And no where did anyone say that these two people should be assigned the same level of blame. The point is that there is still some level of complicity at play here.
In THIS case, these are people who volunteered to be part of the nazi war machine when they did not have to do so. They weren’t even German.
I’m not defending anyone who signed up in the SS. The SS didn’t take conscripts.
“Great people, the best, really great people”
To paraphrase The Don…
The Poles of Volhynia and Galicia would say that the UPA was just as bad as either the Nazis or the Russians. (And with three neighbours all bent on ethnic cleansing, it wasn’t even possible to play one side off against the other!) In that period, it seems that every military or paramilitary organization in Eastern Europe wrought genocide upon someone.
Yes, liberal democratic partisans were thin on the ground everywhere in the Bloodlands. Not a lot of “good guys” as we here would understand them – most of them ended up dead or fled. My point is that the choice for the Ukrainian at the time who was stuck there wasn’t simply a binary one between supporting the Soviets or the Nazis – it was more … nuanced … than that.
What’s not nuanced is that the Ukrainians honoured by this monument chose not just the Germans, not just the Nazis, but the bloody SS. And not just because they disliked the Soviets or the Russians.
These were volunteers, though, is the point, non-Germans seeking out a position in the nazi army. 
…because the USA wasn’t the only country with something like Operation Paperclip. Bucketloads of European fash scattered across the world in the late 1940s.
They made it to some other places, too.
Note the bit that starts at 5:00.
God I love this community! Ask a simple question and open the door to a full on education on the subject. How absolutely cool is that?! Thanks for the links, it looks like I’m in for some pretty interesting reading. As for Bully Hayes, I’ve only ever heard the name…and I cannot recall the context in which I did. So much information to absorb!
Actually there was. Soldiers in the German Army did not have to be members of the Nazi party. You couldn’t progress very high in the ranks, sure. But plenty of German soldiers weren’t Nazis.
Must have been confused by the swastika flags patches. Happens all the time./s
Two wrongs don’t make a right. The recent history of Ukraine is quite complicated, I would also not even try to explain the Ukranian personal logic, but it could be reasoned as a consequence of an extremely traumatic event that happened in 1932-33, HOLODOMOR. Google, and try to imagine it. By the way, the Wikipedia article on it is very, but very mild and broad on its description, not making justice to what occurred.
There are Japanese war graves in Australia, protected by our department of defense, and they are not going anywhere.
The Japanese were, in many respects as bad as the Germans, but in a different part of the world.
You might like to read up on the Soviet-sponsored Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, the “Holodomor”. I suspect that, at that time, any way of getting free of Soviet control would have looked like a recipe for national survival. Stuck, as it were, between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.
I’ve read a couple of books on the Holodomor. Horrible as the engineered famine was, it still doesn’t excuse choosing Hitler and the Nazis as allies against Stalin.
One of the problems that hobbled Robert Conquest’s otherwise solid work on these subjects was that he was also a Cold War anti-Communist ideologue. That position (and perhaps the sponsorship of some of his research by the Ukrainian immigrant community in N America) had him constantly selling his underlying attitude that “Stalin was worse than Hitler, so you can’t blame people who opposed him for joining up with the Nazis”. That same attitude was no doubt seized upon in the late 1980s to justify this monument.
It goes back even further, to the suppression of the Free Territory/Makhnovia in 1921
It’s hard to get away from authoritarian thought when successive governments have purged all the anti-authoritarians.
Not true - from 1942 the Waffen-SS also conscripted members.
This bunch were volunteers though.
On the hindsight, sitting in a comfortable armchair, not being there, is easy to make this kind of assumption believing it to be the right one. But being under their skin it is an other matter.
There are other books besides those written by Robert Conquest on the subject.
There are other books on the topic, better in some ways because Conquest didn’t have access to the archives of the former Soviet Union that the later scholars did. Those other historians I’ve read did not spare the reader the horrors of the Holomodor, but (not being Cold Warriors or purblind “centrists”) did not play the “Stalin was worse than Hitler” numbers and semantics games that Conquest did, either.
I use Conquest here as an example of how ideology can taint and twist the conclusions of a solid and otherwise insightful historian to the point where he ends up excusing people allying themselves with Nazis. Despite the complexity of the situation, there is no excuse – none – for any Ukrainian having volunteered for the Waffen SS or for the Hiwis. Only two years before, Hitler has sold out Galacia to Stalin as part of their pact. The units’ recruiters and officers were not coy about their parent organisations’ primary missions of ethnic cleansing.
There were many other Ukrainians at the time pointing out these facts and saying that Hitler was an equal if not greater threat to Stalin – they weren’t sitting in comfortable armchairs. That the Nazis were genocidal oppressors and untrustworthy allies was not a realisation everyone just came to after 1941; In the European/Eurasian ferment of the late 1920s and the 1930s one had to work very hard to ignore the various ideological factions in play.
Yeah. It’s a common misconception.
Some good reading on this: Richard Evans, in In Hitler’s Shadow West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past estimates that about a third of junior officers were members of the Nazi party in 1941. Omer Bartov, in The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare puts it around 30% for high-ranking officers.
The number drifted up towards the end of the war, largely because by 1945 many young men had grown up under National Socialism and so knew little else in terms of political party participation. But it was not required, and was not universal. An oath of loyalty to Hitler was required, but that’s something different.
That’s for the Wermacht. Members of the SS did have to be card-carrying Nazis, as far as I recall.
Doesn’t justify participating in the Holocaust… as you say, two wrongs don’t make a right…
