NATO's Nazi Problem

I used to think that the western nations were just turning a blind eye to the rise of the neo-Nazis in eastern Europe.
Then I spotted this.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has come under fire for portraying Baltic Nazi collaborators as anti-communist heroes in a flashy new film.

“Forest Brothers: Fight for the Baltics,” a short film NATO published on YouTube and its social media accounts on July 11, depicts anti-Soviet partisans as freedom fighters. The documentary features dramatic battle scene recreations accompanied by Hollywood blockbuster music, in which a Nazi-linked group known as the Forest Brothers ambushes and kills Soviet officers.
...
The eight-minute movie does not once mention that many of the members of the Forest Brothers previously fought on behalf of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. The anti-communist partisans were largely former members of the Waffen-SS.

Oh, yeh. They fought for Hitler against our allies at the time.
That's not something that just got overlooked.

Many of the members of the Forest Brothers “were fascists, including some recycled killers from the 1941 genocide phase of the Latvian Holocaust,” Katz explained. The group “served to delay the Soviet advance (in alliance with the United States, Great Britain and the Allies) that would liberate the death camps further west.”

“That not all Waffen SS members were ‘personal killers’—the country's Jews had already been mostly butchered when these units were formed—is quite irrelevant,” Katz added. “If and when they discovered a Jew in hiding, they did not help him or her.”

Lithuania is not the only NATO nation with a Nazi problem.
Latvia has a Nazi problem too.

Police arrested a man for displaying a poster of soldiers killing Jews at the annual march by local veterans of two SS divisions that made up the Latvian Legion during World War II.

The man was arrested Friday morning on the margins of the annual march of the Remembrance Day of the Latvian Legionnaires — soldiers from the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS and the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (the 1st and 2nd Latvian, respectively). A handful of veterans, flanked by hundreds of supporters waving Latvian flags, gathered around Freedom Monument for the march under heavy police guard.

The march in Latvia, a member of the NATO alliance and the European Union, is currently the only public event in Europe and beyond honoring those who fought under the banner of SS, Nazi Germany’s elite security force.

Then there is NATO ally Poland, which is less in-your-face and more about revisionism.

Polish President Andrzej Duda ratified a law making it illegal to blame his country for any part in the German Nazis’ systematic murder of millions of Jews during World War II, bowing to pressure from his ruling allies and amid rallies by far-right protesters.

Despite mounting international criticism, ruling Law & Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski urged Duda to sign the legislation. The president complied Tuesday, a day after dozens of activists chanted anti-Semitic slogans at a rally in front of his presidential palace in central Warsaw, with one banner reading: “Take off your yarmulke and sign the bill.”

Ironically it isn't just Israel that has a problem with Poland's law. Aspiring NATO ally Ukraine does too.

Neighboring Ukraine also criticized the Polish law, which widened the government’s mandate to prosecute crimes committed by “Ukrainian nationalists and members of Ukrainian formations collaborating with the Third Reich” from 1925 to 1950. Lawmakers in Kiev passed a resolution Tuesday saying they were “deeply concerned” the law could pave the way for “the strengthening of anti-Ukrainian tendencies.”

I won't even bother with Ukraine.

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the existence or speech of any political/ideological group, including Nazis, unless they engage in conduct that is illegal for anyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_America_v._Vil...

On the plus side, a law like Poland's would also violate the US Constitution. We can accuse the US of doing ugly things it did as well as of ugly things it never actually did.(When it comes to accusing individuals, though, the laws of libel and slander apply.)

Off topic, but "topic adjacent:" The right in the US maintains that Nazis were leftist because the name of their party included the word "Socialist." However, as we know, Nazis were far right. (I am not sure of the difference between "far right" and "alt right." There were white supremacists and neo Nazis on the far right long before coining of the term "alt right.") The US right rank and file is incredibly dishonest, IMO. I would refer them to the wiki article about Nazis, but I've actually been told that wiki is communist or some such nonsense. smh

The National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: About this sound Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (help·info), abbreviated NSDAP), commonly referred to in English as the Nazi Party (English: /ˈnɑːtsi, ˈnætsi/),[5] was a far-right political party in Germany that was active between 1920 and 1945, that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party

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The Aspie Corner's picture

@HenryAWallace to get support from workers.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

@The Aspie Corner

I guess including "Workers" in the name wasn't enough.

Belt and suspenders.

But there's no convincing the far right of anything.

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OzoneTom's picture

Allying with Nazis in an effort to undermine a Russian government, and at the same time we provide funds, armament, logistical support for ISIS/ISL and White Helmet terrorists against Syria's government. The latter under cover of a U.S. authorization purportedly intended to combat terrorists.

