Filuwaúrdjan
Realpolitik
Atlas Institution
Posts: 67,997
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« on: September 27, 2023, 07:18:44 AM » |
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It is rather unlikely that he would have been unaware of the Holocaust, as in the eastern part of the former Pale of Settlement it took on a different form to further West: 'the Holocaust by bullets'. People were rounded up and shot, often with the assistance of local nationalist militias. The largest and most infamous incident was at Babi Yar, just outside Kiev/Kyiv, but smaller incidents occurred from the Baltics to the Black Sea coast and they all added up. You can't hide something like that; everyone in the region (and it is a very large region) will have known. I will refrain from wondering whether he might have been involved himself, though that would have been before his SS membership.
As to the Holodomor/Terror Famine, while I'm sure that awareness of it will have stoked further pre-existing extreme nationalist sentiment in Galicia, the region itself was not affected by it as it was part of the Second Polish Republic at the time. While a lot of surviving Galician SS veterans (including Hunka) appear to have justified their actions with reference to the Soviet Union in later decades, their primary political opponent (as they saw it) was the Poles, which is why they carried on murdering those members of the Polish community of Eastern Galicia who had not been deported (temporarily as it happened) to Siberia (by... er... Stalin...) right up until the Eastern Front collapsed.
Anyway, the Zelensky government has always been careful not to honour these ancient creeps back home despite lobbying from certain groups, and people like this will have murdered, or been involved in the murder of, some of his relatives. Diplomacy means that this angle has been downplayed in the coverage, but it really does add something extra to the offensive stupidity of this incident, and I note that the first member of the Canadian government to say in public that Rota's position was untenable was the Foreign Minister.
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