The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal found all SS members to be war criminals who committed crimes against humanity. We then have to ask: Why is Marti Ahtisaari honoring and commemorating war criminals? These Finnish Nazi SS troops were involved in the Holocaust and in genocide. Why isn’t this even news? Why doesn’t Marti Ahtisaari know what the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal held regarding the Waffen SS? Why is he so ignorant or indifferent? […]
In 1999, when he was the President of Finland, Marti Ahtisaari’s government wanted to honor and to commemorate the 3,000 Finnish Nazi Waffen SS volunteers that served in Heinrich Himmler’s SS. Why would any government, indeed, why would anyone, want to honor and commemorate SS troops? Why would anyone want to honor and commemorate Nazis and Nazism? This is the question that has remained unanswered in the US and Western media about Marti Ahtisaari. As a sock puppet for the US, NATO, and EU, Ahtisaari’s role in honoring and commemorating the Nazi Waffen SS has been suppressed. As a Chairman Emeritus of ICG he is regarded as part of the globalist elite. His government’s honoring of Finnish Nazi SS troops is a controversial subject that did not register on the radar screen of the mainstream media.
How substantial was the connection between Marti Ahtisaari’s Finland and Nazi Germany? What role did Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler play in Finland? Were the 3,000 Finnish volunteers in the Waffen SS just regular soldiers or were they Nazi shock troops who had sworn their allegiance to Adolf Hitler and to Nazism? These are questions that the mainstream media will not address. They are, nevertheless, meaningful questions that will help us to understand Marti Ahtisaari’s position on Kosovo.
The Finnish SS troops swore a personal oath to the Supreme Commander “Hitler” of the German Armed Forces. The Finnish government recruited these Finnish SS troops. The recruitment was done in secret. The formation of the Finnish Waffen SS unit was organized on March, 1941, three months before the German invasion of the USSR. There was pre-meditation, and planning. Finland was engaged in an unprovoked act of aggression with Finnish ally Nazi Germany. Finland was not occupied by Nazi Germany. Finland allowed Germany to launch land, sea, and air attacks against the Soviet Union from bases in Finland. In other words, the Finnish government and the Finnish people freely chose or decided to be allies with Adolf Hitler and with Nazi Germany.
The name of the formation that was created was the Finnishe Freiwillige Battaillon der Waffen SS, the Finnish Volunteer Battalion of the Waffen SS. The Finnish Nazi SS troops were issued their own national insignia. The Finnish Army even had its own version of the swastika, which was blue in color and discarded after World War II. The secret SS recruitment in Finland went under the name Engineer Bureau “Ratas”. The Finnish recruits came from Helsinki, the capital, where 1,200 were assembled. The Finnish troops were sent to Nazi Germany for training, where they joined several Nazi Waffen SS formations: The 5th SS Division Wiking, the SS Freiwilligen Battalion “Nordost”, their own Finnish Waffen SS unit, and the II SS Regiment “Nordland”, which was part of the Wiking SS Division.
The Finnish Freiwillige Battalion der Waffen SS consisted of three infantry companies and one motorized company and was commanded by German SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Hans Collani. In total, approximately 3,000 Finnish troops were part of SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen SS.
The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal found all SS members to be war criminals who committed crimes against humanity. We then have to ask: Why is Marti Ahtisaari honoring and commemorating war criminals? These Finnish Nazi SS troops were involved in the Holocaust and in genocide. Why isn’t this even news? Why doesn’t Marti Ahtisaari know what the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal held regarding the Waffen SS? Why is he so ignorant or indifferent?
The Finnish rationalization is that Finnish Nazi Waffen SS troops were just regular soldiers. They did nothing wrong. They did swear an oath to Adolf Hitler. They were part of Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen SS, the organization responsible for the Holocaust and the genocide committed against Jews and Gypsies. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal did find all SS members to be war criminals. Nevertheless, the Finnish rationale is that they were just regular soldiers. This is a salient case of self-delusion and self-interested rationalization that approaches psychopathology. There is almost a total disconnect here with reality as we know it.
What are the facts?
