It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
In the 1930s, thousands of American Nazis hailed George Washington as the ‘first fascist’ The history of Nazi summer camps and rallies in NYC Nazis Hail George Washington As First Fascist,” read a March 7, 1938 headline in Life magazine. The brief article reported on a boisterous group of pro-Nazi Americans who called themselves the German American Bund. The organization, whose antagonistic rallies and assemblies were rife with anti-Semitic and ethno-nationalist rhetoric, had begun to capture mainstream attention as the very politics they embraced were driving Europe toward war.https://timeline.com/nazis-america-camps-rallies-4fc6dfe5e3b3
It would have been naïve to expect the President to unambiguously condemn neo-Confederates (“Heritage, not hate,” etc.), but Nazis? For reasons that are not hard to discern, the swastika, at least in the United States, has always been more clearly legible as a symbol of racial bigotry than the Confederate flag. This country has countenanced more gatherings of white supremacists than it is possible to count, yet Nazism, precisely because Americans do not feel implicated in its worst predations, has typically been easily recognizable as intolerable. In the wake of Rockwell’s gathering, Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, denounced the group as “thugs and hoodlums.” Following the Bund rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia ordered an investigation into their tax compliance—a move that uncovered embezzlement that proved fatal to the organization. In that context, Trump’s decision in February to remove white supremacists from a federal program to counter violent extremists (while maintaining focus on Muslim terrorists) is telling. This had the effect of emboldening the reactionary legions. It was predictable that Richard Spencer’s coalition of the contemptuous would come together. Rockwell was never more than a fringe character, but Spencer increasingly looks like the vector of a formidable anger—one that needs to be confronted at direct angles, not oblique ones. When questioned about the rationale for Trump’s even handedness, the White House clarified that both the protesters and the counter-protesters had resorted to violence. This is notable in that the United States was once a country that did not see Nazis and those willing to fight them as morally equivalent. Aside from that, however, there were no images of anti-fascist protesters mowing down reactionaries with their cars. In 1939 Nazis rallied in Chicago to make Germany great again Four thousand supporters gave the Nazi salute in a northwest-side park.
It can’t happen here? Confronting the fascist threat in the US in the late 1930s By Joe Allen Issue #87: Features Share The first article in this series (ISR 85, Sept.–Oct. 2012) focused on the struggle against the Silvershirts in Minneapolis.1 Part 2 focuses on the struggle against the German American Bund and the Christian Front in New York City. http://isreview.org/issue/87/it-cant-happen-here
Support for the Nazi party wasn't limited to Europe. During WWII, American support for the Nazis was growing, as is evident in these jarring images of Nazis in New York. From the suburbs of Long Island to the Big Apple, we take a look back at when Hitler and his Nazis' attempt to infiltrate the American public in New York. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nazis-new-york-gallery-1.2856907?pmSlide=1.2856893
Friday, September 29, 2023
Canada Nazi row puts spotlight on Ukraine's WWII past
Nadine Yousif - BBC News, Toronto Fri, September 29, 2023 A photo of Heinrich Himmler meeting soldiers in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS
When Canada's parliament praised a Ukrainian war veteran who fought with Nazi Germany, a renewed spotlight was put on a controversial part of Ukraine's history and its memorialisation in Canada.
Yaroslav Hunka, the Ukrainian veteran who was applauded in parliament this week, served with a Nazi unit called the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS - also known as the Galicia Division - that was formed in 1943.
His appearance was criticised by Jewish groups and other parliamentarians alike. MP Anthony Rota, who invited him, has since resigned as the Speaker of the House of Commons, saying he deeply regretted the mistake.
But this is not the first time that Ukraine's role in WWII has sparked a debate in Canada, which is home to the largest Ukrainian diaspora outside of Europe.
Several monuments dedicated to Ukrainian WWII veterans who served in the Galicia Division exist across the country. Jewish groups have long denounced these dedications, arguing soldiers in the Galicia Division swore allegiance to Adolf Hitler, and were either complicit in Nazi Germany's crimes or had committed crimes themselves.
But for some Ukrainians, these veterans are viewed as freedom fighters, who only fought alongside the Nazis to resist the Soviets in their quest for an independent Ukraine. A contentious history
The Galicia Division was a part of the Waffen-SS, a Nazi military unit that on the whole was found to have been involved in numerous atrocities, including the massacring of Jewish civilians.
The Galicia Division has been accused of committing war crimes, but its members have never been found guilty in a court of law.
Jewish groups have condemned Canadian monuments to Ukrainian veterans who fought in the Waffen-SS, saying they are "a glorification and celebration of those who actively participated in Holocaust crimes".
A controversial sculpture of Ukrainian soldier Roman Shukhevych, located near the Ukrainian Youth Association in Edmonton
Shukhevych's involvement, however, is a matter of debate and he was not a member of the Galicia Division.
The monuments, which date back to the 1970s and 80s, have all been vandalised in recent years, with the word "Nazi" painted across them in red. Why is there disagreement on what the monuments stand for?
It goes back to Ukraine's history in the war, as well as the make-up of Canada's large Ukrainian diaspora, said David Marples, a professor of eastern European history at the University of Alberta.
During WWII, millions of Ukrainians served in the Soviet Red Army, but thousands of others fought on the German side under the Galicia Division.
Those who fought with Germany believed it would grant them an independent state free from Soviet rule, Prof Marples said.
At the time, Ukrainians resented the Soviets for their role in the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33, also known as Holodomor, which killed an estimated five million Ukrainians.
Far-right ideologies were also gaining traction in most European countries in the 1930s - including the UK - and Ukraine was no exception, said Prof Marples.
Following the defeat of Germany, some of the Galicia Division soldiers were allowed entry to Canada after surrendering to the Allied forces - a move that was resisted by Jewish groups at the time.
Some Canadians of Ukrainian descent view these soldiers and the broader Galicia Division as "national heroes" who fought for the country's independence.
They also argue that their collaboration with Nazi Germany was short-lived, and that they, including Shukhevych, had eventually fought both the Soviets and the Germans for a free Ukraine.
But the Jewish community views this differently.
"The bottom line is that this unit, the 14th SS unit, were Nazis," B'nai Brith Canada leader Michael Mostyn told the BBC.
Canada has reckoned with this history in the past through a commission in 1985, which was tasked with investigating allegations that Canada had become a haven for Nazi war criminals.
And the "mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution," the report added.
The report's findings have since been contested by Jewish groups and some historians.
Roman Shukhevych (sitting, second from left) shown in Bataillon 201 in 1942
Prof Marples said that at the time of the report, some WWII archives in Ukraine and Russia were not accessible and have since become public, prompting renewed research on the issue.
It was then revealed through this additional research that some of those who served within the Galicia Division were involved in war crimes, he said, although none were ever convicted.
Russian disinformation targets Ukraine's history
As this historical debate entered the 21st century, it was made more complicated by modern Russian propaganda, which falsely labelled the Ukrainian government as Nazis to justify its invasion of the country.
