On April 20, 2015, the birthday of
Adolf Hitler, the United States government is sending American troops to train units
of the Ukrainian National Guard. How appropriate.
The U.S. mass media has lionized
the new Ukrainian government as defenders of democracy and freedom. That always
rang false to an old Jew like me. After all, my grandparents, left Odessa at
the beginning of the Twentieth Century to avoid yet another pogrom in the
freedom loving Ukraine.
And then, during World War II, many
Ukrainians joined the German Waffen SS in the extermination of Jews. Baba Yar is the most famous of these. In this
case, over 30,000 Jewish men, women and children were killed in a two day
period by the Nazis and their Ukrainian nationalist supporters. The Ukrainians
were responsible for seeing that the Jews were kept in line on the way to the
pits where they were forced to lie down and then machine gunned. Anybody who
resisted or hesitated was kicked or clubbed by the Ukrainian collaborators.
Baba Yar was one of many Ukrainian
sites where Jews were brought and killed as part of the “final solution.” In
Odessa, Romanian nationalists led in the murder of over thirty thousand
Jews.
Seems like the Ukrainian
nationalists were the most zealous in carrying out the Nazi policies of
extermination. In Stepan, Lviv, and Zhytomyr,
Ukrainian nationalists led in the killing of Jews. A Ukrainian division of the
SS assisted the Waffen SS in its extermination policies.
But collaboration with the Nazis
was the province of the ultra-nationalist Ukrainians. More than 4.5 million
Ukrainians joined the Red Army to fight Nazi Germany, and more than 250,000
served in Soviet partisan paramilitary units.
Fast forward to the demonstrations
that overthrew the government of Viktor Yanukovich. Not to the tar the movement
with the brush of anti-Semitic atrocities, there were members of the
demonstrations who were, in fact, interested in having a democratic government.
Some of them, by the way, were hooted, harassed and beaten by the ultra-right nationalist
demonstrators there.
So what does this all have to do
with Hitler’s birthday and the government of Ukraine? The government of Ukraine
is riddled with the heirs of Nazi collaborators. I know that sounds very
Putinesque, but the facts do speak.
A few points: During the
demonstrations in Maidan Square that led to the doppling of Yankukovich, Ukrainian nationalists draped Confederate
flags (that’s right, American confederate flags), inside the occupied Kiev’s
city hall. They hoisted white power symbols and Nazi SS symbols over a toppled
statue of V.I.Lenin. They destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who died fighting
the Nazis in World War II. Sieg Heil
salutes and the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol
were common in the demonstrations and in the far right autonomous zones
established during the protests. Hardly auspicious.
The new
Ukrainian “freedom loving” government includes the ultra-nationalist Svoboda
party led by Oleh Tyahnbok. This fellow has called for the liberation of
Ukraine from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.”
This fellow is clear about his sympathies. After the conviction in 2010
of the Ukrainian Nazi death camp guard
John Demjanjuk, known by the inmates as “Ivan the Terrible,” Tyahbok rushed to
Germany to declare that this man, responsible for the death of thirty thousand
people, was a “hero”. Tyahnbok’s party
holds thirty-seven seats in the Ukrainian parliament. (His deputy, Yury
Mykhalchyshny, has founded a think tank called the “Joseph Goebbels Political
Research Center,” in honor of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda).
The Assistant
Secretary of State Victoria Nuland has enjoyed “friendly” meetings with the
Svoboda leadership. “The Euro-Maidan movement has come to embody the principles
and values that are the cornerstones for all free democracies,” Nuland
proclaimed.
Two weeks later, as reported by Max
Blumenthal, in the online blog, Alternet,
15,000 Svoboda members held a torchlight ceremony in the city of Lviv in honor of Stepan Bandera, a World War
II-era Nazi collaborator who led the pro-fascist Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN-B). Lviv, the city renowned for its vigorous involvement in
the World War II extermination of Jews, has become the epicenter
of neo-fascist activity in Ukraine. Elected
Svoboda officials have waged a campaign
to rename its airport after Bandera and successfully changing the name of Peace
Street to the name of the Nachtigall Battalion, an OUN-B wing that participated
directly in the Holocaust. “’Peace’ is a holdover from Soviet stereotypes,” a
Svoboda deputy explained.
The ultra-nationalists are in power
in the contemporary Ukrainian government. Unlike Germany there has been no
official apology for the extermination
of Jews and Gypsies by Ukrainian collaborators. Unlike Germany schoolchildren
do not visit the sites, there is no memory. No memory of the victims. Instead, significant and powerful elements of
the Ukrainian government support the memory of those who committed the
atrocities rather than those who perished.
All of this is quite personal.
After all, if my grandparents had not left the Ukraine in 1906, I might
have been one of those Jewish children shot dead by the “freedom loving”
Ukrainian nationalists.
Hitler’s birthday! What an
auspicious time for the United States to send military aid to the “national
guard” of Ukraine.
