Stroll down Broadway in New York City’s Financial District and you’ll see hundreds of black granite plaques honoring every ticker tape parade in city history. Named there are parade honorees like beloved 20th century icons Amelia Earhart and Nelson Mandela, along with some more ignominious figures, particularly Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval.
Pétain and Laval, leaders of the Nazi collaborationist Vichy France, were honored during parades in the 1930s, years before they enacted policies that removed Jews from civil service, seized Jewish property, and deported more than 65,000 Jews to Nazi camps. And yet, the commemorative plaques in New York were not installed until 2004. There are nearly a dozen streets in the US named after Pétain, who was originally honored as a World War I hero.
In 2018, the New York City Council voted against removing the Pétain and Laval plaques to avoid what they called “cultural amnesia.” Meanwhile, Canada renamed Mount Pétain in the Canadian Rockies last year, and France no longer has any memorials to either man.
Pétain and Laval are far from the only Nazi collaborators and fascists to be honored in the US, or abroad for that matter. In January 2021, an investigation by The Forward identified more than 1,500 statues and streets honoring Nazi collaborators around the world. In the US alone, there are at least 37 such monuments.
There are, of course, monuments, plaques, and statues to many other unsavory or disgraced figures in the US, from Confederate generals to colonialists and slave traders. In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, those statues became a focal point as activists either tore them down or worked to have them legally removed. Yet, in most cases, the public art commemorating fascists — and thus whitewashing fascist history — remain in place. And many, like the Pétain and Laval plaques, were installed in recent decades.
Understanding why can help make sense of far-right revisionism, which has lurked below the surface in the US for decades and recently exploded into public view.
-
The Tangled History of Anti-communism and Fascism
Image Credit: Bettmann Archive In the post-World War II era, the Soviet Union — among other communist powers — posed the most significant threat to global capitalism. The US, from government agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency to major universities, worked quickly to integrate and employ former Nazi collaborators in the ensuing Cold War. Operation Paperclip, as it was known, imported at least 1,600 scientists, engineers, and officials for government employment.
The most famous of these imports was leading Nazi rocket scientist Dr. Wernher Von Braun, who served as director of the Marshall Space Flight Center and chief architect of the Saturn V vehicle, which launched the Apollo spacecraft. Similarly, Kurt H. Debus, the first director of NASA’s Launch Operations Center, worked on the Nazi V-2 missiles that were used against Allied forces.
Multiple military posts and cultural centers are named after Von Braun, and the state-owned Davidson Center for Space Exploration in Alabama prominently displays a quote of his. He even partnered with Disney on a film series popularizing space travel.
While many of those commemorated came from Operation Paperclip, others were nationalist icons of Eastern European diasporas who allied with the Third Reich during their campaigns for independence and later rebranded as anti-Soviet “freedom fighters.” Belarusians and Estonians involved in Nazi-created puppet regimes, for example, received asylum in Western countries, which helped them restore their reputations. To this day, monuments in their name populate public monuments and memorials at Eastern European Orthodox churches.
In South River, New Jersey, the Belarusian Central Council monument beside Saint Euphrosynia Orthodox Church displays a large iron cross to honor the government body that sought independence for Belarus during Nazi occupation. On its back, however, the statue lists names of militiamen from the Byelorussian Home Defence (BHD). This mostly volunteer battalion of nationalists slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles in the mid-1940s.
A banner of red and white stripes adorns the BCC statue, correlating to the administration’s flag and insignia. At center, its official seal shows a lone knight on horseback, evoking fascist appropriation of medieval symbolism. According to author Perry Biddiscombe, the Nazis viewed Belarus as a “racially inferior backwater” and recruited the BHD for their dirty work. As they started losing ground, though, the Nazis allowed BHD members to join the Schutzstaffel (SS). When the Soviet Army forced them to retreat, they fled to Berlin and became a government-in-exile.
Journalist Lev Golinkin, who led the Forward investigation, told ARTnews that monuments like this insidiously warp the public’s historical understanding.
“This is a bit more subtle compared to typical Holocaust distortion, which argues that it never happened,” Golinkin said. “These collaborators actually co-opted the Holocaust — instead of denying it, they claimed to be victims themselves. Over time, I noticed the same patterns and realized that so few people are paying attention because these countries are American allies, either in the European Union or North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so they often get a pass.”
Golinkin has continued to update the Forward’s monument database, particularly as opposition grows. Last December, for example, Belgium removed a monument honoring Latvian SS officers after widespread protests and a panel of historians deemed it inappropriate.
-
Partisan Heroes or Nazi Collaborators?
Image Credit: Lithuanian Foreign Ministry Many monuments in both the US and Europe honor nationalist icons involved in partisan struggles.
