this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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It's a fact.

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[–] Jimius@lemmy.ml 15 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

I think the keyword here is "Waffen-SS" not "Latvian". Fascists and racists come in all nationalities. The Dutch really hate nazis, but a sizeable portion of the population aided in the holocaust regardless.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

That's true, except people from Baltic countries, all of the Eastern Block, and notably Finns love the narrative of bad bad barbaric Russia that always oppressed them, and bad bad totalitarian USSR that was "worse than Nazis".

Just recently certain Linus Torvalds expressed a interesting sentiment about being a Finn and knowing something about "Russian aggression", well, Soviet-Finnish conflicts didn't start with the Winter war, and the Winter war was preceded by a few suggestions ending in an ultimatum. By those suggestions Finland would receive far greater amounts of territory (in the areas it claimed before at that) than the stripe of land and a few small islands in artillery range of Leningrad it would be giving away. That's rather soft if you consider the character of the preceding Soviet-Finnish war. And Finland's participation in the blockade of Leningrad while allied with, well, Nazis makes the "worse than Nazis" argument more easily understandable and still wrong.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml 15 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Percentage-wise Latvia had more % of population in SS than any other country including Germany so i think the "Latvian" part did played at least some role.

[–] Bloomcole@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Most of the Baltics and especially ukraine had large percentages of nazis.
Nothing has changed.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Ukraine actually had tiny % of nazis in WW2. It was like 250000 or so nazis compared to at least 7 million Ukrainian partisans and Red Army soldiers. It's just that west after war absorbed, coddled and promoted the nazi survivors and after 1991 send them back with a huge propaganda bucks, and in 2014 helped them organize the coup.

[–] Bloomcole@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

It must've been that they were so active I got the impression there were more back then.
Also that there is an unhealthy amount of them in our time.
But thanks for correcting me.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 hour ago

It must’ve been that they were so active I got the impression there were more back then.

Well, they have access to the biggest and most pervasive propaganda machine in the history of mankind so their narration is the one that prevail in large part of the world.

Like the mere fact that a literal Waffen SS soldier participating in many atrocities was given applause in western parliament and that wasn't met with unanimous condemnation and collapse of said parliament.