Many peoples were forced by circumstances to fight alongside people they didn’t like.
He volunteered to join the SS. Nobody was forced to join the fucking SS. Did you mean to say “really wanted to fight alongside”, and what’s your evidence for “people they didn’t like”?
SS is not the same as Waffen-SS. The Waffen-SS again had foreign legions. These Waffen-SS foreign legions were volunteers at first, later a mixture of volunteers, voluntolds, conscripts and in the end pressured and/or forced conscripts.
I don’t know about the individual motives of the person in question. But the Waffen-SS foreign legions are too much of a mixed bag to generalize.
In Eastern Europe many joined the Waffen-SS foreign legions to fight against the occupation of their countries by the Soviets. Their values and goals didn’t necessarily align with those of the Nazis, except that they had a common enemy.
Edit: The Waffen-SS was part of the German war machine and they did commit plenty of war crimes. I was commenting to differentiate between two different criminal organizations here (SS/Waffen-SS) and to explain how the recruitment changed as the war went on. It was a mistake on my part to omit this, given the sensibility of the topic. Please do not take my comment as an attempt at whitewashing the numerous crimes of various Waffen-SS units.
My hot take is that if you sell your soul to the Nazis to fight for independence, you should be dealt with like a Nazi.
Ah you’re right, there were also conscripts in some Waffen-SS units. Looks like this guy volunteered though, as it says in the article:
A blog by an association of its veterans, called “Combatant News” in Ukrainian, includes an autobiographical entry by a Yaroslav Hunka that says he volunteered to join the division in 1943 and several photographs of him during the war. The captions say the pictures show Hunka during SS artillery training in Munich in December 1943 and in Neuhammer (now Świętoszów), Poland, the site of Himmler’s visit.
In posts to the blog dated 2011 and 2010, Hunka describes 1941 to 1943 as the happiest years of his life and compares the veterans of his unit, who were scattered across the world, to Jews.
I guess they couldn’t confirm that this is definitely that same Yaroslav Hunka, though that would be some coincidence. Not only did he volunteer, he loved it. And what even is that comparison? That doesn’t sound like a person who has learned anything.
Their values and goals didn’t necessarily align with those of the Nazis, other than they had a common enemy.
You call it “not necessarily aligned, other than”. I call it very much aligned. The difference in opinion can’t be that big or important if they’re willing to kill and die under Nazi orders.
Oof, yeah. That puts a kink in it.
Tbh, maybe we should just ask “Does (insert ideology here) tell me to kill the preteen (or for recent events, anyone under the age of majority) children of the supposedly evil people?” and if the answer is yes or “not specifically but I have no recourse if they suddenly tell me to kill kids” then (insert ideology here) is evil.
TL;DR - Not all Nazis
In any case they weren’t formally accused of war crimes, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t committing atrocities in Poland
