Posted on 05/04/2021 8:12:47 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
The people in question are the Galicia Waffen SS division.
They like to tell how they were against the Communists but it is not supported by facts.
They were formed by the Germans for the rear duty and mostly known for unaginable atrocities against the Belarusian and Polish civilians.
The only time they actually engaged against Communists was a battle of Brody in 1944. The Red Army eliminated the division in about a week, except some elements moved by the Germans to West Europe to fight the Western Allies.
That’s always the Russian excuse. Pathetic.
When common sense in pathetic something is probably wrong with you.
There was a book by Orwell on it. We all know why it is not that popular nowadays.
rear duty .................. ??? = Partisan engagements? Who were the Partisans and who supplied them with weapons and leadership? Nasty Eastern European warfare, expect retribution regardless of which side is which. There are thousands of dead Ukrainian patriots buried under apple and pear orchards. They are a product of communism. Nothing new about the fighting between the Poles and the Ukrainians but the Communists did a number on both of them. 1943 on the German SS divisions became more international, the original nazi standards were dropped. Many were made up of volunteers from all the conquered areas, many out for revenge, others to fight communists in an elite unit. I am sure the criminal element types were put in the SD units to handle their dirty work. The Waffen SS units were fire brigades that were rushed in to fill in the openings at the front to prevent a Russian breakthrough. Their units were always equipped with the latest and best equipment. They weren’t all sent there to build camps. Those camp types weren’t anything more than having the NKVD in units like the Russians did. They were REMF SOBs The front units were best described as the best WWII fighting force that fought for the wrong cause. Remember, Patton was ready to send them back to Russia.
No it’s what the SS did to Ukrainian Jews and partisans during WWII that was the offense
Many Ukrainians in 1941 welcomed the Germans after the Soviets ..had taken Ukraine late 30s and massacred all resistance
Jewish leaders in the Ukraine were seen as allies to the Soviets
Jewish civilians paid a heavy price for that..in my opinion the highest Jews paid anywhere
And the German army ....I know this will sound crazy....was at first seen as less brutal than the Ukrainian people had been with reprisals towards the Jews
There has always been an element of support of Nazi ideals in the Ukraine because they see and I guess some still do..as a counter to Soviet totalitarianism
This touches on something that always bugs me where neoconservatism and talk radio really fail with simpleton history
Painting nazism and communism as the same
That’s just bullshit made to fit uniparty narrative
One is authoritarian the other totalitarian
One toxic nationalism the other rejects that unless attacked
Anyhow...the Ukraine is complex...
Jews suffered worse there more than anywhere in WWII in my opinion and mostly in the hands of Uke populace with horrid massacres committed with blunt instruments and strangulation
The SS actually restrained them
Quite a few techniques for mass murder originated there
It’s nice to see a few here have some inkling of the history there
My attorney is a Uke National
Half Russian and half Uke
Super bright
He and I have talked this a lot....
He’s conflicted
The 4 million were just the remaining Ukrainians. The additional count of Ukrainian kulaks were shipped to Siberia, and the numbers there are significantly more (and also purposely obfuscated because there were so many)- best estimates in the range of 6-7 million more.
The Soviets were not meticulous record keepers like the Germans were, many “registers” did not exist- and there were pockets of NKVD operation in which 100s of thousands were killed unrecorded and not in the Kremlin records.
Contemporaneously elsewhere in USSR— there were many more millions also being starved and cleared out, and the number there rises the total to over 20 million inclusive of the Ukrainian horror. All happening before Stalin killed another 20 million (in and out of his army, and millions of civilians) during /after WWII.
“” “” The Soviets were not meticulous record keepers like the Germans were, many “registers” did not exist- and there were pockets of NKVD operation in which 100s of thousands were killed recorded and not in the Kremlin records.”” “”
What is this opinion based on?
Does it justify killing and robbing civilians? Once again, they didn’t fight communists all that much, preferring to prey on women аnd children.
