Arno Klarsfeld Blasts Glorification of Hitler Collaborators in Ukraine

Arno Klarsfeld is the son of well-known “nazi hunters” Serge and Beate Klarsfeld. In a column published by the French weekly Le Point on Sept. 11, he points to a reality that is hysterically denied by Western and NATO leaders, who are using Ukraine to try and crush Russia. Our newsletter, on the contrary, has consistently reported on the neo-nazi and fascist movements in Ukraine, including by publishing as of Spring 2014 the devastating exposes of Natalia Vitrenko, the head of the Ukrainian Socialist Progressive Party and a friend of the Schiller Institute (available on https://larouchepub.com/).

Arno Klarsfeld’s column begins by noting that if the Ukrainians “want to be part of the European Union family, they must stop glorifying the Ukrainian nationalists who were presented as heroes and who collaborated with the Nazis and assisted them in the extermination of tens of thousands of Jewish families in Ukraine.”

He continues: “One of the first actions of the Kiev municipality after the 2014 revolution was to change the name of the long avenue leading to the site of Babi Yar from ‘Moscow Avenue’ to ‘Bandera Avenue’, whose followers assisted the Nazis in the extermination of more than 30,000 Jewish men, women, and children in the Babi Yar ravine on September 29-30, 1941, when German troops accompanied by the Einsatzgruppen entered Kiev.

“The Kiev District Administrative Court had ordered the municipality to cancel renaming two main streets after Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, another mass murderer of Jews, and after whom a stadium in the large city of Ternopil is named. But the mayor of Kiev, Vitaly Klitschko, appealed the decision and the appeals court ruled in his favor….

“In Lviv, as recently as two years ago, hundreds of men marched in the SS uniforms of Ukrainian collaborators at an event approved by the city. In recent years, at least three Ukrainian municipalities have unveiled statues to Bandera’s deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, who during the Holocaust approved ‘exterminating’ the Jews. The motto of that Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with Bandera’s Nazis posted in the streets of Kiev in 1941 was: ‘Your enemies are Russia, Poland, and the Yids.’…

“It is highly inappropriate that the main arteries leading to the site of the massacres and used by European leaders who come to support Ukraine are named after such monsters. It is completely immoral that such men are glorified. It is quite abnormal that no one speaks about it in the European instances when Ukraine has applied for membership and the process (long, perhaps) has been approved.”

His conclusion: “To let the Ukraine continue unchallenged to glorify those Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis against the Soviets and so horribly massacred so many Jewish families would ultimately mean that Hitler was right to see the Russians as the true enemies of the West, and that his preemptive attack was justified. As for the Jews, they would be collateral victims of the convulsions of history. Europe and the European Union were built on the victory over Nazism. It must remember this.”

The column by Arno Klarsfeld in Le Point is available here.