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.
I can drive there in 20-30 mins. If the pay is right… just saying
Road trip! I’ll bring pretzels!
Not just any pretzels are acceptable
they’re swastika-formed
Especially since the cemetery claims they don’t know who owns it.
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.
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.
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 UkraineNothing about the SS unit, only the dates 1943-1945 and the shield of the lion and crowns. It’s not explicit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is going to get lost by a lot of people, but thanks for sharing a very informative, yet quick history of it all.
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.
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.
Including most of their leaders, so the title of the post is correct. Yeah, surely every group of Nazi collaborators has its history.
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.
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.
If you know much history, the dates and Ukrainian symbols, along with the cross should set off alarm bells.
It’s in a Ukrainian Catholic cemetery, so I’d expect a majority of visitors could read Ukrainian.
A private citizen with a sledge hammer could solve this in seconds.
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.
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.
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.
This isn’t Hitler’s car though, this is a Neo Nazi monument made in the 80s; it has zero historical value
Well the message of why this statue is there is that our nation has tolerated this leech of owner class and oligsrch fascists for far too long thanks to liberal civility politics and private property rights for art displayed in a public town square.
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.
Auchswitz is a good reminder. Most other museums that could host this would be… sending a different message.
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
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.’”
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
They were literally Waffen SS.
Lol, imagine trying to find a reason to excuse helping literal Nazis…
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.
It’s almost like people want to find a reason to support… what they really believe in.
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?
Then formed entire government agencies for them. Here’s the new headquarters for one of them
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.
They also fought Nazis at some point, so it’s a bit more complicated
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You are thinking of the Ukrainian insurgent army. This is the Ukrainian SS division.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This just in: Nazis materialize out of thin air!
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
Nothing like a little casual eugenics haha, amiright? Haha
That’s not eugenics unless you buy into the Nazi based Nazi=genetic argument. Haha
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I mentioned this caveat.
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No. I never liked RTS.
Not every Nazi had bad children, so you’d be killing then too
Non existence is not death.
Ukraine is littered with these type of memorials.
Source?
One instance ain’t littered
The article lists more.
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.
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In this context you seem to be supporting their historical endeavor to be part of the Nazi SS?
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This was 1944, not 2021. But sure, Russia invaded a sovereign nation because they had some Nazis in it. That seems totally reasonable.
here’s the Lev Golinkin article for the curious. https://forward.com/news/558622/ss-galichina-ukraine-nazi-monument-memorial-detroit-elkins-park/