Prof Marples said that while far-right extremism still exists in Ukraine, it is much smaller than what Russian propaganda tries to make people believe.
And Ukrainian elected officials are not tied to any far-right group in the country.
"Russia has greatly simplified the narrative," Prof Marples said.
Ukrainian groups in Canada say the row over monuments and Mr Hunka's appearance in parliament is the result of this propaganda.
As far back as 2017, before the invasion but when Russia-Ukraine tensions were high, the Russian embassy in Canada criticized the existence of Ukrainian monuments in Canada, accusing them of paying tribute to "Nazi collaborators".
Taras Podilsky, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in Edmonton that houses the bust of Shukhevych, said Mr Hunka's swift renunciation by Canadian politicians is the latest effect of Russia's disinformation campaign.
He added there is no evidence linking the veteran to war crimes.
"Without any due process, this person is a victim of a Russian narrative that has now been successful," Mr Podilsky said.
Mr Mostyn of B'nai Brith said he acknowledged the complicated nature of this history, especially to some within the Ukrainian diaspora.
But he said any ties to Nazism "is not something that we can allow future generations to celebrate or whitewash".
Both Jewish groups in Canada and Canadians of Ukrainian descent behind these monuments said they have had conversations about the issue.
However, both said they were unable to agree on a path forward.
"It is on our own private property, it is not on public property, and it is for us to have a symbol of Ukrainian freedom," Mr Podilsky said of the Shukhevych bust in Edmonton. "We know there was no wrongdoing."
Mr Mostyn said that, to him, the recent episode in Canada's House of Commons shows that there are gaps when it comes to Canada's knowledge of Nazi history.
"We have a situation in Canada where we don't know our own history when it comes to Nazi perpetrators that made their way into this country," he said.
He and others within the Jewish community in Canada have called for a renewed examination of this history.
"It really is important that leadership be shown at the highest level by our prime minister, to finally open this up, because this is something that Jewish community has been demanding for decades."
‘Canada has a dark history with Nazis’: political scandal prompts reckoning
Leyland Cecco in Toronto
THE GUARDIAN Fri, September 29, 2023 Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Standing in the House of Commons this week, Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, apologized after a war veteran who fought alongside the Nazis was invited into the country’s parliament, called a “hero” and celebrated with two standing ovations.
Trudeau said all lawmakers “regret deeply” having stood and clapped – “even though we [did] so unaware of the context”, adding that the event was a disservice to the memory of millions “targeted by the Nazi genocide”.
“Every year there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors to share firsthand the horrors of what they experienced,” said Trudeau. “And it is therefore incumbent upon us all to ensure that no one ever forgets what happened.”
But the momentary amnesia – a forgetfulness seemingly shared by all lawmakers who applauded that day – has transformed into a costly political scandal and prompted a broader re-examination of the legacy of Nazi-linked Ukrainian groups in Canada.
During the second world war, Ukraine was one of the main battlefields of the eastern front. About 4.5 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army; far fewer – approximately 250,000 – aligned themselves with Nazi Germany. Some factions at different times fought both Soviet and German forces; some were involved in the mass killing of Ukrainian Jews.
Yaroslav Hunka, the 98-year-old veteran lauded in Canada’s parliament, was a member of the SS 14th Waffen Division, a volunteer unit also known as the “Galicia Division”.
Towards the end of the second world war, the group was also known as the First Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army, which in the following years had the effect of obscuring its links to the Nazi regime. Yaroslav Hunka, the 98-year-old veteran who was lauded in Canada’s parliament. Photograph: Patrick Doyle/AP
After the war, thousands of Ukrainians moved to Canada, and many who had lived through Stalin’s terror and the ensuing mass starvation held strongly anti-Soviet views. But possible links and sympathies to the Nazis were largely overlooked as the cold war set in, said Ivan Katchanovski, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa.
Despite the Galicia Division’s links to war crimes, a cenotaph celebrating the unit was erected in Canada’s largest Ukrainian cemetery. The memorial has long been source of frustration for Polish and Jewish groups. In June 2020 the words “Nazi war monument” were spray-painted on the cenotaph.
“The group, and the memorials to the fighters, have really escaped scrutiny because so few people know the First Ukrainian Division was just a different name for the SS 14th Waffen Division. And this was one of the reasons, unfortunately, why no one raised the issue in the parliament last week,” said Katchanovski.
When he took the stage of Canada’s parliament a week ago, Zelenskiy praised the city of Edmonton for being the first place in the world to erect a commemoration of the Holodomor famine, a deliberate policy from the Soviet Union which killed millions of Ukrainians.
Five miles north, a bust of the Ukrainian military leader Roman Shukhevych atop a stone plinth has long outraged Jewish and Polish groups. Shukhevych, who fought for Ukrainian independence, served with the Nazis and is believed to have been a perpetrator of massacres in Volhynia and eastern Galicia.
Diplomats from Poland and Israel condemned a similar memorial in Ukraine recently, alleging Shukhevych was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands “by bullets, fire, rape, torture and other beastly methods – only because they prayed to God in Polish or Hebrew”.
While many Canadians may have been surprised to learn of statues venerating such figures, these monuments have long been a “painful source of tension” for the Jewish community, said Dan Panneton at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
“I feel like a lot of people are only now learning truly how deep this pain goes. But the reality is, the monuments are on private property. And over the years, we’ve seen a reluctance with specific, nationalistic facets of the community to engage with negative aspects of Nazi collaboration and participation in the Holocaust.”
The row over Hunka’s invitation has also reopened debate over the hundreds of suspected war criminals who settled in the country.
“Canada has a really dark history with Nazis in Canada,” the immigration minister, Marc Miller, told reporters ahead of the prime minister’s apology. “There was a point in our history where it was easier to get [into Canada] as a Nazi than it was as a Jewish person. I think that’s a history we have to reconcile.”
Prominent Jewish groups, including the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, have called for all records about the admittance of former Nazi soldiers to be made public, including the entirety of a landmark 1986 report on war criminals evading justice within Canada.
The 1985 Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, colloquially known as the Deschênes Commission, probed whether the country was a haven for war criminals and Nazi sympathizers. The commission was prompted in part, by reports that the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele had attempted to immigrate to Canada in the early 1960s.
But only redacted portions of the report have been released over the years, omitting an appendix with the names of 240 alleged Nazi war criminals who might be living in Canada.
“Charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia Division have never been substantiated,” said the final report. The federal government has only prosecuted four individuals of war crimes – but none of those attempts have ended in conviction. Due to the secretive nature of the report’s contents, it remains unclear how much the government investigated other individuals suspected of war crimes.
“Remembering the Holocaust means not just remembering the victims,” David Matas of B’nai Brith Canada wrote in a recent editorial. “It means also remembering their murderers.”
