For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage.
For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage.
Elkins Park in Montgomery County has several synagogues ... and one large monument to Nazi collaborators. Many people had no idea it existed until recently.
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A private citizen with a sledge hammer could solve this in seconds.
In my mind, these things should not be destroyed. They should be moved to a museum, so people don't forget. Erasing history is a bad idea. We can't learn otherwise.
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.
That's what holocaust museums are for.
There's many, many better exhibits there than something like this would be. Pictures of holocaust victims, stories from survivors, artifacts, etc. Auschwitz has a room with tens of thousands of shoes in a heap that had been taken from murdered children.
We shouldn't forget history, but that doesn't mean we need to preserve every Nazi memorial and every peice of Nazi propaganda.
Sort of like what ISIS did
There's a world of difference between destroying a 2000 year old temple, and destroying confederate memorials made in the 60s or Nazi memorials made in the 80s.
For one thing, neoconfederate and neonazi propaganda isn't rare. There's not that much historical value to it, either, except to document the neoconfederate and neonazi movements themselves.
And holocaust victims still exist, while I don't think the same is true of any victims of ancient Iraqi pagan gods.