Counter-Currents
General Andrei Vlasov, who commanded the German-backed Russian Liberation Army.
3,698 words
The Third Reich was not profuse in mistakes; otherwise, it would not have been able to battle for almost six years against the major world powers, in numerical and material inferiority and with so few and counterproductive allies. However, it itself made a vital mistake which resulted in losing the war.
Contrary to Hollywood’s presumptions, the Western front was always of minor importance during the Second World War. If Germany had been victorious in the East, it would have been absolutely impossible for the United States and Great Britain to set foot on the European mainland. Not without reason, historian Erik Norling notes the relative scarcity of Anglo-American heroes in comparison with those produced by Germany and Russia, for few were the inhabitants of those Atlantic countries who felt their interests were threatened by the war. Thus, none of the so-called “Western democracies,” where the populations were mostly against seeing their countries enter the conflict, would have been able to sustain a war at anything remotely resembling the same cost as the Soviet Union paid — specifically, about ten million soldiers and approximately 16 million civilians.
Despite the myth, all historians know that the Second World War was decided on the steppes of Russia — and that German anti-Slavism played a decisive role in this tragic defeat.
Before going into the matter, it is necessary to point out that the tendency to despise the Slavs, which was widespread among the Germans at the time — especially among the Prussians — did not originate with National Socialism, with which it bears no connection, but stemmed from the period of Prussian hegemony and the nineteenth-century “Drang nach Osten.” Even the very concept of “Lebensraum” predates Hitler’s birth. The fact that this anti-Slavism was not a National Socialist doctrinal question but a more generally German attitude is shown by the fact that, among the exponents of the Slavophobic faction, we find indistinctly National Socialist personalities and others who ran contrary to that worldview, especially in the Wehrmacht.
The opposite was the case as well: One also finds National Socialists and non-National Socialists alike among the leading representatives of the Slavophile wing. For example, one of the most outspoken supporters of Hitler’s regime among the General Staff, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, vehemently supported the Slavophile thesis. Ministers Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg,[1] and Walther Darré, for example, were likewise clear supporters. The Slavophiles had in Heinrich Himmler their most powerful adversary, but even he would eventually change his mind on this.[2]
The point is that when German troops entered the Soviet Union in 1941, they were welcomed in many areas as liberators. In Ukraine especially, huge crowds came out to throw flowers and cheer. By 1943, although many Ukrainian civilians would flee the advancing Red Army and accompany the retreating Germans, the attitude of the people were unfortunately no longer the same.
Erich Koch, a former German Communist who later became a high official in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) who had belonged to the party’s Strasserist faction and was close to National Bolshevism, was given the governorship of occupied Ukraine. Koch treated the Ukrainian people rudely, which aroused disaffection among some of them.[3] The irreducible Ukrainian nationalist militiamen, who were furiously anti-Communist and anti-Jewish, but who lacked cadres, were pushed to wage war on their own. Under different circumstances, they could have been attracted to making common cause with the Germans and thus would have had much greater effectiveness than what ended up happening. Even so, 100,000 Ukrainians joined the Waffen-SS, making them the non-Germanic people who contributed the most volunteers to the fight — an impressive figure, but one which, in a republic that was home to the Cossacks and which had been at the epicenter of the worst Communist massacres, could have been much higher.
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The same could be said of the other Soviet republics and of the Russians themselves, who soon began to desert with the intention of joining the German ranks against the Marxist tyranny that was exterminating them.[4] In total, more than a million men, coming from the most varied nationalities of the Soviet Union, fought alongside the Germans against their own State, which had been kidnapped by Communist tyranny.[5]
Faced with this situation, Stalin was terrified that Germany would turn the war against Soviet Communism into a political and revolutionary war of liberation, and that the people, instead of fighting against the Germans, would rebel against the Bolshevik elites. He therefore promised the Russians greater political openness through a series of liberalizations in the economic field and the implementation of political and religious freedoms.
Although he never intended to fulfill his promises of freedom, he tried desperately to make them credible. For this goal, the churches, which had previously been destroyed or converted into stables, were reopened; socialism took a discreet second place in war propaganda; the Communist International, or Komintern, was dissolved; the political Commissariat within the Red Army was abolished, and its name was changed from “Red Army” to “Soviet Army”; love for the land, which the Kremlin had previously tried to eradicate, was encouraged; the League of Militant Atheists was dissolved and the Orthodox Church was courted;[6] the military saw the Tsarist ranks and its symbols, such as shoulder pads on the uniforms, were reintroduced — and so on.