The scandal over a standing ovation for a Nazi veteran is now raising questions about a cemetery monument in Canada that honors his Waffen SS unit
Matthew Loh Fri, September 29, 2023 at 2:24 AM MDT·3 min read 107
The scandal over a standing ovation for a Nazi veteran is now raising questions about a cemetery monument in Canada that honors his Waffen SS unit
Canada's parliament accidentally applauded a 98-year-old Nazi veteran on Friday.
The gaffe rekindled calls for a monument honoring his unit to be removed from a Canadian cemetery.
Yaroslav Hunka served in the 14th Waffen SS Division, a voluntary unit of mostly Ukrainians.
The Canadian parliament's standing ovation for a Ukrainian war veteran who turned out to be a former fighter for Nazi Germany has reignited calls to take down a monument honoring his unit.
Yaroslav Hunka, 98, who served in the voluntary 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, was applauded as a war hero by Canadian leaders on Friday without them realizing he actually fought in a Nazi unit.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has since apologized for the gaffe, calling it "deeply embarrassing." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was visiting Canada's parliament at the time of the standing ovation.
Now a monument honoring Hunka's unit in Oakville's St Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery is under fire again after his appearance made headlines.
"It's unacceptable to have monuments dedicated to a unit affiliated with the SS because they were complicit in the Holocaust," Dan Panneton, director of allyship and community engagement from the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, told the Canadian media outlet Global News.
The monument, located around 25 miles from Toronto, is a centograph that was erected in remembrance of those who fought for the 14th SS Division, also known as the Galicia Division.
It was vandalized with graffiti in 2020, when someone spray-painted the words "Nazi war monument" on its face, reported The Ottawa Citizen.
The monument was one of several brought up by the Russian Embassy in Ottawa in 2017, which complained that the structures honored "Nazi collaborators in Canada and nobody is doing anything about it."
These monuments in Canada have been controversial. Jewish groups like B'nai Brith Canada are lobbying to have them removed, calling them "Nazi-glorifying monuments."
But some Ukrainians who moved to Canada believe those who joined the Galicia Division were doing so because they thought they were fighting to free their country from Soviet rule, David Marples, professor of Eastern European history at the University of Alberta, told the BBC.
Jewish groups in Canada disagree. "The bottom line is that this unit, the 14th SS unit, were Nazis," B'nai Brith Canada leader Michael Mostyn told the outlet.
Marples noted that modern Russia has seized upon the narrative of some Ukrainian allyship with Nazi Germany to incorrectly say that modern Ukraine is now run by Nazis. "Russia has greatly simplified the narrative," Marples said, per the BBC.
On this All Hallows' Eve, a special Halloween look at last week's program - "Hitler's Monsters". The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, and in reality the supernatural was an essential part of the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. Join Eric Kurlander, professor of history at Stetson University and author of Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, for an eye-opening look at the occult ideas, esoteric sciences, and pagan religions touted by Nazi Germany in the service of power.
The definitive history of the supernatural in Nazi Germany, exploring the occult ideas, esoteric sciences, and pagan religions touted by the Third Reich in the service of power
The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire.
Product description
Review
“Deeply researched, convincingly authenticated, this extraordinary study of the magical and supernatural at the highest levels of Nazi Germany will astonish.”—Robert Carver, Spectator
“A trustworthy [book] on an extraordinary subject.”—David Aaronovitch, The Times
“This is a dense and scholarly book about one of the pulpiest subjects of the past 70 years – the relationship between the Nazi party and the occult, which has been much debated across popular culture both in fiction (Captain America, Hellboy, Wolfenstein, the Indiana Jones series, Iron Sky, The Keep and countless others) and in innumerable schlocky works of pseudoscience with runes and swastikas on the covers. As it turns out, though, even this sober, academic treatment of the topic reveals stranger-than-fiction truths on every page.”—Tim Martin, Daily Telegraph
“[Kurlander] shows how swiftly irrational ideas can take hold, even in an age before social media.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“This original and compellingly argued book shows a significant link between Nazism and the supernatural.” —Lisa Pine, English Historical Quarterly
“A fascinating look at a little-understood aspect of fascism.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A frightening glimpse at the pseudo-science national socialists accepted to justify their abominations abroad.”—National Post
“Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits.”—National Review
“A deeply researched and lucid study of the role of supernatural beliefs in the rise of the Nazis . . . Indispensable for anyone interested in Nazism and modern pseudoscience and pseudohistory.”—Choice
"Hitler’s Monsters by Eric Kurlander advances an arresting argument. . . . Eric Kurlander deserves considerable credit for taking us along on that pursuit in such entertaining and stimulating fashion."—Derek Hastings, Journal of Modern History
"Hitler’s Monsters is a book I’ve long been wishing to read. Now that it’s been written, I couldn’t be more delighted. Eric Kurlander delivers in just about every way possible. His writing is crisp and compelling; his haunting narrative richly documented, utterly convincing, and certain to change popular understanding of National Socialist history in Germany."—Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, author of Hitler’s Holy Relics
"Eric Kurlander’s provocative new study offers compelling reasons to take a critical look at the neglected history of occultism in Nazi Germany. It should spark renewed attention to the topic and more informed debates about its significance."—Peter Staudenmaier, author of Between Occultism and Nazism
"In this thought-provoking and original book, Kurlander explores the monstrousness of Hitler’s Germany by taking seriously the demons, vampires, witches, and werewolves that populated the Nazi world and made possible the building of a Third Reich right in the middle of the twentieth century."—Peter Fritzsche, author of An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler
"Until now, no one has offered a sustained treatment of the links between Nazism and occultism. Eric Kurlander has unearthed myriad examples of these links, and in fields as diverse as agriculture, archaeology and armaments manufacture. Their cumulative effect in Hitler’s Monsters is positively jaw-dropping."—Monica Black, author of Death in Berlin
"In this stunning new book, historian Eric Kurlander shows how the Third Reich was monstrous in more ways than commonly supposed. The regime's modern planning and methods of conquest and biopolitics were shot through with the search for esoteric pagan, even supernatural knowledge. We cannot think of “racial science” in the same way again."—A. Dirk Moses, author of German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past
About the Author
Eric Kurlander is professor of history at Stetson University. He lives in DeLand, FL.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, July 2017. 448 pages.
$35.00. Hardcover. ISBN 9780300189452.
Review
Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich investigates the role of occultism, supernatural thinking, and “border science”—practices that claimed scientific legitimacy, even while violating standards of empirical verification—in Nazi Germany. From the Nazi Party’s origins in the occultist Thule Society in 1918-19 to the “werewolf” mythologies that drove partisan actions in the waning days of the Second World War, Kurlander integrates the burgeoning literature on Nazi Germany and the occult while incorporating new archival evidence. The result is an exhaustively documented study whose core thesis will prove difficult to refute: Nazi ideology and propaganda, the regime’s genocidal war aims, and the leadership’s insistence on pursuing a bloody Endkampf in the face of inevitable defeat depended on supernatural beliefs shared widely by both the National Socialist leadership and the German population.
