76 years ago today volunteer Ukrainian auxiliaries collaborated with cross-border Hungarian fascist sympathizers and German death squads to finish the ethnic cleansing of Kamianets-Podilskyi. A city that stands in part of the world more aptly known as Ruthenia or Galicia: now part of southwestern Ukraine. And while most of this massacre’s 23,600 dead were marched there from Hungary, the SS einsatzgruppen and local executioners also seized the opportunity to make the townsfolk happy by making their city judenfrei.

1 Valy street, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Khmelnitskyi oblast, Ukraine

So now when you visit this picturesque little shitburg tucked into rural nowhere in the northern Carpathian rim, there’s no sign that anything ever happened there except for an ineffably ominous star of David graffito tucked away on a trashcan at the edge of town near a new restaurant in the old structure that once housed the synagogue. A striking contempt and disregard that shocks even the few provincials who know.

Local tourism, history, and culture are utterly bereft of any references to this second largest Ukrainian auxiliary SS action after the more infamous Babi Yar mass shootings in Kyiv; no one cares. Not even on the anniversary of the horror that happened there in 1941. Because no jews are left. In two days, citizens killed 16,000 Hungarians and almost 8,000 of their own neighbors.

Witnesses gleefully recount that perpetrators didn’t even make the most meager attempts to conceal what they were doing. Hungarian jews unsubtly marched straight through the city center in front of a rabid catholic mob chanting medieval slurs to join fellow local victims en route to their deaths en masse at some nearby killing field, of which only the most specialized tours are now comprised. It’s hard to find this history. And that’s troubling.

Early 1940s: somewhere in the nazi-occupied Soviet Union.

Because it wasn’t antiseptic or clinical; it was aryan wannabes from the three ethnicities who most vigorously embraced indo-european ancestral supremacy shooting point blank into a writhing mass of women and children. At such close range that the victims’ blood, brains, bone, and gore often blew back into their executioners’ faces.

Unknown. If anyone does, please share.

When SS commander Himmler attended one such death squad action in occupied Poland and was spattered with some baby’s skull, witnesses assert that he vomited and returned to Berlin firmly evangelized that the holocaust must be mechanized. Because good, ole, wholesome German boys simply wouldn’t be able to continue doing this; not even to the untermenschen.

1942: Rivne. Poland until 1939. Germany until 1944. Soviet Union until 1991. Now Ukraine.

If Nuremberg is any indication, or we could predict futurecrime and thoughtcrime like orwellian and dystopian sci-fi, any vicious neowhateverthefucks who moronically insist on their right to wave the flags of these warcrimes today — be they swastikas, wulfsangels, black suns, or some other obscure rune — glorify their deeds, revere this history, or seek to recreate it would deserve to die. But that would be wrong. Yet to paraphrase what LBJ ostensibly said the night before he let the deep state kill JFK: “Might not be a threat, but a promise.”

Because as those prone to the 2nd amendment say: self-defense isn’t murder.

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