Posted on 03/16/2014 5:34:18 AM PDT by Cronos
The annual march to honour Latvias World War II Waffen SS divisions, part of the armed wing of Adolf Hitlers Nazi party, always attracts some criticism.
This year, critics of the commemorative event protested during the event. They believe it distorts history honouring Nazism and insulting victims of the regime.
But the veterans, now in their 80s and 90s, the men say they were fighting for Latvian freedom and against the return of the Soviet Red Army which occupied Latvia before the war.
Followed by supporters carrying national flags, they walked through the city to lay flowers at the central Freedom Monument.
Despite the protest, a police spokeswoman said the event passed peacefully. Around 3,000 people took part this year.
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.
Save the history lesson Heiny, Im talking members of the SS, ANY SS, Who served the national socialist German government. The others, like Slovoda and Right sector in Ukraine, American skinheads types, etc,,,are usually known as Neo-nazis.
And slicing the pie kinda thin. I happily call Obama a communist though he is not a card carrying party member that I know of. I show followers of the Reich the same courtesy.
And anyone opposing Nazis deserves respect too. Nazis do not become respectable because they are fighting Soviets.
They were the SOBs who stripped women naked and shot them. NO respect, and our men did right to kill every SS cutthroat they found.
Exactly. Europe's conservatism is very different from America's (because it has no Biblical sentimentalism) and for that reason, Nazism and Communism are seen as the only two alternatives there.
Save me your conventional wisdom babble. You are parroting terms invented and passed on to you by Communist propagandists. No, the Ukrainian nationalists whatever their views are not ‘neo-nazis’! Let’s get absurd! Again, NAZI = member of NSDAP. NSDAP ceased existing in 1945. WWII was started and conducted and lost by Germans, not by any ‘Nazis’. At the same time, in September 1939, Stalin invaded Poland. Too bad our men did not kill every Red Army murderer and rapist they met. We’d be living in a better world if they had.
Finland's membership in the Axis was purely military. So far as I know, there was no totalitarian ideology or anti-Semitism in WWII Finland at all. Finland merely joined in when Germany attacked Russia because it remembered the "Winter War." It's really too bad the Allies didn't declare war on Stalin from the time he invaded eastern Poland. Finland was the only sympathetic Axis partner.
The Iron Cross, originally, had no anti-Semitic connotations whatsoever, being a Prussian military medal created during the Napoleonic wars. Lots of German Jews won Iron Crosses during World War I. Unfortunately, like the Confederate Battle Flag, anti-Semites have hijacked it.
So then why are they proudly marching today as an SS veteran? Nobody pointing a gun at them now. Just sayin.
This.
Communist holocaust continues to this day and is being denied by the scaremongers vomiting nonsense about some mythical nazis.
Happy Purim, Haman.
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.
This is just crazy.
At the same time, in September 1939, Stalin invaded Poland. Too bad our men did not kill every Red Army murderer and rapist they met. Wed be living in a better world if they had.
And this is perfectly true.
Buzz off, pretender!
Hey . . . I know it's not your fault you were born and raised in a culture that believes in evolution and thinks the TaNa"KH is mythology. Shoot, you were taught as a child that the story in the Book of Esther never happened and that Mordecai and Esther were based on false "gxds." If I had been born in your place and you in mine, our positions would be reversed.
One of these days you need to let a good ol' redneck American fundamentalist Bible-thumpin' American conservative teach you a little about Bobble. Then you'll understand at least a little better.
You misunderstand. The massacre of POWs at Baugnez (Malmedy) was just the largest of 11 massacres of POWs in no-man’s land. But it was the one that everyone paid attention to, so the casualties of some of the other massacres were included, and confused, with it. And things get very fuzzy from there.
About 120 men were at the Baugnez site. By all accounts they were fired on by machine guns. But of the 84 bodies recovered a month later, at least 20 had gunshot wounds to the head with powder burns, about that number had gunshot wounds to the head without powder burns, 10 had fatal crushing or blunt-trauma injuries. There is also evidence they were clustered together. A dozen were found in an adjacent field, mostly machine gun casualties.
Further massacres of POWs were reported in Stavelot, Cheneux, La Gleize, and Stoumont, on December 18, 19, and 20. At the latter, about 100 Belgians were murdered.
According to some sources, 538 to 749 POWs had been the victims of war crimes perpetrated by Peiper’s men. These figures are, however, not corroborated by the report of the United States Senate subcommittee that later inquired into the subsequent trial; according to the Committee, the number of dead would be 362 prisoners of war and 111 civilians.
The one case I mentioned, of the innkeeper’s son, is clearly known and was positively identified by his parents, who stated that he had died and been buried, but his body was dressed in a US Army uniform, with one or more bullet injuries, and was included among the dead. A Scots war museum owner in Belgium gathered evidence that at least his name should be removed from the memorial, across the street from his parent’s inn.
I wonder how many “ethnic Russians” that live in the baltics that Putin will want to rescue?
Consider the Ukrainians. Stalin killed over 7 million of them between 1932-33 in the terror famine, where the communists went up and down the country confiscating all the food. Stalin killed more Ukrainians in 2 years than Hitler did Jews.
Disgusting to see people defending the SS,,,,ANY kind of SS.
The dark side of conservatism (especially in places like Europe) is henotheism--a dedication to the national, local worldview, religion, "gxd," etc. The ultimate goal of the so-called "palaeo" right is a "planet of peoples," where each nation would live in its own ethnically pure holy land and worship its own national "gxd" with no objective universal truths whatsoever. There is a tad of this in American conservatism as well, but it's not nearly as bad.
The only way to fight both the henotheistic and pagan "palaeo" right and the G-dless materialistic Left at once is to fight for the objective universal Truth of the One True G-d--ie, the G-d of Israel, the Jewish G-d--in explicitly Jewish terms.
There is no alternative to this other than the leftist universal scientism or the rightist national idol.
Soviets confiscating food and having people fall dead of starvation in the streets. Nazis lining up all the Jews of Kiev in Babi Yar, stripping them naked and shooting them in the head.
Both are utterly hellish and satanic. In Ukraine, the Germans and Soviets both earned the utter disgust sane people. A thinking person should hate both equally. Its weird weird weird to pretend the Nazis were “liberators” of some sort. And condemning an SS man shouldn’t ever, even slightly, be seen as supporting the USSR.
Before the Nazis showed up, the Communists were the enemy, and anything bad said about the Germans was probably seen as Commie propaganda. After the Nazis actually were there and started behaving like Nazis, opinions changed.
If the Nazis governed Ukraine like they did Slovakia, they would have been accepted as liberators.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.