In 1941, within months of each other but completely independently of each other two groups of nationalists addressed formal requests to Hitler to liberate their land from oppressors and help them form their own nation-states.
What were these new nation-states going to be called?
The answer is under the fold.
Ukraine and Israel.
Some Ukrainians turned to Hitler, dreaming of gaining independence from Russia this way. I learned this at Holocaust history course, but forgot details.
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Absolutely. So one of these countries was to be called “Ukraine.” What would the second country be?
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Slovakia? Croatia?
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Slovakia became independent in 1938.
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I thought reader el would know. 🙂
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\ I thought reader el would know.
I don’t. I left Ukraine in 7th grade and then in Israeli school studied almost only Israeli history. Those could not be Jews or Palestinians, so I don’t know.
For some reason thought about Hungary, but surely it is not that.
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Actually, they were Jews. This was a radical nationalist organization in Palestine that thought it would make sense of Hitler to get rid of Jews by sending them to a state of their own. They did not know at that time that Hitler’s plan was to exterminate all Jews. They couldn’t have been expected to guess.
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P.S. Hitler was already sending German Jews to former Poland by that time, and Palestinian Jews thought, why Poland, why not Palestine?
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Lithuania
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“The Lithuanians greeted the Germans as liberators from the repressive Soviet rule and hoped[citation needed] that the Germans would re-establish their independence or at least allow some degree of autonomy…” (Quote from J. Otto Pohl’s link above)
The Nazis were too stupidly racist to even try to pick up allies as they moved eastward. (The Germans would have ultimately lost the war, anyway, but they could have delayed the inevitable.)
Years ago, I read the memoir of a Nazi general who had played a major role in Operation Barbarossa. It was written ten years after the war had ended, when nobody at any level of the old Wehrmacht could plausibly deny full knowledge of Nazi atrocities. The general ended his chapter on the eastern compaign with these words, with no visible trace of irony:
“Thus did Germany throw away the chance given Her by fate to liberate the Russian people from Communism.”
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And the worst part is that there is still a very prevalent belief that the Holocaust was mostly caused by anti-Semitic Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians. This is a myth that both the Nazis and Stalin promoted for reasons of their own, and there are still people who defend this idea. Nobody is asking how come Latvians had not a single Jewish pogrom before the Nazis came and then all of a sudden erupted in genocidal violence.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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