it wasn't to last as the soviet rule of the baltics was evil.
Many Lithuanians have the same approach; they don’t view their service as dedication to Hitler, but to their own independence. Eastern Europeans have no misconceptions as to who killed more people; they regard both of them as monsters, but one as worse than the other.
Glorifying fascism is not acceptable nor making light of the harm to its victims.
There is nothing redeeming about Nazism.
Nazi freedom fighters...yeah, that's the ticket.
A little organizational information.
The SS was organized in two branches, the Waffen (combat) SS and the General SS. The Waffen SS fought on the front lines next to the German army, the Wehrmacht, but had a different chain of command, often with serious coordination problems between the two. To further frustrate matters, the field artillery were under the partial control of the Luftwaffe, the Air Forces, under yet another different command structure.
The Waffen SS were very high quality, elite forces, and at least at their creation, the *average* education of officers was a Masters’ degree.
The General SS, on the other hand, committed the vast majority of genocidal acts and war crimes, and were also tasked with operating the concentration camps, under the direction of the Financial Ministry, of all things.
When the tide was turned in the eastern front, and the Wehrmacht was in retreat, the Waffen SS carried out some extraordinary delaying actions against the Russians, even more extraordinary than the battle of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. For example, a single antitank company held off two Russian mechanized armies for two weeks, with little more than tube antitank weapons (Panzerfausts) and small arms.
Once Germany had conquered most of Europe, the Waffen SS also organized nationalist SS units in many of the countries they occupied, often recruiting among anti-communists.
The threat of Bolshevism drove Germans into the arms of the Nazis — and many other nations in Europe sent their own legions to fight against Bolshevism.
An ugly situation all around.
The Waffen SS took an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler and the ethnic elements from Estonias to Bosnian muslims took the same oath. Any celebration of such service is wrong and these marchers just added to Putin’s claims that there is a rise of fascism in Eastern Europe threatening the Rodina.
They were trying to decide between two forms of totalitarian socialism. There was no good choice.
I just finished reading "The Last 100 Days", about the ending of the war. Hitler was a wussy compared to Uncle Joe when it came to atrocities.
The history we learned in school was written to gloss over most of it; to show it all would reflect upon Roosevelt, the icon of the left, who, naturally, wrote the books.
The Soviets murdered and enslaved them until 1990 (thanks FDR!) and we’re getting hot about some mythical Nazis. Public edumacation is great in America , isn’t it.
Put yourself in the times....knowing only what was known then by the common man. What would you do and why?
We can’t answer that because we weren’t there, aren’t them, and the answer is as numerous and complex as the men/women who made their choices or had choices forced upon them.
The great liberating alliance for democracy between the US, UK and USSR? Really? The outcome of the war left 1/2 of Europe under the heel of butchering savages for another 50 years. The nightmare for Poland and the Baltics that started in 1939 never ended until 1989. One could say that the hell of the eastern Germans that started in 1932 was equally long in its expiry.
On a grander scale, consider the fate,choices and behavior of the Finns between 1914 and 1989. We romanticize their struggle against Soviet aggression in the Winter War, but are meekly silent in judging them about their Nazi alliance in the Russian campaign through 1944.
Or perhaps the militantly anti-Red Churchill who said of his embracing Stalin after the June 1941 Nazi invasion that if Hitler had invaded Hell, he would at least speak favorably of the Devil on the floor of Parliament.
I was told when young by a Polish emigre that when traveling to Europe, to not concern myself with planning to visit either Germany or Russia. He said that no matter where I was in Europe eventually both would visit me.
The Soviet point of view has its supporters here, doesn’t it. Anyone who fought the murderous Communists is a ‘Nazi’. Little wonder such ignorance elected a Communist to the White Hut in this country.
I don't accept that any members of the SS were merely harmless nationalists. If they weren't die-hard Nazis they would have enlisted in different units.
And actually, I understand that in Europe the only two choices at one time were Communism and Nazism. To fight one was almost automatically to align with the other.
Thank G-d that America's traditional veneration of the TaNa"KH has prevented such a situation in this country.
Germans found more collaborators among the Baltics and Ukrainians (as opposed to the Poles and Czechs, where collaboration was practically unknown), because to those nations Germans were liberators from the Soviet hell, and hell it was, worse than the German occupation, which is something that today’s history books will not tell you or will willfully distort. After all, the victors write history, and the American victors, us, are ever ashamed to admit they allied themselves with the greatest murderers in human history, to fight a piker.
I wonder how many “ethnic Russians” that live in the baltics that Putin will want to rescue?
Sort of like the 2008 and 2012 GOP prez candidates.