Finland was an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II, part of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Operation Barbarossa. On June 4, 1942, Adolf Hitler made a visit to Finland to coordinate joint efforts by Finland and Nazi Germany to launch renewed attacks against the Soviet Union. The occasion was the 75th birthday of Finnish commander in chief Carl Mannerheim, a former decorated Russian commander. Hitler flew to the Immola air base on a Focke-Wulf FW-200 Condor flown by his personal pilot, SS Gruppenfuehrer Hans Baur. Joining Hitler on the mission was Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the German Military Command. Hitler met with Finnish President Risto Ryti and with Finnish and German military commanders, including German General Eduard Dietl, the commander of German forces in Finland.
Hitler gave Mannerheim a gift of three Steyr-Daimler 1500 A Kommandeurwagen field cars. Hitler personally thanked Mannerheim for Finnish support of Operation Barbarossa.
Finnish “historiography” and Finnish “historians” claim that Mannerheim was not particularly fond of Adolf Hitler or Nazism. But Mannerheim was fond enough of Hitler and Nazism to visit Hitler and Nazi Germany in late June, 1942 on an official state visit. Mannerheim would himself visit Nazi Germany in the summer of 1942 on an official visit where he met with Hitler again and Hermann Goering, the chief of the German Air Force or Luftwaffe, in the presence of Himmler, Alfred Jodl, and Franz Halder, as broadcast in the July 8, 1942 Die Deutsche Wochenschau newsreel. Mannerheim went hunting with Goering. Heinrich Himmler would also visit Finland in 1942 to convince Finland to deport its Jews to the concentration camps.
US Secretary of State Cordell Hull warned the Finnish government that they risked war with the US by the Finnish alliance with Adolf Hitler. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote Mannerheim a letter which threatened him with prosecution after the war for war crimes: “I wish I could convince Your Excellency that we are going to beat the Nazis. I feel far more confident than in 1917 or 1918. It would be most painful to the many friends of your country in England if Finland found herself in the dock with the guilty and defeated Nazis.” Britain, like the US, was contemplating declaring war against Finland. Britain eventually declared war against Finland on December 6, 1941, followed by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The US broke off diplomatic relations with Finland. Mannerheim ignored the warnings and continued to ally with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Finland did not have to pay for its alliance with Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler after World War II. The history of Finland, an enemy combatant during the war, was largely whitewashed and distorted. Not many people are aware of the actual role Finland played during World War II. Marti Ahtisaari was banking on this widespread ignorance.
Nazi Germany had 200,000 troops in Finland. Finnish troops participated in the siege of Leningrad that resulted in the deaths of an estimated over one million Russian civilians. Ironically, the Murmansk and the Leningrad fronts were the two Russian fronts that held during Operation Barbarossa and where the Russians achieved spectacular and brilliant military successes. There were, however, large civilian casualties, which Finland must bear some historical responsibility for. But Ahtisaari and the Finnish government have never acknowledged their role in these deaths, let alone have they made any apology for them. Those lives do not matter.
The Finnish Waffen SS troops fought fiercely and fanatically for Heinrich Himmler. Himmler himself noted that the Finnish Nazi SS troops were among the best Nazi soldiers. Gottlob Berger, the head of the SS Main Office who coordinated recruiting for the Waffen SS, praised the determination and commitment of Finnish Nazi SS troops in support of Nazism. The Finnish SS troops fought as the advance, shock guard in the German assault on the Ukraine and in the Caucasus. It was the 256 Finnish Nazi SS troops killed during this engagement that Marti Ahtisaari’s government wanted to honor and commemorate in 1999.
Why would Marti Ahtisaari’s government want to honor these Nazi SS war criminals? It is all in how you see the question. For Marti Ahtisaari and the Finnish government, these “alleged” Nazi SS war criminals did nothing wrong. One person’s war criminal is another person’s war hero.
Is this based in any rationality or logic? Isn’t this revisionism and moral relativism of the worst sort? What kind of moral calculus is Marti Ahtisaari guided by? It is a delusional psychopathology that reflects no moral grounding. It is an amoral and unethical posture. What kind of morality is based in subjective self-interest? Marti Ahtisaari can decide what is right or wrong based solely on considerations of self-interest? What kind of morality is that? It is no morality at all. It shows a nihilistic contempt for morality and reason and the rule of law.
