Posted on 03/16/2018 5:25:16 AM PDT by Eleutheria5
Police arrested a man for displaying a poster of soldiers killing Jews at the annual march by local veterans of two SS divisions that made up the Latvian Legion during World War II.
The man was arrested Friday morning on the margins of the annual march of the Remembrance Day of the Latvian Legionnaires — soldiers from the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS and the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (the 1st and 2nd Latvian, respectively.) A handful of veterans flanked by hundreds of supporters waving Latvian flags gathered around Freedom Monument for the march under heavy police guard.
The march in Latvia, a member of the NATO alliance and the European Union, is currently the only public event in Europe and beyond honoring people who fought under the SS banner. Occurring amid rising tensions with Russia, it is part of numerous expressions across Eastern Europe of admiration for people, including Holocaust perpetrators, who collaborated with Germany against the Soviet Union.
Several protesters from the “Latvia without Fascism” group demonstrated against the event by carrying signs reading “They fought for Hitler” and “if they looked as Nazi, and act with Nazi – they were Nazi.” None of those protesters were arrested.
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(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
The policy toward Japanese residents in the four states of the exclusion zone was stupid and counterproductive more than anything else. Most of the citizens were children born in the US, as immigrants were largely unable to naturalize due to laws enacted prior to WWII. That was wrong, yet those policies get little attention today. Was the fate of innocent people living here morally wrong? Yes, but another uncomfortable fact is that such policies were nothing unusual at the time and had been practiced during war for decades by countries around the world. Governments didn’t let foreign nationals of enemy regimes remain at large. And the Issei were foreign nationals.
Yes, thousands of German civilians died during WWII. Some were Nazis, most were not. In total war that’s what happens. It’s a far cry from lining up a bunch of Jews by a ditch in Poland and shooting them in the back of the head, one by one, into a ditch.
Like the NKVD did in the Katyn forest and blamed it on the Nazis? I’m not defending the Nazi regime, but I sure as hell will defend the honor of the individual German soldier. The Nazis didn’t have a patent on atrocity. The Irgun was committing terrorist attacks against the British, at the same time that the Nazis were committing attacks against the Jews. Albert Einstein called Menachim Begin a “terrorist and a facist” the Lehi continued their attacks against British soliders and policeman during the war, even after the Haganah and Irgun had called a ceasefire. Zionists are not without blood on their hands either.
As the war came to a conclusion and the Czechs were facing a Russian occupation. Vasoff’s million man, Army Russians and Ukrainians fighting for Germany on the eastern front supplied by Himmler fought the SS now in control of Prague and chased them out and liberated Prague which kept the Russians from doing so.
I made no comment about German soldiers in WWII, only in the moral equivalence between Nazi atrocities and the allied bombing of Dresden. But I’ll make one now. The Malmedy massacre was perpetrated by Kampfgruppe Peiper, part of the 1st SS Panzer Division. If someone was any part of the SS during WWII they should shut the hell up now. Parading around in remembrance of a murderous regime would be like a picnic celebrating the “action” at My Lai. Have a quiet gathering to remember your comrades but for god’s sake don’t make it a spectacle.
This article says they took a modified oath:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_Legion
“Conscripts promised in the name of God to be subservient to the German military and its commander Adolf Hitler, to be courageous and to be prepared to give up their life in the fight against Bolshevism.”
Would the RAF and USAAF uniforms be a symbol of the atrocity visited on the innocent civilians in Dresden? Germany was a defeated nation by February of 1945 and Dresden had no military significance. Roughly 22,000-25,000 Germans died in one night, but I guess they were all Nazis, so that makes it ok.
There was more moral clarity in WWII than in most wars, but there were morally ambiguous acts on both sides. Those acts should be remembered and debated, just like we are doing now. But discussions like this allow for nuance.
Symbols like Nazi uniforms do not allow for nuance. The SS uniform is firmly associated with Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities in the mind of the vast majority of the world’s population. Support for those atrocities is the message conveyed, whether or not it is intended.
A simple parade and wreath-laying with only the Latvian flag and no Nazi symbols or uniforms would be the right way to honor Latvian veterans and war dead.
They probably would have been arrested if they had displayed the CSA flag.
He was a politician, directed by the Executive of his country to travel and represent his nation. Did we execute Saddam’s foreign ministers?
We can always refuse immoral orders. Decent individuals will do exactly that. Germans were, by in large, all fully receptive to the idea of being the master race, entitled to the lands and resources of other people.
Poles chose to fight both.
“But to specifically honor units of the Waffen SS is vile.”
Non-Germans were not allowed to enlist in the regular Wehrmacht. The Waffen-SS was the only choice they had.
The 40 Waffen-SS divisions raised during WWII included Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, French, Belgian, Hungarian, Albanian, Croatian and Dutch divisions and various sub-units.
2nd Waffen SS Division: Oradour-sur-Glane massacre
I can hear Sir Laurence Oliver now.....
“Down this road on a summer day in 1944, the soldiers came. Nobody lives here now. They stayed only a few hours. When they had gone, the community, which had lived for a thousand years, was dead. This is Oradour-sur-Glane, in France. The day the soldiers came, the people were gathered together. The men were taken to garages and barns, the women and children were led down this road, and they were driven into this church. Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot. Then they were killed too. A few weeks later, many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead, in battle. They never rebuilt Oradour. Its ruins are a memorial. Its martyrdom stands for thousands upon thousands of other martyrdoms in Poland, in Russia, in Burma, China, in a world at war.”
Blame the Allies at Versailles for that. They were the reason that Hitler rose to power. Had they not run up the score and spiked the football, there would have been no Hitler. I find it funny, that the Soviets did the same and the Allies did nothing to stop them. Patton was right, we should have taken Berlin and headed straight to Moscow.
And 70+ years later, they’re honoring the SS. OK.
Patton was right, there is no dodging that one.
Despite sharing these S-es the Baltic Waffen-SS legions are fundamentally different from the German ones and the earlier foreign ones. These weren’t even volunteer units.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_Legion
“One month after the unit was founded, German occupation authorities in Latvia started conscripting military age men. Draftees were given a choice between serving in the Waffen-SS Legions, serving as (German Wehrmacht) auxiliaries, or being sent to a slave labour camp in Germany. Those who tried to avoid one of those options were arrested and sent to concentration camps.”
“In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal declared the Waffen-SS to be a criminal organization, making an exception of people who had been forcibly conscripted. Throughout the post-war years, the Allies would apply this exception to the soldiers of the Latvian Legion and the Estonian Legion. The US Displaced Persons Commission in September 1950 declared that:
“The Baltic Waffen SS Units (Baltic Legions) are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States.”
Even before this decision, around 1,000 former Latvian Legion soldiers had served as guards at the Nuremberg trials, guarding Nazi war criminals. Afterwards, during the Berlin Blockade, they took part in securing Allied facilities involved in the Berlin Airlift and later also were guarding USA Army headquarters.
These men didn’t have many good choices. A national front line unit fighting against the Soviets trying to return seemed the best to many as they wanted to fight against the Soviets anyway and if these orders were to change then they were still better off challenging it as an armed national unit rather than an unarmed and separate civilians.
You should read this subsection of the wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_Legion#Motivation_of_Latvian_Legionnaires
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