For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage.
For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage.
I think we should start an online campaign to have it removed. It’d be real interesting to see who shows up trying to protest its removal.
If I lived nearby, I'd just show up with a sledgehammer and go to town myself.
Probably dump my cats' litter boxes all over it, too.
Especially since the cemetery claims they don’t know who owns it.
I thought the church owns the land and they don't have records for who installed it / paid for it. I think the church could still sanction it's removal, given that they own the cemetery and it's not like they'd be removing a tombstone from a person's grave.
All nazi/confederate monuments should be taken down.
The only place they belong, if any, is in a museum.
More confederate monuments were built in 1999 than in 1869. The year with the most confederate monuments built was 1911, 46 years after the end of the war. That's like as if there were now a sudden spree of building Vietnam War monuments everywhere.
Confederate monuments were overwhelmingly built during the Jim Crow era. The Daughters of the Confederacy built most of them as part of their revisionist lost cause project, trying to write slavery out of the war. Then there was also a lot of them built during the civil rights era, to send a message to civil rights activists.
Sure, it's worth saving a few of them to put into places like the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, the National Civil Rights Museum, America's Black Holocaust Museum, or the National Civil War Museum. But there's many more monuments than appropriate museums for them. Getting rid of the least historically s significant ones isn't a big issue.
Gotta back urinals with something.
This one was only erected 30 years ago. It hardly qualifies for a museum.
that would be a really boring museum
This particular kind of Nazi collaborators is actually all the rage now, since Western public has found THE conflict of our age in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, immediately conveniently forgetting all other conflicts and genocides going on where every Western power has consistently shat its pants. I'm pleasantly surprised that there is, in fact, outrage at this.
In Russian-speaking (those supposedly liberal) parts of Reddit everybody would be justifying this memorial. Cause most of people you'd consider liberal in Russia and Ukraine are in fact disgusted with Putin etc mostly because of weakness and lack of development and corruption.
Not because of any crimes, plenty of them support ethnic cleansing (say, supporting Russian central government against Chechnya is not cool anymore among them, but for most it was like 10 years ago) and even military aggression (say, Azeri aggression against Artsakh). They just want those things to look cool, and Putin's empire of decay, theft, incompetence and general despair is not what they'd like to see.
You know, a bit like people from Hungary/Poland/Baltics just love to say that Soviets were "worse than Nazis", and have that slightly hidden irritation at being reminded that there are Jewish people in the room.
to be fair, the soviets, especially after Stalin took over, were indistinguishable from fascists.
I invite you to fill out the remainder 3, 6, 14
So leave it up because these weren't Nazis
what in tarnation are you talking about?
The monument, in a Montgomery County community known for its synagogues, is dedicated to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel — the Nazi military branch often referred to simply as “the SS.”
The only thing more surprising than this monument’s existence is the fact that it took thirty years for people to actually notice and start making an issue of it.
I'm not really surprised. The text is Cyrillic, not something most Americans can read, and it says:
1st Ukrainian division
To the warriors for the freedom of Ukraine
Nothing about the SS unit, only the dates 1943-1945 and the shield of the lion and crowns. It's not explicit.
Also, it's a monument to Ukrainian soldiers who fought for the German endorsed military of Ukraine, serving with the SS. It's a more complex story than just celebrating Nazi collaboration, because while they were definitely collaborators with the Nazis, they were doing so because they wanted a free and independent Ukraine and wanted to fight the USSR.
So, they're recognizing these soldiers because they fought for Ukrainian independence, not because the people supporting Ukrainian independence at the time were the Germans.
If you know much history, the dates and Ukrainian symbols, along with the cross should set off alarm bells.
It's in a Ukrainian Catholic cemetery, so I'd expect a majority of visitors could read Ukrainian.
I mean, it's clearly nazi symbolism without having to understand the text.
A private citizen with a sledge hammer could solve this in seconds.
In my mind, these things should not be destroyed. They should be moved to a museum, so people don't forget. Erasing history is a bad idea. We can't learn otherwise.
Why tf should they be in a museum, it's ahistorical. It's not erasing history to remove monuments; never in my life have I ever seen a monument to Hitler, but most people can still give a broad strokes review on why he's infamous. You don't need to memorialize something to teach it.
That's what holocaust museums are for.
There's many, many better exhibits there than something like this would be. Pictures of holocaust victims, stories from survivors, artifacts, etc. Auschwitz has a room with tens of thousands of shoes in a heap that had been taken from murdered children.
We shouldn't forget history, but that doesn't mean we need to preserve every Nazi memorial and every peice of Nazi propaganda.
Sort of like what ISIS did
There's a world of difference between destroying a 2000 year old temple, and destroying confederate memorials made in the 60s or Nazi memorials made in the 80s.
For one thing, neoconfederate and neonazi propaganda isn't rare. There's not that much historical value to it, either, except to document the neoconfederate and neonazi movements themselves.
And holocaust victims still exist, while I don't think the same is true of any victims of ancient Iraqi pagan gods.
This article was a nice hiatory leaaon on something I didn't know about. While a monument to honor these people should be removed, i think it is important to have something educational come out of this.
The lesson that should be learned is monuments aren't sacred just because they're monuments.
This just in: Nazis materialize out of thin air!
here’s the Lev Golinkin article for the curious. https://forward.com/news/558622/ss-galichina-ukraine-nazi-monument-memorial-detroit-elkins-park/
I got curious about the last statement in the article about war crimes and wanted to find information on what war crimes the division was responsible for.
According to Wikipedia there has been numerous investigations which all (as I understood it) has been unsuccessful in finding hard evidence.