To the detriment of the Marxist aphorism that “the fatherland is an invention of the bourgeoisie,” the conflict was proclaimed not a sacrifice for the Communist “revolution,” but the Second Great Patriotic War, very significantly evoking the original Great Patriotic War that had been fought against Napoleon’s revolutionary France. The “Internationale,” which had been the Soviet Union’s anthem, was replaced by a genuinely patriotic one. Classist and Marxist propaganda was deemphasized and national and popular sentiments were stimulated. Previously denigrated Russian historical heroes from before the Revolution, such as Alexander Nevsky,[7] were likewise vindicated.
It was even promised that the Communist Party would be dissolved, along with the abhorred kolkhozes (the same ones that, ironically, the inept Erich Koch had maintained), and even that Stalin would eventually be replaced by a Russian nationalist regime. Moreover, amnesty was promised to fellow countrymen who had gone over to the other side, if they returned.
Of course, what happened was just the opposite, and almost all the things that had been temporarily changed in order to mislead the naïve were reversed as soon as the war ended.
Despite the fact that the Soviet promises were dubious, the Third Reich never offered an alternative to the peoples of the USSR given that it was pursuing a secondary objective of obtaining Lebensraum (living space) for the densely-populated Germany, and harbored an anti-Slavic attitude. Thus, no winning over of the Soviet population was sought and no proselytizing or recruitment was carried out — at least initially — among its peoples.
That would prove to be a tremendous fault, for, as the Wehrmacht discovered, it was not possible to defeat Russia in its territory without the support of the Russian people. There were just not enough troops to conquer sufficient land to end the war, and to make matters worse, partisans who were springing up across the immense territory that was already occupied made it difficult to control. The Germans should have recalled that even the previously invincible Napoleon was finally defeated by the Russians when they pursued a strategy of ceding ground and avoiding large battles, even at the enormous price of abandoning Moscow to its fate (and the French leader did not hesitate to set fire to it). The brutal Russian winter and guerrilla tactics ultimately undermined the Napoleonic army’s power on its way back home.
To illustrate this point, the Soviet Union was 27 times the size of National Socialist Germany. Thus, the more land the Germans conquered, the longer their lines of communication from Central Europe had to be extended, and the more partisans and saboteurs had to be controlled in the rear. At the same time, Stalin moved his factories beyond the Ural Mountains, where they were free from attack, and as his army retreated they left nothing but scorched earth, commissioning special commandos to set fire to warehouses, silos, crops, and even entire localities. (There is likewise evidence that they sometimes did this dressed as German soldiers to anger the locals.)
Thus, by far the most colossal mistake made by the Third Reich was to exclude a fundamental part of the white race from their revolution. Instead of waging a war of liberation to free the Russian people from the Jewish claws, “Operation Barbarossa,” the name under which the USSR was invaded, was approached as a simple preventive war — striking before the USSR could attack Germany, which was what Stalin planned to do[8] — and as conquest for Lebensraum. This error is doubly tragic if we think of the positive reception the Germans initially received on Soviet territory and how relatively easy it initially would have been to engage in political warfare by inciting sabotage, revolt, and a change of sides — but unfortunately, there were no such efforts until it was too late.
Of course, apart from anti-Slavism, there were other reasons that delayed the launching of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA). The most important was a question of political consistency: It was not easy to reconcile the interests of the western Soviet republics — precisely those that made up most of the territory occupied by the Germans — which aspired to independence from Russia, with those of the Russian volunteers, who at that time also had an imperialist mentality and did not look favorably upon secession by those republics.[9] It would probably not have been an insurmountable obstacle, had the Russians been granted liberation from Bolshevik tyranny along with the promise of the end of the military occupation after war’s end. After all, the Bolshevik regime itself had given up almost as much territory at the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. In fact, although it came too late, Andrei Vlasov, who commanded the ROA, eventually accepted the possibility of self-determination and independence for the aforementioned republics.
We could likewise mention the narrow-mindedness of those White Russians who had been exiled after the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, and who formed a hodgepodge of aristocrats, Tsarist reactionaries, independence fighters, and so on. Many of them, like Anton Denikin, did not understand the times and were in favor of stupidly “defending” the country even at the cost of keeping the most genocidal government in history in power in a white land so that it could continue exterminating its own citizens. Others, on the other hand, acted more intelligently and supported the Germans.
