deleted

wheeldawg

•

I mentioned this caveat.

i_r_weldr

•

Nothing like a little casual eugenics haha, amiright? Haha

SatanicNotMessianic

•

That’s not eugenics unless you buy into the Nazi based Nazi=genetic argument. Haha

NuPNuA

•

You've played C&C: Red Alert right?

wheeldawg

•

No. I never liked RTS.

SocialMediaRefugee

•

I'm sure your ancestors at some point did bad things...

wheeldawg

•

I don't know if this would affect me, but I'm willing to not exist if it saved that many people.

If non existent even counts as harm. I'm not convinced it does.

Pregnenolone

•

Not every Nazi had bad children, so you’d be killing then too

wheeldawg

•

Non existence is not death.

Tb0n3

•

I wonder if this is anything like the Canadian one for those who were found innocent and actually contributed against the Nazis.

some_guy

•

Found innocent?

You’re whitewashing and apologizing for nazis:

Similar memorials have also generated outcry in Canada. Jared McBride, a UCLA historian of Eastern Europe, said that within the Ukrainian diaspora, many believe that the soldiers allied with the Nazis with noble intentions.

But it is a view that he said scholars view widely as historical revisionism.

“The Nazi regime was a genocidal regime,” McBride said. “This idea of parsing these things out — that ‘We were the good SS division,’ or ‘The good police unit,’ or ‘The good mobile death battalion’ — is not the strongest of arguments.”

John-Paul Himka, a retired history professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and an expert on Ukrainian history, said SS Galizien had “very little to do with the Holocaust” since it was not formed until 1943 and first saw combat the following year. But, Himka said, the unit was also tied to other war crimes during World War II.

“Galizien fought with the Germans against the Soviets; it helped suppress the Slovak uprising; it was involved in atrocities against Poles and Slovaks; it welcomed into its ranks many perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing against the Polish population and of the Holocaust; it propagated antisemitism and seems to have been involved in a roundup of Jews in Brody in 1944,” Himka said by email. “I cannot accept the notion that they were ‘freedom fighters.’”

3L54

•

You calling people names doesnt help anybody. World isnt black and white as you see it.

bobman

•

Begone, nazi sympathizer.

And get some exercise! The Waffen SS would've killed you just out of embarrassment, lol.

3L54

•

Spreading lies and accusing people without any reason doesnt get you really far in real life. I feel sorry for you being so angry over your own imagination.

PatFussy

•

I for one support ukraine 🇺🇦 and all their endeavors

bdonvr

•

In this context you seem to be supporting their historical endeavor to be part of the Nazi SS?

PatFussy

•

Dont be ridiculous. You know there were no nazis in ukraine. The US definitely wouldnt fund any nazi campaign, that would give credence to Russia invading

FlyingSquid

•

This was 1944, not 2021. But sure, Russia invaded a sovereign nation because they had some Nazis in it. That seems totally reasonable.

iopq

•

They collaborated with the Nazis because the Soviets invaded and occupied the country twenty years earlier.

They both fought against the Germans and the Soviets to try to go back to having independence

some_guy

•

You’re whitewashing and apologizing for nazis:

Similar memorials have also generated outcry in Canada. Jared McBride, a UCLA historian of Eastern Europe, said that within the Ukrainian diaspora, many believe that the soldiers allied with the Nazis with noble intentions.

But it is a view that he said scholars view widely as historical revisionism.

“The Nazi regime was a genocidal regime,” McBride said. “This idea of parsing these things out — that ‘We were the good SS division,’ or ‘The good police unit,’ or ‘The good mobile death battalion’ — is not the strongest of arguments.”

John-Paul Himka, a retired history professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and an expert on Ukrainian history, said SS Galizien had “very little to do with the Holocaust” since it was not formed until 1943 and first saw combat the following year. But, Himka said, the unit was also tied to other war crimes during World War II.

“Galizien fought with the Germans against the Soviets; it helped suppress the Slovak uprising; it was involved in atrocities against Poles and Slovaks; it welcomed into its ranks many perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing against the Polish population and of the Holocaust; it propagated antisemitism and seems to have been involved in a roundup of Jews in Brody in 1944,” Himka said by email. “I cannot accept the notion that they were ‘freedom fighters.’”

iopq

•

These were not Nazis, but rather a separate organization that fought against everyone at some point, including fighting against Nazis. I don't have a personal opinion on it

FlyingSquid

•

They were literally Waffen SS.

Empricorn

•

Lol, imagine trying to find a reason to excuse helping literal Nazis...

ElleChaise

•

Even the so-called goods people mention were obtained at the cost of blood. A lot of blood of innocent people. How hard is it to denounce nazism really lol fuck.

Empricorn

•

It's almost like people want to find a reason to support... what they really believe in.

njm1314

•

Kind of like how the US government did the same thing when they protected former Nazis against War crime tribunals because we wanted their help against the Communists?

Pipoca

•

There's a bit of a difference between literally volunteering to fight for the nazi state and protecting von Braun so he could work for NASA.

Protecting von Braun doesn't enable the holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. It's machiavellian and realpolitik, sure, but the nazi atrocities are over by that point.

Literally enlisting in the SS, though, you're either actively carrying out atrocities or enabling other people to carry out atrocities.

K1nsey6

•

Then formed entire government agencies for them. Here's the new headquarters for one of them

CookieJarObserver

•

There are loads... For example...

Being treated better by them than by the ones you fight...

And no, although SS where the guys that run the KZs most of SS didn't even know about them especially not the foreign legions.

iopq

•

They also fought Nazis at some point, so it's a bit more complicated

Furball

•

You are thinking of the Ukrainian insurgent army. This is the Ukrainian SS division.

vlad76

•

Shades of grey are not understood anymore.

NuPNuA

•

Imagine assuming your comfortable 2020s life where you can apply black and white morality to everythin was the status quo thoughout world history, and no one has ever had to try and decide between two evils.

Empricorn

•

Have you been taking stupid pills...? Like yeah, obviously some things are grey and complicated... But some things are black and white. And (I can't fucking believe I have to say this) Nazis = Bad.

njm1314

•

I'd kind of love to hear how you would justify to Ukranians in 1939 that the Russians who have been murdering 10s of millions of Ukranians are the good guys.

SatanicNotMessianic

•

The monument, in a Montgomery County community known for its synagogues, is dedicated to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel — the Nazi military branch often referred to simply as “the SS.”

Fuck them and fuck whitewashing.

CookieJarObserver

•

Not to be that guy but the SS was also the foreign legions of Germany because they weren't allowed in the Wehrmacht (normal military) and SS had many people that just wanted to fight the communists.

bobman

•

Hey buddy drinks soda

You just blow in from stupid town?

AngryMob

•

Doesn't mean we call them heros and erect monuments to them. if anything we place these objects in a museum dedicated to the group. We acknowledge their troubled past, difficult decisions, horrible actions, good actions, and learn from all of it. A sense of shame and humility doesnt make current Ukrainians bad in any way.

Tb0n3

•

Who's this we you're talking about. It's a private fucking cemetery.