Now, I'm not defending Nazis and I'm not saying this division was nice in any way or not guilty of war crimes. I'm just concluding that most things in life are not just black or white.
Ukraine is littered with these type of memorials.
No phili, outside of an ukranian school. Keep sending aim to ukraine!!!
I wonder if any harm at all would be caused if a time traveler caused early miscarriage of every fetus that would become a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.
Like any harm, at all. I highly doubt it. Other than losing a clear example of what not to do in life.
Edit: forgot a clarifying word
I mentioned this caveat.
You've played C&C: Red Alert right?
No. I never liked RTS.
Nothing like a little casual eugenics haha, amiright? Haha
That’s not eugenics unless you buy into the Nazi based Nazi=genetic argument. Haha
I'm sure your ancestors at some point did bad things...
I don't know if this would affect me, but I'm willing to not exist if it saved that many people.
If non existent even counts as harm. I'm not convinced it does.
Not every Nazi had bad children, so you’d be killing then too
Non existence is not death.
I wonder if this is anything like the Canadian one for those who were found innocent and actually contributed against the Nazis.
Found innocent?
You’re whitewashing and apologizing for nazis:
Similar memorials have also generated outcry in Canada. Jared McBride, a UCLA historian of Eastern Europe, said that within the Ukrainian diaspora, many believe that the soldiers allied with the Nazis with noble intentions.
But it is a view that he said scholars view widely as historical revisionism.
“The Nazi regime was a genocidal regime,” McBride said. “This idea of parsing these things out — that ‘We were the good SS division,’ or ‘The good police unit,’ or ‘The good mobile death battalion’ — is not the strongest of arguments.”
John-Paul Himka, a retired history professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and an expert on Ukrainian history, said SS Galizien had “very little to do with the Holocaust” since it was not formed until 1943 and first saw combat the following year. But, Himka said, the unit was also tied to other war crimes during World War II.
“Galizien fought with the Germans against the Soviets; it helped suppress the Slovak uprising; it was involved in atrocities against Poles and Slovaks; it welcomed into its ranks many perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing against the Polish population and of the Holocaust; it propagated antisemitism and seems to have been involved in a roundup of Jews in Brody in 1944,” Himka said by email. “I cannot accept the notion that they were ‘freedom fighters.’”
They collaborated with the Nazis because the Soviets invaded and occupied the country twenty years earlier.
They both fought against the Germans and the Soviets to try to go back to having independence
You’re whitewashing and apologizing for nazis:
Similar memorials have also generated outcry in Canada. Jared McBride, a UCLA historian of Eastern Europe, said that within the Ukrainian diaspora, many believe that the soldiers allied with the Nazis with noble intentions.
But it is a view that he said scholars view widely as historical revisionism.
“The Nazi regime was a genocidal regime,” McBride said. “This idea of parsing these things out — that ‘We were the good SS division,’ or ‘The good police unit,’ or ‘The good mobile death battalion’ — is not the strongest of arguments.”
John-Paul Himka, a retired history professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and an expert on Ukrainian history, said SS Galizien had “very little to do with the Holocaust” since it was not formed until 1943 and first saw combat the following year. But, Himka said, the unit was also tied to other war crimes during World War II.
“Galizien fought with the Germans against the Soviets; it helped suppress the Slovak uprising; it was involved in atrocities against Poles and Slovaks; it welcomed into its ranks many perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing against the Polish population and of the Holocaust; it propagated antisemitism and seems to have been involved in a roundup of Jews in Brody in 1944,” Himka said by email. “I cannot accept the notion that they were ‘freedom fighters.’”
Lol, imagine trying to find a reason to excuse helping literal Nazis...
Even the so-called goods people mention were obtained at the cost of blood. A lot of blood of innocent people. How hard is it to denounce nazism really lol fuck.
Kind of like how the US government did the same thing when they protected former Nazis against War crime tribunals because we wanted their help against the Communists?
There are loads... For example...
Being treated better by them than by the ones you fight...
And no, although SS where the guys that run the KZs most of SS didn't even know about them especially not the foreign legions.
They also fought Nazis at some point, so it's a bit more complicated
Imagine assuming your comfortable 2020s life where you can apply black and white morality to everythin was the status quo thoughout world history, and no one has ever had to try and decide between two evils.
The monument, in a Montgomery County community known for its synagogues, is dedicated to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel — the Nazi military branch often referred to simply as “the SS.”
Fuck them and fuck whitewashing.
Not to be that guy but the SS was also the foreign legions of Germany because they weren't allowed in the Wehrmacht (normal military) and SS had many people that just wanted to fight the communists.
Hey buddy drinks soda
You just blow in from stupid town?
Doesn't mean we call them heros and erect monuments to them. if anything we place these objects in a museum dedicated to the group. We acknowledge their troubled past, difficult decisions, horrible actions, good actions, and learn from all of it. A sense of shame and humility doesnt make current Ukrainians bad in any way.
Who's this we you're talking about. It's a private fucking cemetery.
There's a confederate monument with a huge coward's flag at mile marker 16 on I-24 in West Kentucky. I hate it and wish somebody would do something about it.
Oh won't someone rid me of this racist sign?
Stochastic altruism.
This is a fine example of stochastic Shakespeare.
I-40 going thru NC around I think Morganton but I may be off on my towns there is a giant traitors flag right on the edge of the Interstate. Largest I have ever seen.
Also if you are ever in SC traveling toward the coast near Hilton Head you will get the luxury of seeing these billboards.
...Sherman didn't burn them enough.
They call it the war of northern aggression. There “ain’t nothing civil about it”.
If I lived nearby, I'd take care of it myself.
It being on an interstate, pretty much anybody could be a suspect.