Hitler’s Monsters is at its most impressive in demonstrating overarching patterns amidst the seemingly chaotic nature of Nazi ideology and policymaking. Kurlander shows that a fascination with the supernatural was present at the outset of the National Socialist movement, and shaped Nazi beliefs about race, space, and national destiny through the end of the war. The occultist Thule Society that sponsored the early German Workers’ Party, the predecessor to Hitler's National Socialist Party, promoted “rabid anti-Semitism and anti-Communism, fanatical hatred of democracy, and dedication to overthrowing the [Weimar] Republic” (46). The Nazi Party’s early supporters were steeped in mythologies of a proto-Germanic civilization that emerged out of an Indo-Aryan race, and many believed Hitler to be gifted with supernatural capabilities. After coming to power, the Nazis organized an expedition to Tibet in search of Indo-Aryan ruins, invested in “biodynamic” agriculture that claimed to activate mystical forces beneath the soil, sponsored research on the pseudoscientific “World Ice Theory,” and performed deadly experiments on concentration camp inmates seeking to revive the deceased or demonstrate the racial inferiority of Jews. Kurlander convincingly argues that no decisive turn against occultism took place. Instead, the selective persecution of movements perceived as challenges to the regime’s authority, especially after 1937, formed the bases for deepening cooperation with occult practitioners during the war (106-29).
While offering a fresh synthesis, Kurlander’s study also returns to older interpretive models. Whereas recent scholarship has argued that border science enabled Europeans to adapt to a modern, post-Christian society (xiii), Kurlander follows the neo-Marxist theorists Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch, who viewed occultism as “a tool for the fascist manipulation of the population” (6) that subverted critical reflection (see Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 2005, 238-44). Departing from historians who have focused on the European and global contexts of colonialism, racial science, and economic crisis within which Nazi Germany took shape, Kurlander emphasizes a peculiarly Austro-German fascination with the supernatural. Readers schooled in the critique of the Sonderweg (special path) paradigm of German history might take issue with Kurlander’s suggestions that the “liberal and cosmopolitan aspects of theosophic thought” were “stronger” in Britain than in Germany (16), or that Germany’s long period of political fragmentation fueled particular skepticism toward modern science (23-24). Nevertheless, Kurlander presents compelling evidence for the depth of interest in the supernatural within both the Nazi Party and German society more broadly. In the early 20th century, “thousands of spiritualists, mediums, and astrologers” worked in Berlin and Munich (14), while during the Second World War, the Nazi leadership eschewed the “Jewish” science of atomic physics to invest in supernatural “death rays” and anti-gravity machines (270-76).
Scholars of religion will likely be most interested in Kurlander’s contribution to discussions about the relationship between the Nazi regime, neo-pagan movements, and Germany’s Protestant and Catholic churches, the focus of chapter 6. Some of Kurlander’s findings will be familiar. For instance, Nazi leaders could express vitriolic hostility toward the institutional (especially Catholic) churches while offering paeans to the authentic Germanic religion of the “Aryan” Jesus (179-83). By showing how Nazi religious views drew on a mélange of motifs from völkisch thought, border science, and Eastern religions as well as Christianity, Kurlander usefully complicates the debate about whether the Nazis were “Christians” or “pagans.” At times, however, Kurlander juxtaposes his nuanced account of occultism against a rather static portrait of “traditional Christianity” (7). His opening chapter explains the popularity of supernatural practices in late 19th-century Germany partly as a reaction to a decline in Christian belief. Yet Germany’s 19th-century churches were incubators for a range of revivalist movements that gave voice to similar anxieties about the rise of modernity—one thinks of the Protestant Great Awakening (Erweckungsbewegung) or the rise in Marian apparitions among Catholics. Even during the Nazi years, the Catholic mystic and stigmatic Therese Neumann von Konnersreuth, whom Kurlander treats only cursorily (292), attracted a wide following in rural Bavaria (Michael E. O'Sullivan, "Disruptive Potential: Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, National Socialism, and Democracy," in Monica Black and Eric Kurlander, eds., Revisiting the "Nazi Occult": Histories, Realities, Legacies, Camden House, 2015, 181-201). Greater attention to how Christians (and not only the radically pro-Nazi “German Christians”) partook in occult, supernatural, and racialist thinking might temper the conclusion that Nazi crimes depended on a rejection of “Christian morality” (250).
Hitler’s Monsters leaves open the question of how to integrate the supernatural into the mainstream of scholarship on Nazi Germany, where it continues to play a secondary role. While demonstrating the ubiquity of supernatural thinking at the highest levels of the regime, Kurlander recognizes that occultism constitutes only one of multiple factors necessary to explain Nazi atrocities. “The Third Reich’s crimes took on monumental dimensions because the Nazis drew both on border scientific theories peculiar to the Austro-German supernatural imaginary as well asa broader European mix of eugenics, racism, and colonialism” (232). But how precisely did the “supernatural imaginary” affect the decision process leading to the Final Solution, or the operation of particular killing sites? A task for future scholarship will be to complement Kurlander's focus on the elite stratum of Nazi leaders—Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Bormann figure prominently in his narrative—with investigations of the role of the supernatural in particular religious communities, localities, or military and SS divisions. Such scholarship will surely begin from Kurlander's learned and wide-ranging study.
About the Reviewer(s):
Brandon Bloch is College Fellow in Modern European History at Harvard University.
Date of Review:
July 18, 2018
About the Author(s)/Editor(s)/Translator(s):
Eric Kurlander is Professor of History at Stetson University. His previous books include The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898–1933 and Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2009).
Categories: politics 20th century mysticism ritual violence Europe
Keywords: occult, Nazi, paganism, witchcraft, astrology, supernatural The Nazi's Were Obsessed With Magic What can their fascination with the supernatural teach us about life in our own post-truth times? By REBECCA ONION AUG 24, 2017 SALON https://tinyurl.com/yd2npxlc A picture dated 1939 shows Adolf Hitler giving a speech during a meeting with high-rank Nazi officials. FRANCE PRESSE VOIR/AFP/Getty Images
The History Channel and the virtual pages of Amazon are full of the stories of Nazis who claimed to become werewolves, channel pagan gods, or communicate with aliens. As historian Peter Staudenmaier recently wrote in Aeon, titillated conversations about the Nazis as occult masters just make it harder to talk about the realities of fascism. (If supernatural forces made the Holocaust happen, after all, we don’t have to wonder how humans could have done those things.)
But that doesn’t mean the Nazi relationship with this kind of fringey thinking is meaningless. Historian Eric Kurlander has recently written a book that takes Nazi occultism seriously: Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich. Grouping astrology, some practices in archaeology, history, and folklore, and out-there scientific theories together under the heading “the supernatural imaginary,” Kurlander writes about how the popularity of border thinking guided the Nazis in creating their own political reality in Germany.
