• dubyakay
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    1 year ago

    It’s 1943. You are an Ukrainian lad in an area that your country lost in another senseless conflict, the Polish-Soviet war. You are eighteen years old, with limited knowledge of the world around you. The only thing you are certain of is that you hate the Polish, because they’ve been oppressing you in the area you’ve called your land since birth. A second class citizen in your own home. The elderly spoke of times when it sucked marginally less. The Empire, long gone in another great conflict. And then the Russians came and got their filthy hands on whatever the Polish did not. Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

    The Polish got subjugated by the Nazi Reich, and just two years prior they’ve occupied the area you live in. You’ve seen their tanks roll in. Their planes fly overhead. Their troops marching in unison. From your point of view it was liberation. Things were sucking marginally less in East Galicia again.

    However the rest of your country was still under Soviet rule. And the grip on it getting ever stronger. Stalin and his Communists want to absorb it completely into their machine as the bread basket of their empire. Food for the whole nation! For everyone, but your motherland. Or so you’ve heard. The elders tell of the great famine a decade ago.

    The news papers warn of the evil that is the communists on every headline. You can’t help but feel some sense of urgence to do something about it. You are full of energy and rage! You’ve been slighted! Your people have been slighted!! And suddenly… there it is. The opportunity you’ve been waiting for: “AUFRUF.” reads the paper. A call for Galicia’s Ukrainian youth to take up arms against the Bolsheviks…

    • PxtlOP
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      1 year ago

      Of course. It’s very possible that as a Ukrainian being oppressed, he had good reason to sign up. And his unit was never found guilty of war-crimes.

      But he still swore an oath to Hitler. He still served the Nazis. His unit butchered Polish civilians.

      Maybe he’s a decent man, maybe he isn’t…

      But SS soldiers don’t get to be heroes, particularly not on Parliament. Them’s the breaks.

      • zephyreks
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        1 year ago

        Not found to be guilty of war crimes, but with many accusations and with a record of murdering civilians.

        Wonderful.

    • Microw@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      But that’s clearly not the case here. We arent just talking about a Banderista here, we are talking about a SS member

    • zephyreks
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      1 year ago

      Dude’s SS. Nazi apologism doesn’t really work when the SS was directly and willingly involved in many war crimes.

    • grte
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      1 year ago

      This might make more sense if the Ukrainian group who entered Lyiv with the nazis to declare an independent Ukraine weren’t immediately arrested and interned into a concentration camp, followed by the murder of 4 million Ukrainians and deportation and enslavement of millions more. I think the guy was just a nazi.