Glorification of Collaborators | Ukraine | Poland | US Policy | Antisemitism
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WASHINGTON DC—In a major initiative that could blow the lid off Eastern European historical revisionism, 57 members of the US House of Representatives released a major letter condemning Holocaust distortion in Ukraine and Poland. While Poland’s so-called “Holocaust Law” has been widely criticized, Ukraine’s state-sponsored — and far worse — glorification of ultranationalist Nazi collaborators and whitewashing of their murderous World War Two history has largely flown beneath the radar. The same is true of the Baltics and other East European states, as noted in a piece in today’s Jewish Currents.
The nationalist groups and individuals lionized by Ukraine’s Government today — including the OUN-UPA and its leaders such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych — were complicit in the Holocaust as well as the mass murder of between 70,000-100,000 Polish civilians from 1941-1945. The US Congress initiative was led by dauntless California Congressman Ro Khanna, who we are told by one of our sources in Washington pushed the letter through despite intense opposition from the Ukrainian and Polish embassies. Khanna was the same Congressman who ensured a provision banning aid to the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov battalion was part of the recent defense bill. According to an elderly Holocaust survivor in Lviv, recently interviewed by Defending History, “In Ro Khanna, the souls of the six million victims of the Holocaust have found a true friend.”
Follow Defending History on Twitter at @DefendingHistor for more on this story as it develops. The full text of the congressional letter (with the 57 signatures), follows here. Please use the page-turning handles at the upper left to navigate. (or view as PDF).