A parade to honor the fallen... Of the Nazis

its latvia this is normal

I was half expecting galicia in ukraine to do this

 

Well what do you think about the London Blitz? London was also a major industrial area. Does this deserve more recognition or remembrance than the german cities?

 

This.

I still say Germany missed an opportunity when they didn't build a public bathroom over the location of the fuhrerbunker.

Think of all the sweet, sweet tourist money they missed out on by creating a way to literally piss on Hitler's grave.

 

Commemoration and rememberance is different than "muh Dresden holocaust"

By all means commemorate it, but don't set it apart or use it as a unique example of allied savagery. There's plenty to go around.

*apologies for double-posting.

 

Ok cool, thanks for the clarification, with these things some people seem to give off the vibe that warcrimes against a certain side are less grave because they are the aggressor or something and at first I wasn't quite sure if that was the case here.

At least to me there aren't any 'better' or 'worse' war crimes, a war crime's a war crime regardless of who's committing it. With these things there's no moral high ground for anyone, really.

 

In some ways what America did in the nineteenth century to the African Americans and the Native Americans is over all any different than what the Germans did in world war two. I am not and never will be a fan or supporter of the Nazis. The first concentration camps were set up by the British army during the Boar war in South Africa in the early part of the twentieth century. Also in terms of cruelty and brutally the imperial Japanese army equals either the Russian or German armys. And here is the real kick to the head folks about 150,000 Jews fought in the German army during the second world war.

 

If they are merely remembering dead colleagues, let them.
If they are honoring the reprehensible acts that those died carried out then maybe not.

As to the who was worst in the atrocities carried out.

Germany
Russia
Japan
US
Britain and its (former) colonies
France
China

All of the above committed war crimes.

Oh and special mention goes out to the US for Operation Paperclip and their prosecution of Unit 731...

All sides broke the Geneva convention, the question that should be asked was by how much.
All sides committed atrocities.
All sides can be argued to of committed genocidal actions (some more so then others).

Remember the dead, care for the living, ensure cluster f*cks like WW2 don't happen again!

 

People usually try to blend in.

 

I feel, since my mother and father are immigrants from Latvia, that I should say something.

Those guys hated the Soviets, they especially hated the Soviets. Matter of fact, they welcomed the Nazis with open arms.

 

Yeah...this is my question too.

If it's just a bunch of old vets wanting to remember their fallen friends/brothers in arms...no harm.

But...it'll probably one way or the other turn into an excuse for neo-nazis to gather...

 

It would be one of the most anti-Baltic things that I ever said probably, but still:

I really feel sorry for the countries that have nothing more to commemorate their resistance to the oppressor but a bunch of SS veterans. It is probably awful to feel that vulnerable.

 

Personally, I don't judge these people. I don't know them. If I am honest with myself, I have no idea how I would have acted if I had been a Latvian, German, Englishman, Jew, Ukrainian, Russian, whoever in this time period. I feel sorry for them. My grandfather was a Nazi until he died (albeit I don't think he actually did anything war-criminally speaking). He had a very hard life, and I feel sorry for him.

But you do not have parades with these guys in uniform! No no no no no. Anything honorable they did (saving a comrade, or personal bravery, or whatever) was accidental to the uniform.

 

Well, they are vulnerable. Latvia has only 2 million people in total, are next to Russia and only have a quarter of a century as an independent nation. That's a fucking small country with a lot for reasons to feel vulnerable.

 

Actually the spanish got their first.
And our camps were not supposed to be the death camps they turned into. Stupidity and carelessness did what the Nazis did by design

 

I think we should have a parade for surviving Nazi deserters, draft dodgers, and defectors. After all, if more people followed their example WW2 might have been slightly less of the worst thing to happen in the 20th century.

