And before anyone tries to make the case that the Waffen SS were just elite combat troops in the fight against Bolshevism, here’s Himmler addressing this very unit on their remit as part of the organisation he headed:
Your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost – on our initiative, I must say – those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name, namely the Jews … I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles … I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.
Somehow, avenging the Holomodor and fighting Stalin aren’t primary concerns here…
The history in reality is far more complicated that is believed, I just went to have a look into some details and I found this: see screen capture. From the book “ Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and … “ by Tadeusz Piotrowski, page 231. The said unit was according to the book mainly constituted of ex-Soviet Ukrainian militiamen!!!
I’m glad you’ve abandoned the pretense that their service had anything to do with the Holomodor or opposition to the Soviets. The soldiers you’re discussing here were just murderous anti-Semitic and anti-Polish thugs who drifted between whichever genocidal organisation had the upper hand in Galicia at any given moment. That’s about as complex as it gets, something Himmler (as evinced by his speech) apparently understood.
Which makes it even more interesting that this monument honours the service of these murderous thugs in the Waffen SS in particular. It further illustrates the dishonesty about “freedom fighting” on the part of those who put up the monument.
Nope. Galicia was part of Poland during that period (approx. 1932-33). The Soviet militia phase for (a portion of) these homicidal thugs covers the handover of Galicia to the Soviets from Sept. 1939 (when Poland was divvied up between Hitler and Stalin) to June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa).
It’s fair to bring up the event in general as a major national trauma and to acknowledge that there was good reason for Ukrainians to loathe Stalin and the Soviets. And of course it’s a major example of Stalin’s brutality. In the context of discussions of German SS activities in Eastern Europe during the 1940s, however, I agree it starts to smell.
For example, a favourite narrative of so-called “revisionist” historians (i.e. Holocaust deniers) goes something like “the SS was really hunting down brutal Soviet commissars and officials, the kind who’d overseen the engineered famine in the territories occupied by Germany. Most of those Commie agents happened to be Jewish [this is false], so yes, the SS was ‘technically’ killing Jews en masse. But it was really about ideology, and there weren’t nearly enough of them to get to that 6-million number.” Alternately, some of them will “admit” that the killings of Communist Jews got “a little out of hand” and ended up sweeping in non-Communist Jews, but again they’ll claim the numbers were “only” in the low hundreds of thousands.
Clearly, you’ve moved in different circles than me. Most commonly I see Holomodor referenced when people are dealing with the “Stalin didn’t nothing wrong” types; or, indirectly, as part of pointing out how utterly horrible the Nazis were, in that even with everything Stalin did to Ukraine, he still ended up being the lesser evil compared to Hitler.
I have never seen those types. But I have remarked on occasion that Stalin was an evil badass. Between his background as a bank robber and keeping Hitler’s skull as a paperweight. Not so much an apologist as an appreciation of villainy with panache.
They have an entire wing of the Yaskune “Peace Museum” devoted to suicide attack craft called “Defense of the Homeland”.
I took my father there a few years back. In his understated way, he remarked “This is an interesting take on events. Not a factual one, but interesting”. He spent a good amount of the 1960’s in Germany. The difference in approaching their Axis past was like night and day.
Not much panache when the Germans invaded, though. Just a lot of crying about how shocked he was that Hitler betrayed him and a lot of paralysis when he was asked what to do by his cowed subordinates. Stalin reportedly retreated to his room like a whinging teenager and refused to come out for days.
Have a visit to the Rape of Nanjing museum in Nanjing, China, sometime. It’s basically designed to show that the massacre actually happened. The Japanese either deny it or ignore it, depending on who you’re talking to. The museum is incredibly powerful. But at the end of it is a “friendship plaque” that reads something like “And then the war ended, and how we’re all friends on the world stage. We cooperate” . Then there’s a paragraph break, followed by “But never forget about this. Because if we allow them to, the Japanese will do this again because that’s the kind of people they are.”
!!!
Takes a bit of digging to find out that the museum was built with funds provided by three Japanese businessmen.