This tells us everything we need to know about Marti Ahtisaari. His position on Kosovo should not surprise anyone.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
A Father of the NationUkraine is an East European territory which was originally forming a western part of the Russian Empire from the mid-17th century. That is a present-day independent state and the separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s theory-model of the “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity. According to Anderson, the nation is an abstract and firstly subjective social construction that defy simple, objective definition yet has been for the last two centuries the crucial basis of conflict in world politics and international relations, through the assertion of ...
During the 1990s, the United States planned to break up Yugoslavia and build America’s largest military base in Kosovo (Camp Bondsteel) a strategic location giving the US access to the oil-rich Caspian Sea, which would also threaten Russia’s defence capabilities. In order to achieve their goals, the CIA imported fighters from Afghanistan who went on a rampage of killing and destruction. A mass media disinformation campaign blamed a proportion of the crimes of the CIA-backed fighters on their victims – mostly Serbs.Between 1992 and 1995, CIA terrorists murdered 2383 Serbs in Srebrenica. When the Bosnian Serb army finally arrived in ...
Vladimir Putin has harmed no American. Russia has not stood in the way of any American’s dream. As for the billionaires though, those American and British money bags, the Russians are posing an insurmountable hurdle for their investments. And we all know nothing can stand in the way of their progress. Unfortunately for the human race, mediocrity cannot rule either. Here is a prophesy as real as any newsreel you will view today, the “end all” conclusion for American “exceptionalism”.Do you know where Crimea is? Seriously now, a gaff by presidential hopeful Gary Johnson the other day proved once and ...
The corporate media don’t like Donald Trump. They used to like him a lot; in fact, Big Business Media are responsible for making this minor multi-millionaire into a household name. But Trump is on their hit list, nowadays, because the Republican presidential candidate insists on telling his own lies, rather than sticking to the list of official lies parroted by corporate media every minute of every day.Donald Trump told a really “HUGE” – as he would put it – lie when he claimed to have watched thousands of Muslims cheering in Jersey City, New Jersey, as the World Trade Center ...
IntroductionThe aim of this article is to shed new light on the question of how the configuration of post-war Central and South-East Europe was shaped during WWII by the USSR through its relations with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (the CPY). Relationships between the CPY and the Soviet Union in 1941−1945 depended on the concrete military situation in Europe, and on the diplomatic relationships between the Soviet Union and the other members of the anti-fascist Alliance. For that reason, the Soviet Union and the CPY were cooperating in two directions during WWII. The concrete military situation in the battleground of ...
Documentary films about ex-Yugoslavia not seen on global corporate mass-media news. For instance:US documentary movie "RETLINES" with English subtitle from 1991 about Vatican smuggling Croat Nazi Ustashi to South America in 1945Ratlines were a system of escape routes for Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe at the end of World War II. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in South America, particularly Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile. Other destinations included the United States and perhaps Canada and the Middle East. There were two primary routes: the first went from Germany to Spain, then Argentina; the second from Germany ...
The US has been threatening Iran for more than 20 years. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran. This posting which includes selected articles from our archives was originally published by Global Research 12 years ago in May 2005. In the wake of the war on Iraq (2003), the Bush administration officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. Bush’s National Security doctrine contained in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a continuation of Clinton’s “strategy of ...
We hear that Kosovo and Metohija’s frozen conflict is not conducive to Serbia’s interests, but nobody notes that Serbia stands to lose even more if negotiations under EU auspices continue under the same pattern and trend. Judging by the ongoing course wherein Serbia has been only delivering concessions and Prishtina’s clique only gaining control over the whole Province, Serbia may end up delivering irrevocably all her rights and interests and receiving nothing in return.Except promises of EU membership by 2027 as “indicative” year! Rarely is heard that such a EU/USA deal “territory (of Kosovo and Metohija) for EU membership” would ...
The paradox of the current global crisis is that for the last five years, all relatively responsible and independent nations have made tremendous efforts to save the United States from the financial, economic, military, and political disaster that looms ahead. And this is all despite Washington’s equally systematic moves to destabilize the world order, rightly known as the Pax Americana (“American peace”).Since policy is not a zero-sum game, i.e., one participant’s loss does not necessarily entail a gain for another, this paradox has a logical explanation. A crisis erupts within any system when there is a discrepancy between its internal ...