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the Fascist International. Their contribution to the German war effort was American Dollars, technology, and business expertise. Notable clients of the Dulles Bros. law firm firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, included the largest U.S.-based multinational industrial corporations, including Du Pont chemical, Standard Oil, and Harriman Brown Bros. Among that august group of America's industrial titans was Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker at Harriman, who managed the Silesian-American Corporation account, a holding of the Union Bank Corporation on which Bush and Walker were Directors.

Here's how Wall Street ties together as Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe. As Hitler rose to power, and throughout the 1930s, Sullivan & Cromwell structured numerous Foreign Direct Investment and technology transfer deals that funneled American dollars and patents to Germany.

One such investment and technology transfer deserves special attention. Throughout the 1930s, Harriman's holding, Silesian-American bought up land in the coal seam region of what was then Southern Poland. In 1939, after Hitler made his move to re-annex German territory taken away as reparations to Poland after World War One, Silesia was invaded and reattached back to Germany. Patents for synthetic rubber and oil were transferred by DuPont chemical and Standard Oil while capitalization for the land transfers and development of coal mines required for the synthetic feed material flowed primarily through the Harriman banks and companies.

As World War Two neared, Germany had several severe strategic liabilities. One was that it lacked access to two strategic materials essential to its war effort: rubber and oil. What it did have within nearby reach in southern Poland, was an abundance of coal.

After examining several sites for a new plant to manufacture buna, a type of synthetic rubber essential to the war effort, chemicals manufacturer IG Farben chose a site near the towns of Dwory and Monowice (Monowitz in German), about 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) east of Auschwitz I and 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) east of the town of Oświęcim

This site and the several dozen nearby coal mines just happened to be on land owned by Silesian-American Corporation. Buna rubber and synthetic oil, also produced in quantity at the site, was based on patents shared by joint ventures organized by IG Farben -- the largest munitions maker in Germany -- with its primary American partners, Du Pont and Standard Oil. The camp at Monowitz (also called Monowitz-Buna or Auschwitz III) was constructed and began housing inmates on 30 October 1942, the first concentration camp to be financed and built by private industry. According to the Wollheim Memorial, the petrochemical site erected on American owned land in Silesia was envisioned far more than just a synthetic rubber plant http://www.wollheim-memorial.de/en/was_sollte_fabrik_produzieren

The I.G. Farben plant founded at Auschwitz in April 1940 was more than a factory for making synthetic rubber (Buna), as the common name for the plant—Buna IV—also suggests. In fact, I.G. Auschwitz was designed from the very first to be an extremely complex chemical factory, producing, besides Buna, high-performance fuels (including aviation gasoline and fuel oil for naval use), various plastics, synthetic fibers, stabilizing agents, resins, methanol, nitrogen, and pharmaceuticals. In addition to the Buna rubber and fuel plant, I.G. Farben, along with the Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres), had been planning since summer 1941 to build a third, state-financed, plant complex: the so-called Montan-Anlage. It was intended to supply precursor agents for chemical weapons to the nerve gas plant built by I.G. Farben in Dyhernfurth near Breslau, which started producing the nerve agent tabun in May 1942.

[ . . .]

In 1944 . . . I.G. Auschwitz produced a total of 28,998 tons of methanol, accounting for about 15 percent of Germany’s production for that year.

In addition to the more exotic planned nerve gas production that was reportedly never realized, the Monolitz plant actually operated cheaply with slave labor making an invaluable contribution to the German military. As allied pilots learned first-hand, direct injection of a 50/50 mixture of Methanol improved the performance of Luftwaffe aircraft engines by 25%. http://www.warbirdsresourcegroup.org/LRG/fuels.html

Despite its obvious strategic importance, for reasons that have never been adequately explained the site wasn't bombed until a series of three US air raids during the second half of 1944. When the facility was liberated by Soviet troops in February, 1945, it was found to be largely intact. The Buna plant was the world's largest operating demonstration plant for synthetic rubber and oil production at the time, and operates to this day.

The American contingent of Nazis in Eastern Europe had their headquarters on Wall Street. Much more on this subject, here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2006/12/11/279897/-

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@leveymg
reality that the American people hide from.

Harriman, integral to all of this treason, went from building the German war industry before the war, and maintaining the German war effort for the duration of World War II, to running the Marshall Plan, becoming Sec. of Commerce, and later Governor of New York after the war! Far from being executed for treason, he went on to run the Democratic National Committee and much of our political/foreign policy after the war.

We have a Fascist cell in our government. It has been there since the 1930s and is blatantly treasonous to this day, representing the same exact industrial interests for the same purpose, to destroy organized labor, to destroy democracy, and to oppress labor worldwide.

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a Nazi problem. NATO is a Nazi problem.

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