Another reason was that the USSR, unlike the other belligerent countries, had not signed the Geneva Convention, so it did not refrain from committing all sorts of war crimes. Germany had signed it but was exempt from complying with it in the case of a country that did not respect it. The food rations and treatment of the Soviet prisoners were therefore much worse than those offered to the prisoners of other nationalities, since they knew that captured Germans did not have a better fate awaiting them. This was also a mistake, in spite of everything, because it hindered concord between Germans and Russians.[10] On the other hand, the Communists were busy killing even the most conciliatory German officials, such as Bauer, the Vice Governor of the Galitzia region, who was murdered by a Bolshevik agent because of his special empathy for the Ukrainians.
And this discord brings us to an additional motive: mistrust. Since most of the volunteers came from prison camps and controlled territories — young men educated by the Communist regime — and not so much from white Russians in exile or deserters who had crossed the front lines, it was possible that many were faking adhesion just to take the opportunity to return to the other side or to swell the ranks of the partisans, after having been armed. Although there was no way of knowing at first, in time such mistrust proved unfounded, and the Russian volunteers stood out for their bravery and ferocity. And as for the Soviet workers sent to Germany, Himmler himself, although very reluctant at first, eventually accepted the fact that cases of sabotage were far less frequent than he had feared. It is also true that the insubordination and reckless actions of certain natural allies did not help to dispel this initial mistrust, such as when the Wehrmacht penetrated a few kilometers into Ukrainian territory, after which the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) declared the country’s independence, unilaterally and by surprise. Afterwards they only managed to get themselves arrested by the Germans, even though the latter had released their leader after the defeat of Poland, where Stepan Bandera had been imprisoned, two years earlier.
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We could find undoubtedly find various thoughtful reasons to explain the Germans’ Slavophobic stance, but it would be irrelevant. It is not a question of elucidating what amount of blame belongs to each party, but only to show the error of the policy of exclusion of entire segments of the Race as being considered unworthy of enjoying the fruits of the Identitarian Revolution (NS, third positionist, or however we want to approach it).
The past cannot be changed. Nonetheless, it can be used to learn a valuable lesson: The only possibility to win is to do the right thing; that is, to incorporate all white peoples equally into the Revolution, and the subsequent future White Union, making a clear distinction between the subjugated peoples and the elite that dominates them and to treat all sister ethnicities as what they are. At a time of struggle for the survival of the Race, any past grudges are like arguing about greyhounds and hounds — or, as the Byzantines did, about the sex of angels.
We know that this racial brotherhood and unity is perfectly possible because, even without intending it, it was very close to being achieved. In fact, despite all the mainstream narratives to the contrary, the Second World War was largely a European civil war between a European national side and its opposition, which was also composed of brethren but manipulated by an enemy media empire dominated by Jewry, and of treacherous governments that used their peoples as cannon fodder to serve the interests of the former. The French state was an Allied power, Germany’s historical rival from its very birth, and yet more Frenchmen gave their lives fighting under Adolf Hitler’s orders than under those of Édouard Daladier, the self-proclaimed “liberator” of France Charles de Gaulle, and other French or Western political puppets.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for his part, noted the singular fact that a part of the Russian people had joined the army of an attacking country — something that, in Russia’s long history, had never happened before. And it certainly did not happen out of mere “opportunism.” These were not cowards who deserted for fear of finding themselves on the losing side. Not surprisingly, among the Russians who took up arms against their former comrades were real warriors, including many who had previously been awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.[11] The transfer of Soviet soldiers to the Third Reich continued until the very end of the war, when it was more than obvious that Germany would be defeated. The Slav fighters who joined from the very beginning maintained their warlike ardor and continued to ignore Stalin’s kind offers to surrender.[12]
If, in spite of the lack of will to accept the Soviet peoples in the crusade against the System, in spite of the fact that enlistment efforts came very late (precisely when the potential recruits had less motive to believe in the possibility of an Axis victory) — in spite of everything, the recruitment of a million Soviet combatants (some historians put it at 1.4 million)[13] was reached, it is evident that a serious and early effort to do so would have decisively shifted the balance of power in the war towards the other side.
The German Third Reich should have been transformed into a European First Reich. To succeed, National Socialism needed to have been more faithfully National Socialist: It should have conceived the whole of the Race as a Nation without excluding any ethnic community, such as the Slavs; it should have defined its internal borders as based on ethnicity (unlike the Commissariats that were created in the East); it should have brought revolution to the entire white world under its rule, instead of maintaining the least disruptive governments possible and then being forced to negotiate with unreliable collaborators like Vichy France. It should even have allied with the nationalist movements of Arabia and other races, encouraging them to fight for independence from the European colonial powers, which would have been a mortal blow for the English empire and provoked the creation of new ethnostates, both for the whites and for the non-white races, which would then have all been free from supremacisms, wars, and forced coexistence. (In reality, this alliance was never sought in order to satisfy the Pétain government, since France still possessed an immense colonial empire and intended to preserve it).