The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA. (1)CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: ...
The Balkan Peninsula together with the region of South-East Europe historically has been one of the most important focal points of the Russian foreign policy, cultural influences and attempts to spread an ideology of the Orthodox solidarity and the Slavic reciprocity.[1] These ideas are common to almost all trends of the Russian public life in the past and today.After Russia lost the Great Crimean War of 1853–1856 she intensified its cultural influence in the region of the South-East Europe for the purposes of beating the Habsburg (the Roman-Catholic) rivalry and to spread an idea of the Pan-Slavism in this part ...
SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is elating after his right-wing Likud Party secured a firm victory in the Israeli elections on March 17. It was a very close race against the Zionist Union Party, led by Isaac Herzog. Our next guest, Shir Hever, in an interview he did with us last month, predicted that Prime Minister Netanyahu would win in spite of many strikes against him at the time. So, defying election polls leading up to the election, Prime Minister Netanyahu has ...
The recent arrest of 40 alleged Islamic radicals in Kosovo together with the arrest of one of the Kosovo Imams suspected of being an inspirer of jihad in the region brought serious questions about the radicalisation of Islam and terrorism in Kosovo, in the Balkans and in Europe. Even though the issue of Kosovo Albanian volunteers or mercenaries fighting alongside the anti-Bashar forces in Syria and supporting the radical leadership of the Islamic State (earlier the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has been present in the public debate in Kosovo for at least a year, the debate itself was ...
As the Second World War advanced from its early stages, the United States was assessing which sections of the earth it would hold conquest over. American planners had to remain patient, however. A seemingly endless string of conquests for the Nazis had astonished the world – particularly those in the US – and led to Adolf Hitler being crowned as “the new Napoleon”.In the summer of 1942, under Hitler’s domineering command of the military, the Germans controlled vast swathes of Europe – from Warsaw to Oslo to Paris, and eastwards onto Athens, Kiev and Sevastopol. It was one major victory ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
Louis XVI needed a revolution, Napoleon needed two historic military defeats, the Spanish Empire in the New World needed multiple revolutions, the Russian Czar needed a communist revolution, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires needed World War I, Nazi Germany needed World War II, Imperial Japan needed two atomic bombs, the Portuguese Empire in Africa needed a military coup at home, the Soviet Empire needed Mikhail Gorbachev … What will the American Empire need?I don’t believe anyone will consciously launch World War III. The situation now is more like the eve of World War I, when great powers were armed and ...
The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,by the Italian Committee No War No NATODocumentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO, Florence, April 7, 20191. The operation conducted by the USA and NATO in Ukraine began in 1991 after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Warsaw Pact, which was a part of the Soviet Union, also disintegrated. The United States and its European allies moved immediately to take full advantage of the new geopolitical situation.2. Ukraine – whose territory acts as a buffer between NATO and Russia and is crossed by energy corridors between Russia and the ...
The 2015 dataOrigins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
Fourteen years ago the U.S. Government de-classified the now famous “La Vista Report” of May 15, 1947, a top-secret U.S. Army Intelligence report documenting the Vatican’s role in aiding the escape of numerous high-ranking Nazi war criminals, among them Ante Pavelic, fascist leader of wartime Croatia; Franz Stangel, Commander of Treblinka; Eduard Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga”; Klaus Barbie, “the Butcher of Lyon”; SS General Walter Rauff, inventor of the mobile gas truck; Adolf Eichmann, “architect of the Holocaust”; and tens of thousands of others. Writing about the document prior to its release, internationally renowned Nazi hunter Charles R. Allen ...
Unless We Learn Our History, We’re Doomed to Repeat ItPreface: I am a patriotic American who loves my country. I was born here, and lived here my entire life.So why do I frequently point out America’s warts? Because – as the Founding Fathers and Supreme Court judges have explained – we can only make America better if we honestly examine her shortcomings. After all:“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”Only when Americans can honestly look at our weaknesses can we become stronger. If we fail to do so, history will repeat …While Americans rightly condemn the Nazis as monstrous people, ...