The most curious thing about last year’s protests that toppled statues of slavers and colonizers is that the monuments of Holocaust perpetrators didn’t even make headlines. Yet a Forward investigation reveals there are hundreds of statues and monuments in the United States and around the world to people who abetted or took part in the murder of Jews and others during the Holocaust. The Nazi collaborators of Central and Eastern Europe weren’t as fastidious at keeping records as their Third Reich allies, which makes it difficult to arrive at a precise number of their victims. As a rough estimate, the Nazi collaborators honored with monuments on U.S. soil represent governments, death squads and paramilitaries that murdered a half million Jews, Poles and Bosnians. Holocaust perpetrators is the correct term for these men and organizations, for they played an integral part in the Final Solution, arresting and deporting Jews to concentration camps or gunning them down in the forests and fields of Eastern Europe (one-third of all Holocaust victims were killed in what’s called the “Holocaust by bullets”). (…) The monuments and the figures they honor stand at a crossroads of fascism and neo-fascism, the losers of WWII and today’s white supremacists who believe they’re on the brink of a global race war. It’s impossible to understand one without understanding the other, which is why tracking the growth of Nazi collaborator monuments is so crucial. These statues don’t just disparage the dead; they warn the living.
via forward: How many monuments honor fascists, Nazis and murderers of Jews? You’ll be shocked.