The Third Reich should have understood its pan-Aryan revolutionary historical mission at an early time, and not merely the pan-Germanist one, which was something more typical of an archaic romantic völkisch nationalism than of a racial nationalism derived from a racial worldview.
Indeed, in the end there was a profound change of mentality in that sense, and the thesis of the “great Germanic space” gave way to the “European SS theory,” which foresaw a new order of European brotherhood[14] — but it was already too late to make a difference in the course of the war. If this had come earlier, we would not today have to suffer any of the evils that now afflict us in these decadent societies produced by failed states: racial mixing, capitalism, cultural Marxism, replacement genocide, rampant crime in our streets, low birthrates, endangered pensions, parasitic panderers and castes . . .
It is in our hands to learn from History and not repeat the same mistake that caused us to lose the most vital war for our survival as a Race. This lesson must not be forgotten if we want to succeed in the next — and last — opportunity we will have to free ourselves.
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Notes
[1] Already in 1927, six years before the NSDAP came to power, the very Nordicist Rosenberg made public his thesis that an alliance between Germany and Ukraine was essential for the foreign policy of the future National Socialist State. On May 9, 1941, before the outbreak of war against the Soviet Union, he presented his General Plan for the East, which envisaged the creation of a Ukrainian state allied with Germany. Given this background, Rosenberg, Head of the Foreign Policy Office, was appointed Minister for the Occupied Territories in the East.
[2] In April 1943, Himmler authorized the first SS division of Ukrainian origin (as well as many other units derived from several other Soviet nationalities), and in the summer of 1944 two more SS divisions of Russian volunteers were created.
[3] As Reichskommisar of Ukraine, he even forbade volunteers from eastern Ukraine to join the aforementioned 1st Ukrainian Division. It seems quite significant that Erich Koch was well-treated in the post-war period by the Communist authorities, spending a relatively comfortable stay in a Polish prison without ever being extradited to the USSR or tried for any crime in Ukraine.
[4] If there is something that makes Communism different from other ideologies, it is that its favorite victims are its own citizens, who are killed in greater numbers at the hands of the repressive apparatus of the state itself than in military conflicts against other countries.
[5] Compare this number, for the purposes of measuring the figure’s magnitude, with the almost 50,000 soldiers that Spain, which had an Axis-friendly fascist government, contributed in its famous Blue Division, for example.
[6] This was immediately after the hardest years of the massive Stalinist purges and the ruthless persecution of the Church; however, a great number of useful fools still proliferated in it who participated in the deception, such as Metropolitan Sergei, who supported the Soviet war aims and incited anti-German sentiments.
[7] Nevsky was a Prince (Marxist classism was set aside) and a saint of the Orthodox Church (atheism was set aside), but what counted for the Soviets was that he had fought and defeated the Germanic Teutonic Knights.
[8] See The Icebreaker by Viktor Suvorov, who was a former Soviet military intelligence officer.
[9] Instead of making anachronistic accusations against the Germans, it is worth remembering that this was a time when almost everyone, everywhere, was an expansionist or imperialist. In the 1940s, the so-called Western democracies possessed huge colonial empires, and some had even made use of concentration camps (which were originally invented by Great Britain to imprison Boers in South Africa). The Soviet Union, for its part, retained control over the nationalities that had already been subjugated by the Russian Empire, as well as many others that it had seized since the fall of the Tsar.
[10] Winston Churchill would use the same tactic to inflame the British people, who were not enough enthusiastic about fighting a war “for Poland,” a country that he would hand over to the Soviet Union at the end of the war, anyway. What he did was to initiate a campaign of massive aerial terrorism against residential neighborhoods, hoping thereby to elicit a similar German response, which would in turn enrage the British people.
[11] The leader of the Russian Liberation Army himself, the highly decorated General Andrei Vlasov, had been the first to defeat the Germans in a battle, specifically the Battle of Moscow.
[12] It is true that Stalin placed large masses of Soviet troops who had been German prisoners of war in the Gulags, since they had been given the order to resist to the death at all costs; thus, to be captured was “treason.” Still, no one could have foreseen such a crime.
[13] According to the calculations of the Minister of Agriculture, Herbert Backe. In addition, there were six million Soviet citizens working in Germany for the war industry.
[14] See Eurofascism by Erik Norling.
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31 comments
This is a thought that has been present in the back of my mind for some time (and one shared by Varg Vikernes, of all people). Arguments about supposed Slavic inferiority aside, the radical, ideological National Socialists certainly favored a ‘European Union’.
