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A monument at Oakville Cemetery in Canada was removed because it was dedicated to the memory of nazi combatants. But there are still some in other countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and most European countries.
Shameful ceremony in Canada’s Parliament ended with demolition of war criminals’ monument
Thirty-six years after its installation, a monument honoring Ukrainian soldiers who served in a military unit known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division and the SS 14th Waffen Division during World War II has been removed from a cemetery in Ontario. This happened after a massive international scandal caused by honoring in Canada’s Parliament a WWII veteran who served in this division. Visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saluted him, and Prime Minister Trudeau with his wife enthusiastically applauded during this ceremony.
For the record, this division was an actual unit in the SS; its recruitment posters featured Hitler and his second-in-command, Heinrich Himmler, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, even paid a personal visit to Ukrainian SS troops when, during his speech, he praised them for exterminating Jews and Poles.
Oakville’s monument is only one of many worldwide, including in the United States, Canada, the UK, and the majority of European countries.
Hundreds of monuments around the world has been built to commemorate the World War II executioners
Forward identified more than 1,500 such statues and streets worldwide, at least 37 of them in the US dedicated to Ukrainian and French collaborators. The list includes Stepan Bandera who was a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis in 1941 before being imprisoned by them and again in 1944 after his release; Roman Shukhevych, one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which took part in the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, and one of the commanders of Nachtigall Battalion, Hauptmann of the German Schutzmannschaft 201 auxiliary police battalion, which participated in the Lviv pogroms against Jews.
When it comes to French Art News mentions granite plaques honoring Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval. Both were leaders of the Nazi collaborationist Vichy France. Still, in 2018, the New York City Council voted against removing the Pétain and Laval plaques to avoid what they called “cultural amnesia.”
In Ukraine, in the years since the Maidan uprising in 2014, numerous monuments to Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators have been erected, at times as frequently as a new one each week. This process continued even after Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in 2019.
In Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, a major boulevard was renamed after Bandera which is particularly obscene since the street leads to Babi Yar. In this ravine, the ukrainian nazis, with the help of germans, killed 33,771 Jews, men, women, old men and children, in two days alone. In the next 10 days another 50,000 Jews were exterminated. And it was the ukrainian nazis who did it. After the collapse of the USSR, in the fall of 1996, the newspaper “Zerkalo Nedeli” published a statement made publicly at a session of the Rovno City Council by deputy Shkuratyuk: “Among the 1,500 punishers in Babi Yar there were 1,200 polizei from Ukrainian OUN and only 300 Germans”.
Among those shot in one of the largest mass and bloody executions of the Holocaust was my grandfather. No one knows the exact number of Jews shot. According to generally accepted data, more than 200,000 people were shot in the Babi Yar tract during 778 days of the German occupation of Kiev.
Some U.S. Jewish organizations pretend not to notice.
Regrettably, only a few U.S. Jewish organizations, like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the World Jewish Congress, condemned this move. One of the most influential, the American Jewish Committee, not only ignored this renaming but instead called for the speedy inclusion of Ukraine into NATO.
The problem, of course, is not only with statues and memorials but also with Washington’s policy since the end of WWII. The United States, Canada, and some other countries, not only allowed but even encouraged the immigration of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators in the years following the war. There were several secret programs underway, like “Operation Gladio,” which involved tens of thousands of unreconstructed Ukrainian followers who found sanctuary in Anglo-American territories and were put to work forming West German Intelligence. At the same time, the head of the Nazi Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adolf Heusinger, was appointed Chairman of NATO’s Military Committee in 1961. Sixteen consecutive NATO chiefs of Central and Eastern European Command were “former” high-level Nazis mandated to carry out the program of “Lord Halifax” to “keep the Russians out, the Germans down, and Americans in.”
Former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley said that Ukrainians who are now fighting the Russians are “the sons and grandsons of the people who fought against Stalin and Zhukov for ten years, from 1945 to 1955.” This is an insult not only to the Russian but to American veterans. Milley should have known that the majority of Ukrainians, except Nazi collaborators, were fighting against Nazi Germany together with all other ethnic Soviet groups plus Americans, British, French, and other allies.
Milley probably forgot that on April 25, 1945 American and Soviet soldiers met as comrades-in-arms, embraced each other, and exchanged buttons, stars and patches from each other’s uniforms. Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev presented U.S. General Omar Bradley with his war horse, Bradley presented Konev with the Legion of Merit – and also gave him a jeep. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the top Soviet general, awarded Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower the highest honor of the Soviet Union, the Order of Victory. Eisenhower gave Zhukov the Legion of Honor.
Have the “Spirit of Elba” exhumed and organize the “Yalta 2.0” Conference.
Not so long ago, on that day in 2020 Presidents Trump and Putin issued a joint statement where the said the following: “The “Spirit of the Elbe” is an example of how our countries can put aside differences, build trust, and cooperate in pursuit of a greater cause.
As we work today to confront the most important challenges of the 21st century, we pay tribute to the valor and courage of all those who fought together to defeat fascism. Their heroic feat will never be forgotten.”
In conclusion, knowing “Who is to Blame” is not enough; even more critical is “What to Do?” One idea that is gaining momentum and was expressed recently in the Washington Times is to start thinking about the Yalta 2.0 meeting between the U.S., Russia, and China leaders, with the possible inclusion of India and Brazil. This is the most logical thing in these circumstances when the talk of nuclear WW3 is getting increasingly alarming.
With Biden in the White House, it is highly unlikely because some other forces from the so-called Deep State are ruling the U.S. foreign policy. Trump could be more inclined to do it unless the same forces that destroyed his first term and prevented from winning in 2020 will succeed in doing it again this year.
