Posted on 03/16/2014 5:34:18 AM PDT by Cronos
The annual march to honour Latvia’s World War II Waffen SS divisions, part of the armed wing of Adolf Hitler’s 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.
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.
And if you are the first neighbor, do you whine about the second being a Nazi?
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.
Bolshevism really did make all of Europe fracture along strange lines.
the option was to be stood against a wall and shot.
They were trying to decide between two forms of totalitarian socialism. There was no good choice.
Its delusional to pretend that the Waffen SS had no hand in the mass murders. In fact Das Reich was more than happy to mass murder the entire town of Orador in France. And the excuse? That’s how they did things on the eastern front.
American GIs at Malmedy also would be interested to hear that the Waffen SS wasn’t a bunch of low life’s that systematically murdered outside the norms of the military profession.
And the Das Reich 2nd SS division, which was formed in Ukraine, and did some of its nastiest work there, had an emblem for their unit. It was an emblem called the Wolfsangel. Coincidently, it was also adopted by the Svoboda party (Socialist National party) and can be seen on he armbands of the Right Sector thugs that just took over Kiev and all the security and defense posts in the new government.
now we KNOW the horrors that the Nazis did -- that's common knowledge in the west. Imagine how horrific the Soviets were if they were considered worse than the Nazis
sadly, in the case of the Baltic nations, they were... it’s a sad read on the history of these nations between 1900 and 1990
the Financial Ministry because they considered Jews and Poles and Russian pows as little more than beasts of burden — actually worse than beasts of burden
“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.”
Herr Goebbels appreciates you parroting his propaganda. The truth is that Nazism thrived in the humiliating terms of Versailles. Communism in Germany was about as much of a threat as the Jews, who were also blamed.
Sure it was.
One of the most disgusting and repugnant crimes of the Nazis was exactly what you allude to. At the time Stalin was abusing Ukraine beyond all sanity, the Nazis rolled in.
Many many Ukrainians thought the nightmare might finally be ended, because “Germans were civilized”. But instead, they turned out to be every bit as inhuman as the NKVD and added the fun Nazi homosexual twist, and German organizing skills to the games.
Its sick beyond belief to do that to those who actually thought you might be their rescuer.
A better neighbor analogy might be that a woman is being raped in her home. A neighbor smashes down the door and beats the attacker senseless. He looks at her and unbuckles his belt, saying “hey babe,, this just ain’t your day”.
Never understood this concept that Nazis are somehow anti-communist or somehow decent.
“Imagine how horrific the Soviets were if they were considered worse than the Nazis”
Nazis weren’t considered better, GERMANS were. People under the Soviet boot thought they were joining the Germans they all knew of recently from WWI. They knew how “Germans” acted. The German Army of WWI was the antithesis of the Nazi armies.
They didn’t yet knew about what the face of the Nazi really was.
And imagine how horrific the Nazis were that they were cool with being seen as liberators, and were still happy to heap even more abuse on those they “liberated”. Nazis were truly sick. They weren’t about wiping out communism, they were only about spreading their own sick brand of socialism, nothing more.
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.