The critical difference is that Stalinist crimes are universally condemned, thousands of perpetrators put on trial in 1950s, the rehabilitation panels working since 1956 to this day.
Ukrainian nationalists are perfectly okay with their crimes, ereciing monuments to Nazi criminals and even continue their practices.
The last Odessa massacre took place in 2014, everything is on video, there are eiidence of government complicity and nobody is prosecuted.
Also the war in Donbas with 13,000 civilians killed.
That’s up to the Ukrainians
My point was few here have a clue about Ukraine
Bloodiest civilian war in the war....there and Croatia
37-44 was about old feuds ....very old
Killing civilians is never justified but it happens ...in the Ukraine it was done Rwanda’ style by civilians on the Jews as get back..
It was horrible
Bu they will excise to what the Soviets did to them...and that Soviet occupation had the support top Jewish leadership
Why....because the Jews had suffered before under Uke and czarist authority and saw the Soviets as an improvement
It just went on and on...each side feeling justified ....and then the Final Solution picked up the baton
We are not perfect either....we justifiably kill a lot of civilians with impersonal technological warfare
The Comanches killed ingeniously for fun and so on
There are few truly pacifist cultures
But the Ukranian killings in WWII were in my mind the worst I’ve seen white folks act..both sides...
Huta_Pieniacka_massacre ............I saw the movie, I believe it was on Prime. Hatred was the name. I it was a Polish movie with sub titles.
Every russian Soviet apologist in 20 years on this site has used the same lame-ass excuse. Common-sense? What, are you drunk?
I'll explain. After Stalin killed off 3.9 MILLION Ukrainians in the process of imposing Communist rule, the Nazis were welcomed as liberators.
They understood that Stalin was worse.
That beats your emotional response for sure.
The opening of the Kremlin records following the fall of the Soviet Union. Yelstin helped (and a friend obtained the file with signatures of Lenin and Stalin to murder the Tsar’s family-as a result of these records being opened).
Stalin’s signature on lists of killings deportations, labor camps, Beria’s also- but nothing compared to the corroborated Nazi records, inititaion and completion. You are unaware of these? Try reading Robert Conquest— his lifetime of work on the Great Terror, and Communist Soviet mass murders. More recently Stephen Kotkin. Try, just for starters: “Stalin: Waiting for Hitler”
Very few people in Stalin’s category- Hitler 12 years, Mao for a long time with nowhere near the industrialization Stalin had, and Stalin for 30 years of collectivization of 100 million people (had to get rid of the peasants, and any vestige of capitalism).
The National Socialists were very clever in developing “local” murder squads— the Waffen SS which originally were the military branch of the SS under Himmler command. The onset of WWII put them under OKW, and thus subject to expansion to the so called political needs of the OKW on the front lines (getting rid of pesky civilians of a particular interest).
The Galician Waffen SS had Catholic clergy as chaplains, and the Hitler oath was conditional to fighting Bolshevism (as the Bolshies had in the Holodomor- slaughtered Catholics along with the kulaks, muslims whomever), as a “Ukrainian” division was hoped to be a step to Ukrainian independence. Nazis would not let them be called Ukrainian, but the implication of it helped them recruit many Ukrainians who had an interest in getting rid of Belarus and Poles (political chosen “cleansers” by the Nazis... for the Nazi statist, not the Soviet statists). The Soviets wiped them out as you point out.
It’s more complicated. Most members of the SS Glacian division were from Galicia. Galcia was not majority Ruthenian and Ukranian (43%). Rather Poles were a slight plurality (46%). Another 10% were Jewish, although Jews were a plurality in some cities and towns. The Soviets stole Western Galicia in 1939 and annexed it mostly to Ukraine, with portions going to Belarus. When the Germans invaded, they worked with Ukrainians to subjugated Poles, and murder Jews and the Polish intelligentsia. Ironically, in 1945, the conquering Soviets ethnically cleansed most surviving Poles and Jews.
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