What we need today is a revolutionarily new and fair assesment of Hitler and historical NS. What was good and what was bad about them. Of course this new assesment must be made not from a judeo-democratic point of view (for we are all tired with this anti-white mainstream shit we know from ‘our’ schools, churches, msm, politicians, or from the normies), but only from a pro-white, pan-european perspective.
We get that from reassessment from Otto Strasser’s “New Europe,” by
Kerry Bolton
.
I would argue that Hitler’s biggest mistake was not listening to Rommel and supplying his Afrka Korps with the supplies necessary to defeat the Brits and Americans. If Rommel had been allowed to win in N Africa, the Germans could have gained control of enough fuel to supply the rest of their war machine, prevented the losses in Sicily and Italy, reducing the West’s appetite for the invasion of France. With no Western front and the necessary fuel, the Germans could have, at least, fought the Soviets to a standstill. Not losing the 6th Army at Stalingrad would have helped, too. Way too many mistakes, but hindsight…
Thank you for your comment, sir. This essay deals with political mistakes, though, since military mistakes are primarily those of the armies themselves and not of the Third Reich or National Socialism as such. On the other hand, I think that not sending reinforcements to Africa can hardly be considered to have been a mistake, as it was always a secondary front. The war was being decided on the European continent, where the Germans were already fighting vastly outnumbered and, by conquering the Caucasus, were not only obtaining oil, but depriving the Soviets of theirs. Even Sicily and Italy never posed a problem. The Normandy invasion came about because the invasion of Italy was a resounding Allied fiasco, where they remained bogged down until the end of the war. Yes, there were some important mistakes on the battlefield, of course. But again, I’m only interested in political mistakes, that were more vital… and the only ones we can learn anything from in this era.
Well, Rommel wasn’t really a team player and it could even be argued that his Field Marshal’s baton was as much due to the Propaganda Ministry and his having once served on the Führer’s expeditionary guard rather than to any kind of genius at command.
Was Rommel more charismatic than Field Marshal Kesselring? Probably, but that doesn’t make him more competent.
Where I see the problem is that GFM Rommel should have had his command subordinated to GFM Kesselring, the theater commander. Because what happened is that Rommel would go off half-cocked and then expect to be supported by supplies, ammunition, motorization, and fuel that was sorely needed elsewhere.
Grandiloquently disrupting the enemy is fine and all, but war is a very concerted enterprise. There are a lot of moving parts and balls in the air. When reserves, materiel and air and naval resources had to be diverted for unplanned campaigns and emergencies, this came at the expense of other operations and planning.
For example, capturing Malta was a priority undertaking that kept having to be postponed by Kesselring and the OKW in no small part due to Rommel’s showboating. At some point the Axis capturing Malta simply became impossible, and failing to do so seriously sabotaged Rommel’s critical supply lines to North Africa.
Rommel is somewhat overrated in my opinion. He is popular in the Anglosphere because ─ Monty beat him, by Jove ─ and because at Normandy he at least passively collaborated with the Generals’ bomb plot against Hitler.
Even a hidebound Prussian Junker like von Rundstedt, the Commander-in-Chief West at Normandy ─ who had actually been retired from the Army before the war, and who was clearly far less talented than Rommel when it came to newer concepts like armored warfare ─ should be rated better than is usually the case because at least he was loyal.
🙂
Excellent essay. German National Socialism was not about White Identity or White Nationalism. It was, despite the effects of modernity, an ‘old world’ movement with ‘old world’ ideas about race. Still, it was flexible. Himmler himself intervened to allow an ‘interracial’ marriage of German NSDAP member to an Irish woman.
We have to chart our own course.
The past is not really a guide to what must be done.
A cautionary tale, but not really a guide.
We will have to approach the future with creativity and discipline, reinventing the wheel if we have to.
Thank you! Absolutely; History should be to human peoples only what personal experiences are to invidivuals.
This article gives me great hope for our future, it is a relief to see the path away from our obstinate inter-quarelling.
Also:
That picture of Gen. Andrei Vlasov is begging for a text-icon, wartime-adventure mobile game stylized on the Command & Conquer setting, gamers who loved Papers Please might find that irresistible.
Erich Koch, a former German Communist who later became a high official in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party
Soviet agent. After the war he had to be executed by the Poles, but was pardonned and lived till 1986 in a comfortable Polish prison in Warteland.
Koch was a scum, unfortunately Hitler listened to him, instead of listening to Alfred Rosenberg. If only Rosenberg had his way in the East!… But are there really proves that Koch was an agent?
