Originally Posted by
Angela
For the Russians, the epithet "Nazi", doesn't have precisely the same connotations as it does in the West. Most Russians, and most Ukrainians, for that matter, including Zelensky, who is himself Jewish, have no real understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust. The history that was taught behind the Iron Curtain was sanitized in many ways.
What the Russians were indeed taught, however, is that some Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians etc. collaborated with the Nazis when they invaded Russia. That's, I believe, the context. Of course, the fact that they did so is not just because anti-semitism was rampant in Eastern Europe, but because of the heavy hand of the Russian "Empire", whether under the Czars or the Commissars.
Doesn't change any of the points made by Jovialis, which is that little did the Nazis know how much "southern" ancestry they had, how "mixed" they were, and that all their "measurements" were nonsense. If they hadn't been nonsense, Jewish boys wouldn't have been able to pass the tests and hide in the Hitler Youth to escape detection, as indeed did happen.
Their total dependence on physical attributes instead of ancestry is also shown in the fact that they stole Polish children who were blonde and blue-eyed and had the "right" metrics even though they thought of Slavs as untermenschen, and we now know that those children were just as "Slavic" as the brown-haired children. There's a great documentary on you tube about it. The irony is that as the children grew up some of them no longer fit the "standard", but thankfully the death camps were a thing of the past. The despair of these people once they realized what had been done to them, how their families, culture, and history had been stolen from them, is really heartbreaking.
