Hitler's Birrthday in Ukraine

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.