We spoke recently about World Ice Theory, the anti-Semitism inherent in Nazi critiques of mainstream science, and lessons from Nazi unreality for our own post-truth times. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Who participated in supernatural thinking in Germany in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s? Everyone? And do you think Nazis actually believed this stuff, or did they find it politically convenient?
Educated urban liberal elites and Jewish intellectuals were the least likely to embrace any of this as authentic, or see it as anything other than a pathology of modernity that was particularly strong in Austria and Germany and needed to be dealt with. They could see people they otherwise respected finding some of it interesting, and worried about that response, but they were almost universally opposed to it.
Then you have the German and Austrian middle and lower-middle classes. Traditional religious practice was waning over the course of the 19th century. World War I was really galvanizing in that regard because it called everything into question. Many people who were—well, I don’t want to use the term that some of the intellectuals at the time used, like “half-educated,” “semi-educated”; Theodor Adorno [said] “occultism is the metaphysic of dunces.” Let’s say, clearly these were people who were educated enough to want an alternative to traditional religion, to want to be able to argue scientifically or with authority about religion, science, and politics, and they’re finding these alternative doctrines and institutes and classes on parapsychology and tarot reading as a kind of supplement to the [disenchantment of] the world that occurred through industrialization. And that was true of millions of Germans and Austrians. (It was also true in Britain and France!)
Why did so many Nazis, in particular, believe it or find it interesting or see it as potentially helpful in manipulating the population? Because they grew up during a flowering of supernatural thinking across Germany and Austria. So even the Nazis who were skeptical recognized it as a profound theme. You have both Hitler and Goebbels in the 1920s acknowledging that ‘folkish [völkisch]’ thinkers are the ones most likely to join the Nazi Party. Many of these people want to wander around “clothed in bearskins,” as Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, talking about mystical runes. Now Hitler and Goebbels said, “That’s not what our movement is about.” So some people say, “You see, Hitler wasn’t into that!” But my question is why didn’t Churchill or Roosevelt or France’s Prime Minister Leon Blum have to write things like that to their constituents repeatedly? It’s because [supernatural thinking] wasn’t so intrinsic to [their] movements.
So to come back to France for a minute: In France, you don’t see the equivalent politicization and racialization of it. You have theosophy in Britain and America. But it’s a relatively harmless movement, where people get together in a drawing room and try to connect with spirits and write novels about Atlantis. But the concept of root races, which [H.P.] Blavatsky, the Russian progenitor of theosophy, talked about, never gets brought up as an actual basis for belief in “superior breeding” or race war among the liberal or conservative parties that run the government in Britain and America. It clearly is not influencing Roosevelt or Churchill’s view of social policy or foreign policy.
But in Germany so many of the people who joined the Nazi Party or supported it are using language and ideas directly borrowed from these occult and border scientific doctrines. “Tschandals,” the lesser races, a Thule civilization.
You make a distinction between pseudoscience, which tries (and fails) to operate within mainstream science, and what you call “border science,” which works around the edges, from a faith-based epistemology. What was the relationship between the people who were still trying to work within an international mainstream of scientific activity in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and the people who were doing these border-scientific experiments that were increasingly supported by the regime? (World Ice Theory, for example—the idea that everything in our universe was created when the collision of two stars flung icy celestial moons and planets everywhere—happened to align with ideas from Nordic mythology, so it got a lot of support from the Nazis despite its origins in a dream.)
[Border science] was easily dismissed as amateurish by mainstream scientists in the 1910s and 1920s. There were no university posts or research institutes officially sponsored by the Imperial German, Austrian, or Weimar government to promote world ice theory. But it was wildly popular among völkisch and esoterically inclined thinkers, like engineers, who didn’t quite understand modern physics but understood enough technical jargon to kind of glom onto the ideas and argue that they were valid as an alternative to “Jewish physics.”
In the 1930s Hitler and [Heinrich] Himmler gave an honorary doctoral title to the living co-progenitor of World Ice Theory, or “Glacial Cosmogony” as they called it, Philip Fauth. They put him and Hans Robert Scultetus, who was trained as a meteorologist, in charge of a World Ice Division in ’35 or ’36 within the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s giant Institute for Ancestral Research. The sole purpose of the division was to coordinate and propagate World Ice Theory as official Nazi doctrine.
A year or so in they started to get nasty letters from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, or professional physicists and geologists, asking “Hey, what are you doing here? It’s bad enough that kids can’t do math anymore and we’re trying to rebuild our military and improve our technology. Now you’ve got these official publications claiming that World Ice Theory is just as good or better than modern geology and physics. This is really problematic.”
The really mainstream, well-known natural scientists—as far as I can tell, they were just ignored. So Himmler didn’t put them in jail or anything, he just wouldn’t give them the time of day when they wrote the letters. But if you were a person within the SS ambit, like this guy named Georg Hinzpeter, you were in trouble. All Hinzpeter said was, “You know, if we use what we’ve got in the last 30 years in terms of physics and geology, some calculations and claims that [co-progenitor of the theory Hans] Hörbiger made 40 years ago—not his fault, that was the 1890s—don’t quite hold up, and maybe we should rethink these premises.” And that was when Himmler and Scultetus and this other guy, Edmund Kiss, who wrote fantasy novels about Atlantis—not even a scientist!—they all agreed: “You know what? We’ve got a protocol [The Pyrmont Protocol] now. Anyone practicing World Ice Theory now has to subscribe to its basic tenets”—almost like a bible. “And if you don’t, you will not be allowed to publish, at least not with the imprimatur of anything in the government, and you will not get any funding.” In 1939, World Ice Theory became a very rigid kind of orthodoxy.
As in many other areas, the Third Reich was not a totalitarian regime in all ways. They weren’t going to start locking up otherwise brilliant “Aryan” scientists who paid their taxes and joined the military because they found this theory laughable. But they weren’t going to change what they thought or redistribute funding in a more rational way, either.
What other theories, beside World Ice Theory, did the regime adhere to in that way?
Well, the entire apparatus of race theory was founded at least as much on ideas drawn from Indo-Aryan religion, Nordic mythology and occult or border-scientific doctrines as it was on modern biology or eugenics. Eugenics as practiced in most of the West was limited by the fact that those people wanted to be accepted by mainstream biology. So eugenics was a pseudoscience, not a border science. It did come out of mainstream genetics and biology, it just made claims that were out of all proportion with scientific capacity or reality at the time. And when that proved as destructive as it was, both scientifically and ideologically [after World War II], it got reined back in.
In the Nazi case, it’s the opposite. While they make certain nods to the eugenics movement and say “Oh, this brilliant Swedish or British eugenicist was very inspiring,” when you look at how they argue about race, with the Jews being monstrous and the Slavs “sub-human,” while Indian, Japanese, and perhaps even Persian and Arab civilizations are deemed at least partially Indo-Aryan, it’s all this stuff that’s wrapped up with ariosophy, theosophy, anthroposophy—these major occult doctrines that were prominent in Austria and Germany. It had so little to do with actual empirical science, or even pseudoscience practiced elsewhere during the first half of the 20th century, that it opened the way for all these fantastical policies.
