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Following controversy, all names will be left off Canadian monument to ‘victims of communism’
(www.theartnewspaper.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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Those Eastern European countries faced the ultimate rock-and-a-hard-place situation; side with the Nazis, side with Stalin, or get crushed by both (and whichever one you "sided" with wouldn't treat you particularly well either). And they had to pick sides without knowing what the judgment of history would be.
Honestly, a rare situation where some Nazi collaborators deserve an "it was complicated" footnote, IMO. Though that's a bit much to ask for on a stone monument like this.
It was really not that hard a choice. People seem to forget the Nazis murdered millions of Slavs.
Re-quoting from my comment:
Emphasis added. They were making the choice without the benefit of that Wikipedia page from 2025 to refer to.
And Stalin was right up there with Hitler in terms of total kill-count, which is why it was a rock-and-a-hard-place situation. There was no good option available.
When one option is live under a brutal dictator and the other option is have your ethnicity wiped off the face of the Earth, there isn't really an option, is there? The German attempt to eliminate the Slavs was not theoretical. They were massacring people in territories they occupied throughout the war. Even the vast majority of Ukrainians, who had more reason than most to hate the USSR, still picked up arms for them against the Nazis because the Nazis were just that bad.
Basically every death in the European Theatre of WW2 can be directly blamed on Hitler and the Nazis for starting the whole thing so I have trouble believing this. I don't know if you heard but that was a lot of people.
You're still missing the point. The people living there, at that time, didn't know what those options would ultimately lead to. They didn't have the benefit of hindsight. And even if they did, they were right there at that moment in time, having to make decisions that would determine if they survived one more day.
Poor Stalin, I guess he had absolutely no choice in all the massacring that he did. Hitler made him do it.
I recently read my German grandma's memoirs. During the war she signed up to help in Nazi occupied Minsk. Of course for the Nazis "help" meant ensuring the local newspaper printed propaganda. And beforehand they were instructed to be harsh with the "dumb Russians".
She once got into trouble because one serial story in the newspaper tended towards a revolutionary message. Apparently the translator didn't care for the story so he stopped reading it and just let it get printed as he received it. At least that was his official excuse.
Anyways, of course she grew closer to some of the locals. And of course not every single one of them could help with sabotaging the occupiers. So it was extra sad when she eventually had to flee from the approaching Russian army (a day after the officers loudly proclaimed at a Nazi party that they were about to win the war) and had to live with the knowledge that the Russian's she left behind were all likely to be executed as collaborators.
She couldn't take them with her because the Nazis would likely kill them for being Russian. Or at the very least put them into concentration camps. And she already knew they were bad, just not how bad.
My dad had a Latvian friend in his youth, and dad would tell me about how sometimes when they'd had a bit much to drink he'd tell stories about fighting on the front lines in Latvia. For the Germans, against the Russians. He was by absolutely no means a Nazi supporter, but he had to weigh the options and try to figure out which one was less likely to end with him and his family lying dead in a ditch somewhere.
It really sucks that Latvia didn't regain independence until 1991. I hope he lived long enough to see that.