Soviets hanged small fishes like Oberleutnante und Majoren, but they have had no any accusations to Erich Koch, and the Poles, who wanted to execute him, were told to pardon him. Such order could come only from Moscow. But why such untypical mercy to the big Nazi murderer?
That is to say: are there any proves others than his criminal policies during the war and apparently mild treatment by the commies after the war.
Some details are there in the book “Moskaus As im Kampf der Geheimdienste” by Hugo Manfred Beer. Moscow’s Ace is here Martin Bormann, whom Beer accused to be pro-Soviet, but he writes about Koch too. Also a Frenchman called Pierre de Villemarest, former Gaullist spy and Resistance fighter, said something about him.
Anti-Slavic politics of the Third Reich is an oversimplification, I think. The Germans have had nothing against such Slavic peoples as Croatians, Bosnians. Slovenians, Slovaks. The Czechs lived relatively comfortable under occupation and there was no Resistance, and even the famous OPERATION ANTHROPOID was organized by the British SOE, not by Czechs tsemselves. Yes, to the Poles the Germans were hostile, but that was more territorial conflict, than a ethnical one. And at least the German Slavs, Wenden und Sorben, they were not oppressed. Moreover many German generals and politicians were of Slavic (wendisch) origin. The Germans were of course hostile to their main enemies in the East, the so called “Eastern Slavs” or, as we can say now, to the cannon fodder of Stalin and the Third Internationale, who were ready to attack Germany in the July of 1941. Also, the hostility here was also more political, than the ethnical. Even if we do not stress that the Eastern Slavs are Slavs only in linguistical terms (in such terms Sioux and Apaches, Harlem Negroes or South African Zulus are to be considered as the English, because they speak English language). not from the ethnical point of view. But the bad attitude of Germans to the Stalin’s subjects was because of Stalin’s aggressive politics. And not Germans were guilty that Comrade Stalin wanted to sell his cannon fodder to the British Empire to crush Germany. So as 130 years earlier “Russian” Tsar Alexander I sold his cannon fodder to the same British Empire to crush Napoleonic France.
In western Ukraine, Galicia (including Lviv, formerly Lemberg) was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Much of it was ruled by Austrians (German speakers) until the end of World War I. I’ve been to Lviv several times in the last few years. I’ve heard it said that life under Austrian rule was considered good for Ukrainians; at least, that is the opinion of some. I have also read some other things supporting that. But the post-World War I Polish rulers of Galicia were so horrible to the Ukrainians (not to mention the 2 million or more Germans) that they then ruled over that the Austrians became an easy preference. In the 1920s and 30s, a significant number of ethnic Ukrainians fled to Canada, and the British press reported widespread torture and murder in what is now western Ukraine and Belarus. The Poles wanted to Polonize the population and make them Polish speakers. I believe these people were, by and large, friendly towards Austrians and Germans. After World War II, Bandera and other Ukrainian nationalists settled in Germany. Bandera was assassinated in Munich in 1958.
I now live in Estonia, a country that was also German-friendly in World War II. Like Galicia in Ukraine, Estonia and neighboring Latvia formed divisions that became part of the Waffen SS in the war, clearly indicating their preference for Germany. But I believe there has been a significant change in attitudes since 1991, when the USSR broke up. I think I have sensed a noticeable difference in how older Estonians view the Germans as compared to younger Estonians, maybe especially more liberal people. I think the older people here view the Germans favorably and do not like the Russians or Soviets. But, since 1991, eastern Europe has been introduced to the so-called “Holocaust,” so I believe many Estonians (and others, like Ukrainians) that sided with the Germans have mixed feelings about their grandfathers fighting alongside “NAZIS.” The Jews (or Judeo-Bolsheviks) have had a huge impact in eastern Europe, making themselves out as the victims, and most people are oblivious to the huge role (dominant at first) Jews played in the Soviet regime.
I have a 31-year-old Estonian friend, and he helped confirm my thoughts. He said he was told the Germans were good and were Estonia’s allies. Some other older Estonians have said similar things. I had a discussion with a young Ukrainian from Donetsk, where many Ukrainians are Russian or Russian-friendly, and she said something about the Germans in regards to World War II that I disagreed with. My parents were German. I informed her of some things, and an older Estonian saw the two of us talking, and the next day he raised his right arm with the Sieg Heil salute when he found out what I said.