To what degree was anti-mainstream-science feeling within the Nazi Party also anti-Semitic?
I wouldn’t say they were “anti-science.” The Nazis simply thought that there are new sciences, new ways of doing things that traditional scientists hadn’t accepted, in part because they’d been corrupted by Jewish leftist materialists who don’t understand the mystical parts of life. Because the Jews, they insist, are these soulless, self-interested, evil people who just can’t get the organicist connection between soul and body—and all these other ideas that völkisch and esoteric thinkers, and many Nazis, embraced.
You make the argument that, near the end of the war, miraculous thinking was a strategic and military detriment to the Nazi war effort. What happened to this kind of thinking through the lead-up to the defeat and after the defeat?
My impression is that the supernatural imaginary, and the Nazi dismissal of mainstream science in favor of border science, impacted their ability, financially and logistically, to maximize military resources. I give examples, like the rocket program and death rays and other things that the SS was trying to develop, and Hitler’s own aversion to nuclear technology. I haven’t quantified it, and the effect may have only been marginal, and there’s a lot of research left to be done here. Maybe [supernatural thinking] only undermined the Nazi ability to maximize whatever it was they needed at any given time—more bombers, more fighters—by 10 or 20 percent, and they would have lost anyway. But clearly there was an impact there.
We happen to have a period in Austria and Germany, where for various reasons, the intrinsic popularity of certain occult ideas and border scientific doctrines, of alternative religions, Nordic mythology, and German folklore, punctuated by crises, like World War I and the Great Depression, made the supernatural imaginary much more widespread, public, political, and dangerous as a reservoir of policy, than it would have been otherwise or was in other countries at that time.
After the war, now that Germany was defeated [these kinds of supernatural thinking] became receded from the realm of policy, becoming a mostly privatized form of entertainment. No longer were there research institutes, supported by Himmler or Hitler, sponsoring parapsychology, dowsing, or World Ice Theory. With the collapse of Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry no major German political leaders were promoting astrology as a means of propaganda or threatening collaborators with retribution from Nazi “werewolves.” And that for me is important.
So people are still interested in the supernatural today! They’re playing video games and reading Harry Potter, but most recognize the difference between supernatural thinking and empirical science; between fantasy and policy. I think Germans since 1945 have become more allergic to these kinds of faith-based, organicist, racist, völkisch ways of thinking, precisely because of that experience from the 1890s and to the 1940s. It doesn’t go away, but it becomes privatized and held at arms’ length.
One of the things that makes liberals, lefties, centrists feel so frustrated in encountering an administration that is anti-reality, is the feeling that nothing you will say can make a difference. Is there anything that opponents of Nazis in Germany did that Americans can take a note or a lesson from, in terms of intervening against the supernatural imaginary taking hold of the national mind?
Let’s say one-quarter or one-third of [people in] all modern industrialized societies are sympathetic to fascism. They may claim they believe in democracy and elections and some kind of individual rights, but when it comes down to it, they’ll sacrifice those to have this kind of national organic folk community that fits their vision of their country. And they’ll give up all sorts of rights and kick out foreigners.
You want to be arguing against people who have that point of view, but you also want to make sure you aren’t alienating the more rational actors, who recognize that this is dangerous and would only side with the fascist group if they’re alienated from whatever the putative left might be.
It means not exaggerating or demonizing certain things that are really legitimate points of view, even if you disagree with them, and then being careful to explain your terms when you want to identify fascist, or racist, or supernaturalist thinking.
It’s not an easy process, because once [supernatural thinking] has been unleashed, and we’ve been resorting to faith-based responses to complex problems it for years, it’s very hard to turn around and suddenly say, “Global warming is happening. It’s just a question of how bad it is, and what we can do about it.” Or “the world is not 5,000 years old, the world is billions of years old. We need to accept science and evolution.” It’s hard for conservatives now to say that, much less liberals, and still get elected.
When it comes to some of these fundamental premises on which we base our political and social reality, all educated people, all citizens, regardless of politics, [should be] agreeing and pushing back. And I don’t think we’re there yet.
Screenshot of House of Commons video. Good morning Maple readers. We're sure you've all seen the news that Canadian MPs gave a standing ovation to a Ukrainian veteran of Adolf Hitler's Waffen SS in Parliament on Friday.
Given the urgency and international outrage surrounding this incident, we published a story on it yesterday, which you can read here.
The story looked at how every federal party is, in effect, pleading ignorance in order to explain why their MPs applauded a Nazi collaborator. The Liberals are piling the blame on Speaker Anthony Rota, who faced growing calls to resign on Monday. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are claiming that they could not have possibly known that the veteran fought with the Nazis.
However, as several critics pointed out, Rota shared biographical details about the veteran that should have made it obvious to anyone with a basic grasp of Second World War history that he fought on the side of Hitler.
Despite this, MPs from every party stood up and applauded.
Here are some other articles and stories that covered this incident over the past few days.
Prime Minister Comments
Speaking to reporters in the House of Commons yesterday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the incident was "extremely upsetting" and "deeply embarrassing" to Parliament. He then pivoted to talking about Canadian aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russia's invasion, and referred to "Russian disinformation" and "propaganda."
Speaking for the first time since a Ukrainian Nazi Veteran was appalled during the Zelensky speech, Justin Trudeau says “this is deeply embarrassing to the Parliament of Canada and by extension to all Canadians,” adding it is “extremely upsetting that this happened” #cdnpolipic.twitter.com/6YfkGw74D5— Mackenzie Gray (@Gray_Mackenzie) September 25, 2023
Trudeau has yet to comment on a photo shared by the veteran's family on social media which apparently showed him waiting for a meeting with Trudeau and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Bloc, NDP Call For Speaker's Resignation
As reported by The Globe and Mail yesterday: "The Bloc Québécois has joined the calls for the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons, backing the NDP for Anthony Rota to go after he publicly honoured a Ukrainian-Canadian man as a Second World War hero although the man served in a Nazi SS unit during the war."
The story continued: "As the Commons began its business earlier Monday, [NDP House Leader Peter] Julian called for the speakers resignation. The Bloc did not initially join Mr. Julian in seeking Mr. Rota’s departure. Nor did the Conservatives or Liberals."
As reported by CTV News: "After issuing an in-person apology to the chamber, Rota sat in the Speaker's chair to listen to MPs from all sides decry how damaging it was that he invited and drew the chamber's attention to 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, who fought for the First Ukrainian Division, a volunteer unit under Nazi command."
The article continued: "Government House Leader Karina Gould was first, saying that as a Canadian of Jewish origin and an MP who was photographed with the veteran in question, 'this hurt all of us.'" Read the full story.
We've been here before... Cultural Centre With Nazi Statue Received $35,000 Federal Grant For Protection From ‘Hate Crimes’ Ukrainian Nazi German Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201 with Roman Shukhevych (sitting, second from left), 1942 (Wikimedia Commons).