 

The Baltics (at least Estonia, which is where I thought about this) have this weird form of nationalism I've never seen anywhere else. Tartu has a crepe restaurant run by neo-Nazis and a neo-Nazi bar. (At least I was told it was when I was there.) Coupled with a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric (or so I was told). But at the same time there's this idea that "we've never actually done anything important and suck." Weird.

 

I can understand why they feel that way. What I cannot understand is why they not only not fight that feeling but endorse it and use it as a banner. Your weakness is not something that you should commemorate. And Baltic SS thingy is high point of their weakness because not only they were failed to defend themselves against one oppressor but they also fought for the other. Soviets did horrible things to them. Germans forced them to do horrible things to the others. Who is worse? A person who is hurting you or a person who forced you to hurt the other? For me there is a clear answer to that question.

And I must point out that for all the speeches about how Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians greeted the Germans with open arms as liberators from Soviet horror it still was a sheer stupidity on their parts. Why? Because they are still exist after 60 years of Soviet rule. And there would be only Germans in the Baltic states after one generation in the Greater Reich. Yeah, plenty of the Balts were deemed worthy of being called Arians. But it only meant that they would be 'converted' into the proper Germans and nothing more.

So this is what perplexing for me. Their nationalists have plenty of reasons to hate the Soviets or maybe even Russians. But Nazies were literal death of their small nations and they still consider them a better alternative. It is a self-delusion in its purest form.

 

Hence why my ancestor, who was considered an Aryan, said no.

He was sent to a concentration camp, but still.

 

They don't have much else to commemorate.

Plus they aren't commemorating being Nazis, but simply honoring their old warriors who fought so long ago.

 

It happens when you discard decades years of your own history because you was under occupation. In their time bolsheviks tried to do it too with imperial period of history. But they had enough sense in them to stop doing that because it was stupid.

 

In North Africa, Rommel and the forces under his command were pretty clean. I'm not saying there was never a war crime, but it wasn't greater than the rate at which war crimes were committed by any of the warring parties, including the allies. Shooting surrendering men, that kind of thing. Sometimes under the horrific pressure of war soldiers crack, and do that sort of thing without having to be ordered to from above.

Rommel had a kinda rose-tinted view of the Nazi party. He still thought of it as an anti-communist organization, and was in denial about its sinister, diabolical, genocide-committing side.

The Commando order came through to Rommel's HQ, but he declined to pass it on to his men, and it was not followed.

Also, at one time, after a large number of allied prisoners had been taken, and this had been communicated back to Berlin. Orders were sent back to the front, instructing them to identify and separate out any Jews among the POWs, and then shoot them. Rommel ignored this also, and the Jewish POWs were treated the same as the rest of the POWs.

 

What the sweet loving fuck does Rommel have to do with the Latvian SS? I swear to Kruppstahl, every fucking time the nazis come up, there's always some motherfucker who brings up that the guy who commanded Hitlers bodyguard and is known for fighting primarily in a desert area with few civilians on a small front SOMEHOW DIDNT COMIT WAR CRIMES AGAINST THEM.

(He also didn't understand logistics but that's water under the bridge.) While somehow ignoring the decade-long propaganda inculcation and actions of German soldiers literally anywhere else.

Stop with the Rommel worship. Especially when you're trying to use it to expiate German war crimes or not discuss their fucked up wartime society.

Fuckin. Stop. His leadership enabled worse monsters than he was, and he's overrated historically anyway.

 

I find it incredibly hard to give a shit that Rommel wasn't a complete monster considering he was still an obstacle to the overthrow of the Nazis. him being a competent honourable soldier wouldn't impress me either, because if he was incompetent he would have been shot in the face earlier and a lot of people who aren't Nazis wouldn't have died.

 

This, my grandfather Adolf Neumann was given the choice to either joint the army or decline. He had bad feelings about declining so he joined up to survive. He was lucky to be alive after the Canadians took him prisoner and the British sent him to the Russians.

 

He knew what the Nazis were.

Anything involving them doesn't end well if you caught their attention.