Cogitation in the Time of War #18 - Still on the topic of Nazism in Ukraine

It's a feeling that I have, from stuff I've seen and read way before Putin's Invasion began (almost 1 month ago), but I think that this sentiment the russians have that Ukraine has a problem with fascism and nazism is an old one; meaning that there are many russians that for a long time are suspicious of ukrainians and thus they fully believe the current narrative that the ukrainian government is controlled by neo-nazis and neo-fascists. And I believe this stems from events of World War II, in the Eastern Front.

After Operation Barbarossa (the 1941 German invasion of Russia), the majority of Hiwis (short for Hilfswilliger, volunteers from the occupied territories in the East integrated into the Wehrmacht) were ukrainians (in total the Hiwis numbered around 600000, during the course of the war). But the russians seems to forget that 4,5 million ukrainians joined the Red Army after Nazi Germany was ousted from Ukraine. In addition to this, and during the Nazi occupation, around 250000 ukrainians served in the Soviet organized resistance, the partisans, that continued to fight the Germans throughout the occupation. Numbers that largely surpass the total of ukrainians that fought together with Germany, and we must not forget that the 600 thousand of hiwis were not just ukrainians and also very important, even though these were officially designated volunteers, many were POWs, and other civilians, that were forced to enlist. No doubt there would be some ukrainians that gladly volunteered to fight against the soviets (for various reasons) and in those, a portion that happily collaborated with the nazis, including in the atrocities they commited.

But this view that the ukrainians were Nazi Germany sympathizers seems to be also shared by many people here in the West. Just as there is an idea that croats tend also to be fascists because of the Croatian Legion (right side in top image) that was very active on the Eastern Front and because croats also never got along very well with serbs who controlled communist Yugoslavia . And for a lot of people out there, those who don't like socialists/communists are fascists...

To me, the most curious thing about people who use these examples of collaboration with Nazi Germany (or with the Japanese), is that they seem to forget that there were also many volunteer units from Western countries and that these units were full of true Nazi believers.

And there's also plenty of images taken at the time of rallies full of supporters and sympathizers of Hitler and the Nazis, occurring in the US and the UK.

Collaborationists were a problem in many occupied countries, from France, through Central Europe and the Baltic, to Russia. We must not continue to judge these countries and their people today for what happened 80 years ago. In a way, it seems that sometimes people are better at forgiving the German people, not forgetting the Italians and other allies (and I think it's very good that we forgive them), than at forgiving others who just reacted to the circumstances of the time.