In 2019, the town of Lemont, Illinois installed a statue honoring Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, who led the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) on an anti-Soviet campaign with Hitler’s army. The LAF murdered thousands of Lithuanian Jews in June 1941 during the early period of the Nazi invasion.
In 2017, the Simon Wiesenthal Center urged the Lithuanian parliament to avoid honoring Ramanauskas-Vanagas for that reason, but the Lithuanian foreign ministry responded by accusing them of disseminating Russian propaganda. While Ramanauskas-Vanagas may not have been directly connected to that massacre, the Weisenthal Center, and others, have argued that his leadership during that period should be disqualifying.
Created by late sculptor Jonas Jagèla, who designed a similar monument to Ramanauskas-Vagas in the Lithuanian town of Lazdijai, the thin statue resembles a leafless tree with rows of jagged stone branches. Critics have speculated that this is a subtle reference to the Forest Brothers, a partisan militia of Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians who also collaborated with the Nazis. In 2017, NATO produced a video honoring the Forest Brothers but quickly deleted it after public outcry.
For Golinkin, a Ukrainian-Jew working to untangle the legacy of far-right nationalist leader Stepan Bandera (another Nazi collaborator icon uplifted by NATO), the monuments represent the US government’s feigned ignorance to far-right hate groups.
“The collaborators themselves rewrote histories and published books arguing that they actually saved Jews and were victims of Nazis,” Golinkin said. “They created entire legends and built monuments to themselves, and now diaspora communities in the US teach their children that they were heroes.”
-
The Difference between Germany and the US
Image Credit: Photo by JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images The proliferation of these monuments in the US speaks to historical amnesia and revisionism. Germany, by contrast, prohibits Holocaust denial and Nazi iconography, while government officials speak candidly about Nazi Germany, as well as the Soviet Union army’s war-time sacrifices.
In her 2019 book, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, philosopher Susan Neiman argued that German society has largely accepted responsibility for past transgressions, unlike Americans today.
“The Germans know, as many Americans do not, that the war was won at Stalingrad and that 27 million Soviet citizens died in the fight against the Wehrmacht,” Neiman told ARTnews. “Among decent Germans who want to acknowledge their country’s crimes, there is a strong sense of guilt for the war against the Soviet Union.”
To be sure, Germany’s most celebrated art exhibition, documenta, was co-founded by a former SS officer, and many of Hitler’s “Divinely Gifted” artists still have their own large-scale sculptures displayed in public spaces. Yet older generations of Germans can still recall how the German Democratic Republic (GDR) influenced policy during reunification. Rather than comparing Nazism with Soviet communism, as US intellectuals often do, there is greater awareness of the Third Reich’s total assault on racial and political differences.
“As repressive as that time was, communism and socialism had been legitimate political positions a short while before, and most people knew Americans who had taken those positions,” Neiman added. “We know very little about this period today. In the popular imagination, Nazism is equivalent to antisemitism, whereas the Nazis were at least as anticommunist as they were antisemitic.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, and Putin’s subsequent justification of the war as necessary to rid Ukraine of “Nazis,” has further muddied public discourse. In the US, monuments installed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN) have been misconstrued as representing Ukrainian democracy. The OUN, however, openly declared its intent to “work closely with National-Socialist Greater Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.”
Curiously, even Russian historical figures are appraised for Axis allegiances in the US.
In Nanuet, New York, a monument honors Andrey Vlasov, a Soviet general who defected to Nazi Germany during the war. Vlasov co-founded the Russian Liberation Army, which collaborated with the Third Reich and helped suppress the Warsaw Uprising. The monument appears beside an Orthodox convent founded by some of the last Tsarist refugees — largely white Russians who fled during the October Revolution. Several members of the royal family are still buried there after rebranding as anti-communists.
-
Public Efforts to Remove Monuments Have Succeeded
Image Credit: Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images While activist efforts since 2020 have focused on Confederate figures, some progress has been made on fascist-associated public art.
In June 2021, a rock sculpture dedicated to conservationist Madison Grant was removed from Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in California following a letter signed by more than 200 academics. Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race espoused eugenicist notions of racial superiority, leading Hitler to champion his work.
That decision was sparked by California’s Reexamining Our Past Initiative. Started in the wake of the George Floyd protests, the program re-examines names, titles, and public artworks associated with California state parks to foster more inclusive public spaces, exemplifying what cultural organizations can accomplish in the short term.
As Marnin Robbins, California State Parks’ district interpretive program manager, told the North Coast Journal last year, the 19,000-ton boulder monument was designed as “an attempt by those who knew [Grant] to rehab his reputation” as a conservationist and anthropologist.
“He was none of those things,” Robbins said. “He was a socialite, a wealthy individual who had some powerful friends.”