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I suspect it likely that they have had statues erected, but despite being Nazi sympathisers rather than because of it (e.g., you might take Henry Ford as an example).
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Ooo…fair point. I hadn’t thought of it that way. Well shit. I guess there is no ideology so repugnant that the US won’t at least tacitly support with a monument. For thirty seconds I thought that there might be at least a SINGLE thing that we were nicer about than our neighbors to the north. I should’ve known better… 
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You know, in theory it would be really easy to do one without the other, to make a monument to the unfortunate Germans forced into a disgusting war without glorifying said cause. To those soldiers forced to fight for Hitler against their will. Dictators hurt even their own. Put up a stone saying that and I don’t think anyone would consider it a Nazi memorial.
To those that died for the freedom of Ukraine on a monument to the SS is so decidedly the opposite, so clearly presenting their cause as a worthy one, I don’t understand how you can possibly think what you are saying has any bearing on it.
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I would think Lindbergh would be another example. His reputation was fairly tarnished by the time the US went to war, though statues of him are primarily for his accomplishments in aviation rather than his sympathy for Nazi ideology.
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“Freedom of Ukraine”. . . I guess that depends what you mean by “freedom.”
The 100,000+ Jews who died at Babi Yar probably aren’t thankful for being ‘liberated’ from their lives.
[ETA: and it wasn’t just Jews that died at the hands of Ukrainian nationalist collaborators.]
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Perhaps I’ll have the time and energy to worry about Canadian Nazi memorials some time after Jewish cemeteries stop being vandalized. Of course, I’m sure Europe has solved that problem. I’m sure that Europe hasn’t had, say another vandalism incident in Worms or Southern France this month.
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Confederate flag.
Traitors and racists. And people are only now starting to realize that?
Don’t bother me with that “southern heritage” BS because you know exactly how that dog whistle sounds.
Germany doesn’t stand for celebrating National Socialists, and the Untied States of America should not stand for celebrating Confederate traitors.
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To give an idea of how evil the SS were my grandfathers only story about his involvement in The Battle of The Bulge was they had to keep the SS prisoners separated from the German conscript prisoners as they were even more ready and willing to beat them to a pulp than the Americans.
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God - what a mess. Scratch deep enough (usually not very deep) and there are atrocities everywhere. Human beings are brutal animals with a thin veneer of civilization, and it doesn’t take much to get them to do terrible things. Present company excepted, of course. (/s)
Perhaps this is the original sin St.Augustine was talking about - not the sin that you have as a result of being born “in sin”, but rather that every human has the propensity for unbelievably sinful behavior, and that we need saints to constantly remind us not to be that way.
EDIT: I’m NOT saying it should not be removed. I am saying that we should not kid ourselves that we are superior to the people that erected this monument. We have no idea what monuments we are currently creating that will be seen as horrendous centuries (decades?) hence. We are not the apotheosis of human culture. There will be a future, and we will be wrong about some things.
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All true, but speaking as someone who is a great-great-grandson of a Ukranian-Canadian immigrant, That doesn’t change the issue. You acknowledge the sins of the past and ensure they don’t happen again.
Tear down the monument and replace it with a monument to the Ukrainian immigrants (and, in war times, refugees) that are part of the wonderful fabric of Canadian culture. No need to glorify past misdeeds at the same time.
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For Waffen SS units? Absolutely not. You will find memorials to individual soldiers (say, the sons of a village that didn’t come back) but they will not usually mention units, and certainly not glorify the Waffen SS. If something like that was erected it would be vandalised.
Those weren’t “clean Wehrmacht soldiers just following orders” (which is in itself a myth of course). They were card carrying Nazis committed to the cause.
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Long before the Nazi’s showed up, Ukrainian non-jews were murdering jews in a massive, celebrated fashion. My grandmother’s parents brought her to Canada and eventually resettled in Los Angeles. Her grandfather was slaughtered (after taking out a dozen attackers, the story goes). The Ukrainians invented the pogrom. So if it was a stone monument dedicated not to Nazis but to, say, the cossacks or even those who welcomed them… well, I wish they’d used a dremel.
My family was lucky. Some stayed and survived to the current generation and others got out before it got even worse.
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This.
I mean, I am not surprised that this went up, given the excuse and the heavy concentration of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada.
But it doesn’t need to stay there.
People talk about removing monuments as erasing history, but that’s only if you don’t record the removal. It will in no way erase history if a future textbook reads “up until 2020, a monument celebrating members of a volunteer SS unit was allowed to stand under the guise of honoring Ukrainian war dead. In 2020, in recognition of the actual meaning of the monument, the city had it removed… etc.”
Because we should, as Canadians, acknowledge our complicity in letting it stand for so long.
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If one was puzzled how this monument was related to Nazis, it’s the emblem at the top. I guess it is low key enough and/or the explicit info not in English that at first look it didn’t raise any flags for me.
Rather shocked it was allowed to be put up in, checks notes, 1988???
The Poles managed to offer resistance to Stalin’s forces with out the help of Nazis. 
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I don’t think it was anywhere near 20k (at least not from my recollection of readings, but I’d have to doublecheck). They fled to Brazil because it was the only country that still allowed national, legal slavery. They still have, I believe, an active sub-culture down there.
The problem is: there isn’t. The very act of “memorializing” some dead but not others becomes at least de facto support for one faction’s ideology. In the US, Confederate war “memorials” were erected in the 20th century specifically to glorify white supremacy. That they are ostensibly memorials to the dead (even if only a specific few) has been used as justification for keeping them, despite the fact that this was not their actual, or at least primary, purpose.
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Except that one of the other nations–in fact the one that did most of “the work” to end the atrocity of Nazism–was also an oppressive totalitarian regime that killed tens of millions of innocents, including because those innocents were ethnic minorities, and used its victory in WWII to, among other things, continue oppressing Ukraine for decades, followed by another wannabe-totalitarian regime governed by a Stalinist that is currently doing the same goddamn thing.
We should not allow a memorial to Nazis to remain up anywhere, but some nuance in this discussion would be helpful given that there were objectively awful, murderous regimes on both sides of this war, and we were fighting alongside one of them.
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I am outraged at genocide.
I do not want to see monuments built to genocide.
Please read my comment in context. I was addressing specifically the comment that questioned the desecration of an enemy’s cemeteries, and describing one of the impulses that prompts it.
In this specific case - no, Canada should not have a monument to the Waffen-SS.
For Ukrainians, the situation is complicated. The view that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ made many Ukrainians decide that the only way to save their nation and people from one genocidal tyrant would be to sell it out to another.
In large measure, Hitler is iconic of evil and Stalin is not because Stalin was the enemy of our enemy. (I am NOT redeeming Hitler here! I am condemning Stalin!)
Place the thing side by side with a memorial to По́стріл у спи́ну - the Shot in the Back?
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I’m old enough to to remember the shitstorm that came up when Reagan, on a visit to Germany in around 1985, committed to visit a German war cemetery in Bitburg. It came to light that about 50 of the 2000 soldiers who were buried there were Waffen SS.
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