For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage.

Found innocent?

You’re whitewashing and apologizing for nazis:

Similar memorials have also generated outcry in Canada. Jared McBride, a UCLA historian of Eastern Europe, said that within the Ukrainian diaspora, many believe that the soldiers allied with the Nazis with noble intentions.

But it is a view that he said scholars view widely as historical revisionism.

“The Nazi regime was a genocidal regime,” McBride said. “This idea of parsing these things out — that ‘We were the good SS division,’ or ‘The good police unit,’ or ‘The good mobile death battalion’ — is not the strongest of arguments.”

John-Paul Himka, a retired history professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and an expert on Ukrainian history, said SS Galizien had “very little to do with the Holocaust” since it was not formed until 1943 and first saw combat the following year. But, Himka said, the unit was also tied to other war crimes during World War II.

“Galizien fought with the Germans against the Soviets; it helped suppress the Slovak uprising; it was involved in atrocities against Poles and Slovaks; it welcomed into its ranks many perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing against the Polish population and of the Holocaust; it propagated antisemitism and seems to have been involved in a roundup of Jews in Brody in 1944,” Himka said by email. “I cannot accept the notion that they were ‘freedom fighters.’”