Monumental Developments

Slowly but surely, we are winning this one. William Bender and Ryan W. Briggs write:

A national Jewish advocacy organization is calling for the removal of a monument to Nazi collaborators in Montgomery County, just outside of Philadelphia, that until recently went largely unnoticed for decades.

The large stone cross, which was the subject of an Inquirer article published Sunday, was erected about 30 years ago at St. Mary’s Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery in Elkins Park in honor of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel — the Nazi military branch often referred to simply as “the SS.”

The unit, known also as the “1st Galician” or “SS Galizien,” was formed in 1943. It was composed of volunteers and conscripts from Nazi-occupied Ukraine who fought for Germany during World War II. Some in the Ukrainian diaspora view those soldiers not as Nazi collaborators but “freedom fighters” who wanted to establish Ukrainian independence by battling the Soviet Union.

Jewish groups — and many historians — don’t see it that way.

In a statement Tuesday, the American Jewish Committee called for the monument to be removed.

“We trust our Ukrainian friends and colleagues recognize that this cannot remain,” the statement said. “We urge them to act in the same spirit that motivated Ukrainian President Zelensky to correct these historical myths at home and remove this memorial stone from our community.”

Zelensky, who is Jewish, has condemned marchers who similarly celebrated the unit during a 2021 parade in Kyiv.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League both said last week that they had only recently learned of the monument, which is located next to an elementary school and in a community that is also home to several synagogues.

It had received little publicity until this year.

In May, a Ukrainian politician visited the cemetery to pose in front of the cross, which features the lion and crowns insignia of SS Galizien. It gained some traction on Twitter. Last week, the Forward, a Jewish newspaper that has been tracking monuments to Nazi collaborators around the world, wrote an article about it.

Records from a Ukrainian veterans association, apparently now defunct, show that a group of Ukrainian veterans initially sought to create the burial grove, which contains about 50 gravestones for SS Galizien veterans and their spouses.

The cemetery is owned by the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, near Northern Liberties, which functions as the primary church for the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia. The same veterans association records state the church approved the memorial, donated land for its creation and dispatched clergy to consecrate the monument in the early 1990s.

Church officials disputed that.

A spokesperson for the archeparchy, Mariana Karapinka, declined to comment on the monument last week. She said cemetery monuments “are not subject to the approval of the archeparchy,” but did not have any information on what group paid for it.

She instead sent a document for “historical context” which said the actions and legacy of SS Galizien “continue to be debated by historians.”

“[T]he morality of fighting in a unit organized by the criminal Nazi state even if intended by those who joined to fend off the criminal Stalinist state continues to be a topic for reflection,” the document states. “Those who erected the monument saw those who joined the unit as fighting in the interest of Ukraine.”

That explanation is not uncommon among some Ukrainians living in North America. Thousands of SS Galizien veterans are buried across the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, some near similar memorials. Just a few blocks away from St. Mary’s cemetery, the Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center has a memorial wall bearing the unit’s insignia, and framed photos of prominent members.

The UECC last week referred questions back to the church.

“They were greatly opposed to Russians and Communists — they thought they could get their independence restored by being on the German side,” Edward Zetick, the local post commander of the Ukrainian American Veterans, said last week.

But historians consulted by The [Philadelphia] Inquirer warned against whitewashing the atrocities of the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

“The claim that Waffen-SS soldiers fought for ‘freedom’ of Ukraine is a revisionist claim, as these people stood under the command of Heinrich Himmler and took a personal oath to Adolf Hitler,” said Per Anders Rudling, a professor at Lund University in Sweden. “I think that perhaps it should be up to the unit’s admirers to clarify their concept of freedom,” he added.

Marcia Bronstein, regional director of AJC Philadelphia/Southern New Jersey, said her group would reach out to local Ukrainian groups in response to news of the monument.

“You can’t erase atrocities against Jews and other minorities,” Bronstein said Tuesday. “We have to have a reckoning about history so people understand what happened. It’s not appropriate to try to cover it up.”

Almost immediately after the Second World War, the new enemy was declared to be the Soviet Union, so that anyone who was sufficiently opposed to that was welcomed with open arms. For example, and notice just how early we are talking about:

In the summer of 1945, occupation zones in the Austrian federal state of Upper Austria were unexpectedly reallocated between the United States and the Soviets. US-liberated regions north of the Danube River were reassigned to the Soviets, while the southern bank remained under US control. People started to flee to the US zone in large numbers immediately. Primarily Nazi elites fearing Soviet punishment migrated to the south bank of the Danube River. The zoning along the Danube River divided an otherwise historically, economically and culturally homogeneous region into two areas - one with a high density and another one with comparably low density of Nazi elite members.

Austria's long tradition of far-right populism allows the authors to trace the effects of migrated Nazi elites since the late 1940s until today. The results indicate a substantial and persistent increase in extreme right-wing attitudes in the destinations of migrating extremists. Even seventy years after the Nazi influx, vote shares for far-right parties are still much higher in places where Nazi elites settled.

Thus, very recent senior Nazi Officers were central to the foundation of NATO, the sainted Attlee Government imposed austerity at home in order to go to war to restore the rule of Nazi collaborators in Greece, Western intelligence agencies were replete with old Nazis throughout the Cold War, and often quite senior German Nazi scientists, technicians and engineers were integrated into United States government agencies, notably NASA, through Operation Paperclip.

Having taken in only 10,000 Kindertransport children, Britain took in 15,000 Nazi collaborators, one and half times as many. 1,000 Kindertransport children had been interned as enemy aliens, and some of them had been sent as far as Australia and Canada to get rid of them, but there was none of that for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician).

Those were ethnic Ukrainians from a formerly Austro-Hungarian area that had been incorporated into Poland after the First World War, meaning that they were able to claim pre-War Polish nationality in order to enter Britain even though they had massacred ethnic Poles during the War. It had in fact been Churchill who had handed Galicia over to Stalin, but that did not stop many of the 1st Galician from making their way to Britain. After all, it was by then Attlee's Britain.

If anyone had had any doubt who they were, then they had openly worn their SS uniforms as early as the 1950s at events organised by their old comrades' organisation, the Association of Ukrainian Former Combatants in Great Britain. Into the twenty-first century, that Association appears to have been laying at British war memorials wreaths to the fallen of the Battle of Brody.

Certainly, the AUFCGB has erected a number of monuments in this country, where they are fairly unobtrusive, although some of the ones to the same Division in North America are enormous. This is the one at Cannock Chase, with the currently familiar Tryzub alongside the ever unmistakable Iron Cross, and with the inscription first in Ukrainian, then in German, and only then in English. Yes, that does say 1986.

On Sunday 16th November 2014, the AUFCGB, by then under people who must have been too young to have fought in the Second World War but who were clearly in sympathy, marched openly from Trafalgar Square to the Cenotaph, where it laid this wreath. To a Division of the SS. At the Cenotaph. One week after Remembrance Sunday.

In order to present Russia as having always been the enemy, NATO publications in Eastern Europe routinely portray Wartime collaborators as heroes and freedom fighters, with, for example, their successors among the signatories to this. And that is before we even start about the Second Front in the Third World War, the one against China, with which we should also not be siding. If you need to look up Nippon Kaigi, then please, please do. 

Japan is already run by people who believe, "that Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers [a widespread view in several of those countries at the time and since, by the way]; that the 1946–1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate; and that killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre were exaggerated or fabricated," as well as that the comfort women were not coerced. But then, look who runs Hungary. In NATO. And look who NATO is backing in Ukraine.