For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage.

TheTango@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 476 points –
For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage.
inquirer.com
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Why tf should they be in a museum, it's ahistorical. It's not erasing history to remove monuments; never in my life have I ever seen a monument to Hitler, but most people can still give a broad strokes review on why he's infamous. You don't need to memorialize something to teach it.

I've been to a stunning transport museum in Germany. Incredible restored vehicles from all over the world. Even a Concorde jet. Super cool.

They also have Hitler's car there. It's stunning, it's historical, it happened, and the modern crime would be to hide it away, or destroy it.

Without our past, we can't learn for our future. Put that kind of stuff in a museum. Have an information display about why it was there. Inform the future generations. Empower them with knowledge.

This isn't Hitler's car though, this is a Neo Nazi monument made in the 80s; it has zero historical value

Are you seriously comparing a car personally used by Hitler to a memorial built by neonazis in the 80s?

If I made a swastika statue with a plaque saying the Jews and Slavs must be exterminated, would you back me up? Because it's the same thing. Neither are actually part of the history, they're just contemporary fetishism of Nazis.

To be fair, this seems to have been made by people related to the unit - veterans and their families. Which honestly might make it worse.

The slab was erected by veterans groups about 30 years ago at St. Mary’s Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the creation of the unit ...

The division surrendered to the Allies in 1945. Facing the possibility of deportation to the Soviet Union, about 8,000 former soldiers from the division were allowed to emigrate and others followed later, settling in such places as Toronto, Chicago and Philadelphia

Ukrainians want to pretend that this group had nothing to do with the holocaust or naziism, but keep in mind that only a couple decades before during the Russian Civil War there were over a thousand pogroms in Ukraine which murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews. Murderous antisemitism wasn't a fringe thing in Ukraine then.