From The Maple, Sept. 3, 2021
An Edmonton cultural centre with a prominent bust of a Nazi collaborator and war criminal received over $35,000 from the federal government for a security system to protect it from hate crimes. Read the full story.
From Harper Collins (2015): "For the first time, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war 'refugees.' But some had help from the U.S. government."
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Canada’s Nazi Monuments
Why does Canada have not one but several memorials to Nazi collaborators?
UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTS
And why, when statues are toppling all over the world, have Canadian Jewish groups remained silent?
THE NATION JULY 21, 2020 Heinrich Himmler reviews District Galicia SS troops
(Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been updated both to reflect B’nai Brith Canada’s change in position since we originally published it and to include more of Aidan Fishman’s comments.
“Graffiti on monument commemorating Nazi SS division being investigated as a hate crime by police.” Ordinarily, you’d assume a headline about Nazis as victims came from The Onion (and indeed, they’ve been prescient on this). But it’s 2020; we’re well down the rabbit hole of the American president who calls neo-Nazis “good people,” and this all-too-real article is from the Ottawa Citizen, a major Canadian newspaper. Indeed, the news that Canada has a monument commemorating Third Reich soldiers is just the outer layer of a nesting doll of progressively shocking facts.
First, Canada has not one but several memorials to Nazi collaborators. Second, even though Canada, like the United States, is in the midst of a reckoning about statues to monsters, the chances of Ottawa’s doing anything, even speaking out, on this are next to none. Finally, Canadian-Jewish organizations—people you might think have an interest in denouncing monuments celebrating butchers of Jews—have been distinctly silent about this. That’s both stunning and unsurprising.
The story of how a monument to Nazi collaborators ended up in Canada—a nation that lost over 45,000 men fighting against the Nazis—is both dark and complex, involving geopolitics, historical revisionism, propaganda, anti-Semitism, and the quiet continuation of a war that for most people ended 75 years ago.
The story about Jewish organizations appeasing Holocaust distortion is far simpler. It’s a story about silence. And cowardice.
An “Unfortunate” Tribute to the SS
The monument in question is a cenotaph honoring members of the SS Galichina division of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi party’s military branch whose long list of war crimes includes the Holocaust. The pillar, which is located in a Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario, was vandalized with the words “Nazi war monument” sometime around June 21. Early in the investigation, the police classified the vandalism as a “hate crime,” meaning the SS members are the ones who were victims of hate here.
In response to David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen, the Halton Regional police spokesman stated, “This incident occurred to a monument and the graffiti appeared to target an identifiable group.” The fact that the “identifiable group” in question is an SS division didn’t seem to matter.
After Pugliese’s article gained traction, the Halton Regional police department apologized, stating that the incident has been reclassified as simple vandalism. The police chief added an admirable tweet, saying, “The most unfortunate part of all this is that any such monument would exist in the first place.”
It is, indeed unfortunate, for the SS Galichina (also known as the 14th Waffen-SS Division) was an actual unit in the SS, deemed important enough to receive a personal visit from Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second in command and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.
During his speech to rally the Ukrainian SS troops, Himmler waxed poetic about how much better-off Ukraine was with the Jews exterminated and mused about the fighters’ willingness to slaughter Poles. SS Galichina recruitment posters proudly featured Hitler; there’s no doubt about just who it is the Oakville memorial honors.
But the truly unfortunate thing is that Oakville’s monument is only one of several glorifying Nazi collaborators and butchers of Jews scattered throughout Canada. Edmonton has a bust of Roman Shukhevych, who was in charge of a nationalist battalion serving as Nazi auxiliaries that later morphed into a German auxiliary police battalion. These units took part in lethal anti-Semitic violence and brutal counterinsurgency suppression. Shukhevych also commanded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which killed Jews and systematically massacred 70,000–100,000 Poles; the Oakville cemetery has a prominent UPA monument as well. Who built them? The Nazi collaborators themselves, whom Canada took in with open arms.
Butchers Welcome
The most infamous case of Nazis launching successful postwar careers in the New World is Operation Paperclip, when the US government secretly brought over Nazi scientists and engineers who helped pioneer America’s rocket program. But Operation Paperclip is known only because of its impact; the truth is, the United States and Canada took in thousands of concentration camp guards, SS fighters, and other Nazi collaborators from Ukraine and other nations such as Latvia, which had its own SS division, one it honors today with parades.
Unlike the Jews they had tortured and murdered, these Holocaust perpetrators got to settle down, start families, work, live, and die in peace. Along the way, they rebranded themselves as “victims of Communism” and “freedom fighters” to whitewash their bloody pasts. Once in a while you hear about one of them—some of the last remaining Nazis in the United States were Ukrainian—but most went on to live unmolested and free in North America.
There are several theories about why the US and Canadian governments welcomed these murderers. Some say it’s because they helped lead the fight against the USSR in the Cold War; indeed, declassified CIA materialsadmit to it. Others point out they were used as strike-breakers to weaken the resistance of labor movements.
Underneath, though, is a much simpler explanation: American and Canadian elites let in Holocaust perpetrators for the same reason they denied asylum to Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis who desperately tried to escape the Holocaust only to be rejected at every port of call: anti-Semitism.
Enter Putin
In 2017, the awkwardness of being a country that simultaneously honors Canadians who died fighting for the Allies and Ukrainian units who fought for the Third Reich exploded into international headlines. The scandal was triggered by an interesting party: Moscow.
Vladimir Putin has made World War II remembrance a cornerstone of building patriotism and pride in Russia, commemorating the USSR’s enormous sacrifice with films and elaborate parades. Moscow’s focus on defeating the Nazis went into overdrive after the 2013–14 Ukrainian uprising. The new Kiev government had its own neo-Nazi battalions and instituted an ultranationalist policy of officially honoring Shukhevych, the SS Galichina, and other Nazi lackeys and Holocaust perpetrators. These actions, which I and others reportedfor The Nation, have been condemned by Israel and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others.
Moscow seized on this to justify annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in Eastern Ukraine. To this day, the Kremlin propaganda machine delights in trolling the West about Ukraine and other nations’ whitewashing of Nazi collaborators; in addition to feeding the cult of WWII at home, the trolling is used to put Russia’s Western adversaries in an awkward spot.
Three years ago, the Kremlin decided to take the show on the road. The Russian embassy in Canada began gleefully tweeting about the Canadian monuments, including the SS Galichina memorial in Oakville. It’s safe to assume Moscow knew that this would create a wedge issue between Ottawa and Canada’s large Ukrainian diaspora.
But the Russian trolling backfired. Indeed, Moscow propaganda bemoaning Nazi whitewashing was a gift for the whitewashers, who began to attack anyone protesting the glorification of Nazi collaborators as carrying water for the Kremlin. Under anything approaching normal circumstances, the “You’re siding with Putin” logic wouldn’t have worked in a remedial middle school debate. It’s the ultimate straw man argument—the question of whether we should condemn those who honor Nazi butchers and engage in Holocaust distortion has nothing to do with Russia. The Kremlin, like most governments, routinely denounces things like terrorist attacks; does that make Americans who oppose terrorism Kremlin stooges?
