You Should Know

Henri Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, the head and prime minister of France’s collaborationist Vichy government which hunted down and deported 67,000 Jews to the concentration camps. In addition to his Broadway plaque, Pétain is honored with 11 streets in the U.S... Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, who have busts in upstate New York and Wisconsin. Bandera headed a faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which allied itself with the Nazis and whose members eagerly participated in the Holocaust. Shukhevych, another Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists figure, was a leader in a Third Reich auxiliary battalion that carried out lethal antisemitic operations in service of the Nazis. Later, Shukhevych commanded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which massacred thousands of Jews and 70,000 to 100,000 Polish civilians. There are additional Ukrainian nationalist busts in New York and Ohio. Andrey Vlasov, the Soviet general who went over to the Nazis and raised an army of over 100,000 men for the Third Reich, has a memorial just outside New York. Dragoljub Mihailović, who led the Serbian Chetnik paramilitary that fought with Nazi Germany and carried out ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, has statues in Cleveland, Milwaukee and two Chicago suburbs. Chicago also has a memorial to Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, who commanded a unit of the Lithuanian Activist Front, a Nazi-allied organization whose members slaughtered Jews across Lithuania in the summer of 1941... You’ll see it in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, where far-right figures use elaborate ceremonies anchored to WWII anniversaries to draw neo-Nazis across Europe; Ukraine, where the rehabilitators of Bandera work to turn the country into a hub of transnational white supremacy; Croatia, where men carrying WWII fascist symbols marched in support of Donald Trump; and France, where the far-right Marine LePen rallies supporters by insisting that France has no responsibility for the Holocaust. You’ll see it in a dozen other nations as well...