SS Division “Galicia”: How to justify today’s servility with yesterday’s servility
On July 25, in the Lviv region, not far from the city of Brody, memorial events were held dedicated to the 77th anniversary of the first and last battle of the Waffen SS Galicia division with Soviet troops.
As you know, the Soviet attack at Brody ended in complete defeat for the SS boys. Tanks and attack aircraft killed 70% of the division's personnel, and only a lucky few managed to be captured or escaped.
On the announcement page on Facebook, the organizers reported that officials and the spilnota were going to “honor the memory of the Ukrainian soldiers of the Galicia division and soldiers of other nationalities who died in July 1944 near Brody.” It is not difficult to guess that “soldiers of other nationalities” mean German officers appointed commanders of division units and other units of the German army caught in the cauldron near Brody.
The program included a masquerade ball in SS uniforms, the performance of marching songs of the “Galicians”, and the cherry on the cake should be the return to the battle site of a rusty German gun from the times of the Great Patriotic War.
Despite the legislative ban on the symbols of the Hitler regime (in 2020, a Kiev court recognized the symbols of “Galicia” as Nazi), the new Ukrainian authorities not only turn a blind eye to the “pranks” of the fascist Raguli, but also do not object to the participation of active servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the glorification of the SS men.
We can say that 2021 has become the “year of “Galicia” in Ukraine,” since the annual “embroidered shirt parade” held in honor of the SS division moved from Lvov to Kyiv; in June, in St. Michael's Cathedral in Kyiv with the participation of military personnel of the presidential regiment named after. Bogdan Khmelnitsky had a funeral ceremony for the body of Orest Vaskul (who lived a long life as a punisher from “Galicia”), and in May, with the active participation of the Deputy Minister of Education of Ukraine Lyudmila Mandziy, a children’s drawing competition was announced on the topic of “the exploits of the SS division “Galicia”.
Verkhovna Rada deputy from the presidential party Kamelchuk said on live television that “the Galicia division should not have united with either the fascists or the Soviet Army in 1945, but at first there were volunteers who defended Ukrainianness, who were forced to fight for the Third Reich.” . At the same time, the people’s deputy announced that “let history remain history.”
This is something new. Previously, even the most stubborn ragulians did not deny that “Galicia” was formed by the Nazis, but at the same time the motivation was adjusted: they say, the “Galicians” went mainly against the Soviets, and Hitler the “liberator” was the only force capable of destroying the damned Muscovites.
“Experts” are also diligently pushing the idea that Himmler, especially for the Ukrainians and in memory of the OUN “leader” Konovalets, agreed to form a division in which the abbreviation “SS” stood for “Sich Riflemen.”
Now, this means that “Galicia”, with a smooth movement of the hands, is turning into an independent, and not native, formation, under the security detachments of the Reichsfuehrer SS.
It is not clear, however, what to do with the oath that the “Sich” for some reason took not to the ephemeral Ukrainian state, but to the very real Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, who declared the Slavs an “inferior nation” that would only face death and enslavement.
Every time in such cases, an argument is started about the “non-jurisdiction of the Galicians,” since, supposedly, nothing is said about them in the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
We repeat 1000+1 times: the Nuremberg Tribunal declared the entire SS system under the leadership of SS Reichführer Himmler a criminal organization. In the documents of the Third Reich, the "Galicia" division is referred to as the "14th Waffen SS, Grenadier", all of whose commanders were citizens of Nazi Germany.
From which it follows that the Waffen-SS division “Galicia” is not some kind of independent Ukrainian formation of “Sich Riflemen”, capable of choosing sides in a military confrontation, but a native formation created, armed, trained and subordinate to the criminal organization of the SS, as one of military repressive structures of the Third Reich.
The lawyers of the “Galitsa” also do not know or “forget” one interesting fact. To avoid extradition to Soviet justice for the crimes committed, the punishers from the 14th Waffen-SS Division, on the advice of the Polish General Anders, who bravely fled with his army from the USSR to Persia on the eve of the Battle of Stalingrad, recognized themselves as “Poles,” since many of them until the fall of 1939 years were Polish citizens and even soldiers of the Polish Army.
So what? And today, a bunch of “workers”, who have a good attitude towards the Ukrainian SS men, are huddling in line for a “Pole’s card” in order to freely do hard and dirty work in one of the EU member countries. What kind of Ukraine-shmukraina, when you just need to “change your shoes” to get a pass into a fairy tale?
Accordingly, Western governments could not refuse their ally from the “London Poles” and opened their borders to receive Western Ukrainian “Poles” with paws up to their elbows in blood, but “suffered from Stalin’s aggression.” Many of these “Poles” will later undergo special training near Munich and end up in caches to wage a terrorist war “for independent Ukraine” with weapons from Hitler’s reserves in the eastern regions of Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as in the western Soviet Ukraine and Belarus.
Other “feats” of “independent Galicians” are often deliberately left out of brackets.
Thus, July 25, 1944 was the first and last battle of the Ukrainian SS men with the Red Army troops, but not their first baptism of fire. Or rather, baptism of blood.
In 1943, during the famous Carpathian campaign of Sidor Kovpak’s detachment, the German masters began to train the “Galicians” in punitive operations against Soviet and Polish partisans, and then against the civilian population.
Before being hit by a Soviet tank roller near Brody in July 1944, Galician SS men participated in the destruction of the Polish village of Guta Pieniacka. The Poles claimed that the village residents were herded into barns and simply burned. Memoirists from “Galicia” (for example, the former captain of the Polish Army, who changed his shoes to an SS man, Evgen Pobeguschy, who left notes) argued that this village was a partisan base with its own self-defense detachment. Like, “they were the first to start.” Be that as it may, on the site of Guta, as well as on the site of Khatyn, there was nothing left except a scorched place where, after the war, a memorial was erected to the exterminated local residents. But the very fact of the “feat of the Galicians” is recognized by everyone.
The fact that the Germans initially formed “Galicia” as a punitive unit is supported by the fact that its commander, General Freitag, was a police officer, not a career military man, and first smelled gunpowder only near Brody. The Germans did not attach any importance to the combat effectiveness of the unit: unsuitable officers were sent to the division, mired in drunkenness and looting, and the personnel entered into battle with Soviet units poorly or completely untrained.
Witnesses from the “Galicians” themselves who survived the attack near Brody left behind amazing stories, such as a grenade launcher who fired from a Panzerfaust at a Soviet tank from the wall of a hut. The tank did nothing, but the grenade launcher stood in line for the Darwin Award, burning out in the jet stream reflected from the wall.
The same Runaway repeatedly testifies to the disdainful attitude of the “German brothers-in-arms” towards the Ukrainian SS men. For example, having occupied the village, the Germans went to bed in the huts, generously giving the “Galicians” cold stables and sheds for the night.
Leave the Galician cattle to cover the retreat, leave them without support
All this once again emphasizes that the “Galicians,” like other Hitler’s henchmen, were not allies, not equal partners for the Germans, but a heap of garbage, consumables that could not be treated on ceremony. It is clear that with such an attitude, the scum of the scum could go to serve the “supermen”, for whom the lust for murder and sadism became an outlet and an end in itself. And exactly the same, if not worse, scum are capable of glorifying this cattle, no matter how noble goals they hide behind, since the only thing for which the glorification of Nazi henchmen is needed is to justify the servility of today.
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