But this didn’t happen under normal circumstances. It happened during the three-year orgy of Russiagate, when accusations of doing Putin’s bidding were hurled with abandon in the media. In this miasma, ultranationalist accusations became an extraordinarily effective weapon, deployed to smear anyone who dared speak out.
The Russia factor transformed a clear case of anti-Semitism into a debatable affair. Western outlets churned out insipid articles framing the issue as a Russia story while allowing that perhaps those glorifying Holocaust perpetrators had valid points. A common argument is that Shukhevych and others were honored for fighting the Soviets, not slaughtering Jews. Osama bin Laden also fought against Moscow; should we erect statues celebrating his efforts?
The very media that rightfully denounced Trump for both-siding white supremacists ended up both-siding Holocaust distortion.
“Nazi war monument” has been scrawled on a memorial to the 1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army in St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, Ont.(Kontakt Ukrainian TV / YouTube)
“A Threat to Democracy”
To understand just how serious (and career-threatening) the Russia charges were, consider that over the past couple of years, we’ve witnessed an explosion of anti-Semitism, including Holocaust distortion/denial. Yet the only reason you’re reading about Canada designating Nazi collaborators “hate crime” victims is because of three people: the Ottawa Citizen’s Pugliese, fellow journalist Scott Taylor, and American blogger Moss Robeson, who’ve hammered away at the issue in the media and on Twitter.
Pugliese and Taylor weighed in on the glorification of Ukrainian and Latvian Nazi collaborators before and were attacked for it at international levels. The Ukrainian embassy in Canada accused Pugliese of writing “Kremlin-style propaganda,” while the Latvian foreign ministry labeled his articles a “threat to democracy.” Meanwhile, the Latvian ambassador to Canada accused Taylor of swallowing Russian propaganda.
Nor is this limited to the media. In 2012, Swedish postdoctoral fellow Per Anders Rudling, who bravely chronicled the whitewashing of Shukhevych and others, was subjected to a brutal campaign designed to discredit his academic career.
Despite their different professions and nationalities, Pugliese, Taylor, Robeson, and Rudling have one thing in common: None of them run websites with prominently placed donation buttons asking for money to fight anti-Semitism. Canadian-Jewish organizations, on the other hand, have those buttons. This takes us to the final sordid part of this story—appeasement by Jewish groups.
The two major Jewish-Canadian advocacy groups are the Centre for Israeli and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and B’nai Brith Canada. Despite Canada’s Nazi collaborator monuments’ having been in the news for three years, the CIJA’s press release section doesn’t contain a single item on the issue. (CIJA’s press office did not respond to a request for any pertinent press releases.) That’s despite CIJA’s numerous denunciations of other anti-Semitic incidents.
B’nai Brith’s behavior has been even stranger. In 2017, B’nai Brith official Aidan Fishman told Canada’s National Post: “Clearly, if there actually are monuments to Nazis in Canada we would be quite concerned about that,” adding that “The Russian government sometimes uses the word ‘Nazi,’ especially in the context of the Ukrainian conflict, with somewhat broader meaning than other groups would use it.” Fishman told the National Post the Russian embassy tweets were potentially an attempt “to take shots at the Ukrainian community in Canada.”
In a follow-up article about the monuments to SS Galichina and Nazi collaborator Shukhevych, Fishman told the National Post: “I think the question that Canadians really need to ask is, does the presence of these monuments in any way contribute to anti-Semitism, or to other forms of racism or bigotry in Canada today?” Fishman told the National Post the answer appeared to be “no,” adding that “the intent of these monuments is not to stir up hatred or glorify crimes against Jews,” and that, while B’nai Brith did not support the creation of new monuments of this kind, it did not see a need to call for the removal of the existing ones.
Fishman did add that: “I think that the communities that have established these monuments, so namely the Ukrainian-Canadian community, should take a critical look at these facts and should remind themselves that many of these people were engaged in collaboration with the Nazis…and that may change the way that these people are portrayed and perceived in their own community.”
B’nai Brith later condemned the “glorification of Nazis” in Europe, not the more inconvenient commemorations at home. At the same time, it was vocal about Shukhevych’s crimes and supported an effort to strip another Ukrainian war criminal of Canadian citizenship.
When it comes to the recent uproar over the Oakville monument, B’nai Brith appears to have split the difference between defending and condemning Nazi collaborators, initially electing to remain silent. However, in response to an inquiry from The Nation, the group said, “There is no place for monuments in our society that glorify military units, political organizations or individuals who collaborated with the Nazis in World War II. B’nai Brith Canada calls for such monuments to be removed and for comprehensive education efforts to accurately portray the historical record of those individuals and organizations involved.” The only major Jewish organization to forthrightly address the current scandal is the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Unfortunately, this isn’t surprising. As I and others have noted, Jewish groups appear to be following Benjamin Netanyahu’s lead. Netanyahu has turned a blind eye to horrific Holocaust denial/distortion in Eastern Europe, including Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary, in exchange for favorable UN votes. Perhaps that’s the case here.
Either way, motivations don’t much matter. The sentence, “We are choosing to remain silent on Holocaust distortion because…” doesn’t have a morally justifiable ending—especially when you’re raising money to fight anti-Semitism.
Those who fought in WWII and Jews caught in the horrors of the Holocaust were faced with terrifying demands: charging the beaches of Normandy, surviving unspeakable conditions, carrying out real resistance behind enemy lines. We are given much simpler tasks. We’re merely asked to speak up for the memory of dead Jews and Allied soldiers. Unfortunately, so far we have failed, which is why Canada’s Nazi monuments continue to stand tall.
UPDATE: Following the publication of this article and the general backlash against Nazi monuments, B’nai Brith issued a press release titled “Nazi Collaborators Should Not Be Honoured In Canada,” stating that: “It is unfathomable that Nazi glorification be allowed to continue in this country.” The group went on to denounce the Oakville cenotaph as an “affront to the memory of Canadian veterans and the victims of Nazi atrocities,” and demand its removal, as well as of monuments to Shukhevych and “all others like it that glorify Nazis in Canada.”
The press release further denounced the evils of Nazis and Nazi collaborators as “unambiguous,” adding “The idea that there are officials in this country who could tolerate any other interpretation of these events is extremely disturbing to most Canadians.” Lev GolinkinLev Golinkin is the author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, Amazon’s Debut of the Month, a Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program selection, and winner of the Premio Salerno Libro d’Europa. His writing on the Ukraine crisis, Russia, the far right, and immigrant and refugee identity has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Boston Globe, Politico Europe, and Time (online), among other venues.
![Hitler's Monsters by [Eric Kurlander]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51UWZ9rRdoL._SY346_.jpg)
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