When I was in Lviv in 2019, I met another young Ukrainian. She was an extremely nasty young thing. Two of her relatives died fighting for the Soviet Union during WWII. I believe they were her grandfathers. She absolutely hates everything German and has been to Israel several times. She almost worships Jews. She’s oblivious to the fact that she lives in a city where Ukraine’s national hero Bandera has a statue erected in his honor. He fought against Ukraine’s enemies, Poles, Russians, and Jewish-Bolsheviks. When my friend (also from California) worked in Lviv fifteen or twenty years ago as an English language instructor, he was told by the Ukrainians he befriended that the years under Austrian rule were good, but you might be less likely to hear that today, thanks to the Jews. A few months ago, I saw a big magazine with an attractive cover in the grocery store from the Jewish-owned Swedish media empire Bonnier with the title “German occupation” of Estonia, but Estonians did not view their country as being under occupation. The Germans liberated them.
The Jews have been hard at work pushing the narrative favorable to them in eastern Europe, pointing their finger at Germans and eastern Europeans, and hiding their own brutality that made them hated by many here years ago. As many people know, Ukraine now has a Jewish president.
This is Lviv, Ukraine, in 1943, when young Ukrainians joined the fight and became part of the Galicia Waffen SS Division.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ13bj7NpqY&t=3s
I don’t know why my previous comment was combined into one long paragraph.
Sorry. It is displayed as I wrote it.
Lwiw and Galichyna were annexed by Stalin in the autumn of 1939 and connected to the Ukrainian SSR, with which the Galichians have very few in common. The so-called Eastern Ukrainians were the same colonizers and butchers in the “Western Ukraine” as the Russians were. And so they were also in Kaukasus, Edil-Ural, Steppe, Central Asia, and Siberia. In Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union the Russians and the Eastern Ukrainians were colonizers and ruling nation, but the Western Ukrainians were oppressed and colonized by them, alike as Kaukasians and Central Asians were. Without Eastern Ukrainians neither Russian Empire nor Soviet Union could exist.
And yes, the Soviet annexation of the Western Ukraine and Baltic States was not only inhuman crime, but also a big geopolitical mistake of the Soviet rulers, because the inhabitants of those lands did not want to live in the SU and fought against Soviets with arms in hands. And even after the defeat those peoples fought unviolently against the Soviet rule, and in the end of 80’s they have destroyed the SOviet Union.
Bottom line: Hitlers eyes were bigger than his stomach. Moreover, he could have banished Jews permanently ( instead of trying to actually exterminate an entire race.)
Quite possibly this article ( and the comments thereto) could have been auf Deutsch.
She was an extremely nasty young thing.
Well, maybe you did not asked her,but I am sure, that her granddads or/and grandmoms had come to Lwiw only after 1945, as Soviet/Russian/Eastern Ukrainian occupiers and colonizers. What she said is typical to those persons. The Russians in QZ say the same and behave themselves in the same way and look down at “locals”.
The disintegration of Austria-Hungary was a big tragedy for all its peoples. They all lived without Habsburger Reich mush worse than within it.
By what criteria?
“By what criteria?”
In regards to how their country treated them. The Austro-Hungarian Empire (for centuries called the Austrian Empire) was a country of many peoples, each with their own language, and every people had representation in the Austrian parliament, later divided into two parliaments (Austrian and Hungarian). As I stated in my comment above, I heard similar sentiments as those of Kök Böri expressed by various people from Galicia in Lviv, and the fact that the people of Lviv welcomed German troops as liberators in 1941 and Ukrainian men later made up the Galician Waffen SS Division formed in 1943 all support that claim. Austrians are Germans. Both speak German, and when the German army arrived in Lviv in 1941, the Ukrainians remembered them from the roughly 150 years when they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The best way to illustrate this is to compare how the people were treated when they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to how they were treated after the empire collapsed and they became part of the newly formed countries after World War I. The German General Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof discusses this in the lecture on his book “1939: The War That Had Many Fathers,” starting 15 minutes and 15 seconds into his lecture.
After World War I, Poland was formed from the broken-up Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it annexed parts of Ukraine and Belarus (White Russia) from the USSR. “Banned from German schoolbooks” is “the humanitarian tragedy of the non-Polish minorities in Poland.” Poland had “five million Ukrainians,” and many fled to (British) Canada. British newspapers and the British Parliament took up the subject.
Manchester Guardian, 12/14/1931. “The minorities in Poland are to disappear.” “This policy is being pushed forward ruthlessly and without the slightest regard for public opinion abroad.” “The Ukraine under Polish rule is an inferno—the same can be said of White Russia [Belarus] with even greater justice.” “The purpose of the Polish policy is the disappearance of the national minorities.”
British Parliament, 6/15/32: “In Volhynia, the conditions are harsher still.” “One especially deplorable matter—that is, the torture of prisoners in the prisons and of suspects… “I regret that the evidence is convincing that medieval torture was practiced.”
In France, a professor of Slavic studies who had lived there said, “There were shootings, hangings, tortures, imprisonments, confiscations…..many Ukrainian priests were executed.”
Under Austrian rule, the university in Lviv had eleven Ukrainian professors. Under Polish rule, the university had none.
In the lands taken from Germany, things were similar. By 1931, over one million Germans had already fled Poland for Germany. More would flee later.
If you cover up the atrocities committed by Jews and Poles, then Bandera and Ukrainians become war criminals for defending themselves or taking revenge. Jews made up 80–85% of the first government of that criminal regime; they had huge representation in the secret service (NKVD), and they ran most of the Gulags (slave labor camps).
Ukrainian and European history is falsified, covers up the criminal behavior of allies, and blames everything on the Germans and the victims of the communists that joined the Germans because they were glad to be free from the criminal USSR. The same can be said of the Galicians, who wanted to be free from the Poles.
And consider Czechoslovakia. That country was formed from Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, taken from Austria-Hungary after World War I. It was not the ideal democracy that the allies that created it claimed. None of the people that made up the country were asked if they wanted to be torn away from Austria-Hungary, and problems arose almost immediately.
The name of the country itself was dishonest, as were most of the discussions concerning it, concealing the fact that 23% of the country were Germans (actually Austrians). Czechs made up about 50% of the newly created country, Slovaks made up 16%, and others made up the rest. When the makeup of the country is discussed, the author may combine Czechs and Slovaks as one ethnic group to make the German population percentage appear smaller, but like the Germans, the Slovaks also did not want to be part of Czechoslovakia. The country was run by Czechs, and other groups were not treated as equals. When the Sudeten Germans got their independence, Slovakia became a German ally in World War II.
After World War II, the 3.5 million Sudeten-Germans were driven off their lands and had everything stolen from them as part of the biggest ethnic cleansing in history. Millions of others moved into their homes and cities. There is an interesting story on how former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s father stole the valuable art collection of a German whose home in Prague was given to him after the war. Those valuable art pieces are now in Albright’s brother’s home. When the Jew was asked if her family would return the stolen art to the family asking for it to be returned, she claimed her family obtained the art “legally.” Under the new Czech leader Benes, after the war, everything that belonged to the Germans was “legally” stolen from them. None of this is made up.
Slovakia was forced to merge with the Czechs again after the war until they broke away again in the early 1990s and Czechoslovakia was dissolved again. So much for that ideal democracy.
The War That Had Many Fathers – Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRpsfJmtPNg&t=8s
President Vladimir Putin speaking to a group of Jews. Jews made up 80 – 85% of the first Soviet Union government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIeYoF1VhHc&t=1s
Yes, and also Oesterreich-Ungarn was a bulwark, defending Middle and Southern Europa of the Russian Imperialism and its Western expansion. (Russia tried to destroy Habsburger Reich from within with the so-called Panslawism, which was one of many “active measures”, political warfare means, of the Russian intelligence, aimed to provoke separatism of Slavic peoples, but of course all Slavs in O-U had much more civil rights, than the peoples of “Russian” Empire itself.)
After the disintegration of Habsburger Reich the peoples of their territories have got dictatorships much more cruel than the soft authoritarianism of Franz Josef I was, and after the WW 2, they got Communism and Russian occupation, Budapest-56, Prague-68, etc. Only “Rest-Oesterreich” was an exception to this rule.
Yes, I know. I just thought that the statement about living worse “without the Habsburger Reich” was intented to mean that they lived worse being independent than living within it. Based on your answer, I guess it meant it was worse living within other empires than within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Peter, i havve never lived there but I originate from there. You know the history of this part of the world.
@SG – My parents were German and the war affected them greatly so I became very interested in WW II. I assume you are speaking of Galicia. I went to Lviv several times in 2019 – 2020. It’s a nice city and has a very interesting history.
No, the biggest mistake was breaking the peace and invading Russia.
Russia was planning a massive invasion of Europe. Sadly, Hitler did not destroy the Soviet Union, but Stalin ended up with only Eastern Europe in the end. If Hitler had kept “the peace,” Stalin might have gotten everything.
A good article that is worth perusing and reflecting. This anonymous friend, you probably didn’t read the article in full or in earnest. Please reread it and especially pay your attention to Note No.8 and get to read the noted book and other relevant reference materials. Hitler, for all his mortal flaws and biases, had saved half Europe from Stalinist-communist despotism by preempting a Soviet blitzkrieg on the entire central and western Europe.
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