CALLING IT a a "purely historical" exercise, Rich Iott, a Tea Party Republican candidate for the House of Representatives from Ohio, recently was forced to defend his weekend hobby of dressing up and playing Nazi.
Iott is involved with a group devoted to re-enacting the exploits of the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, which fought mainly on the Eastern Front during World War II, the Atlantic's Joshua Green recently reported.
Iott’s Wiking group has a disclaimer on its Web site disavowing any connection to anti-Semitism, but praises the Wafen-SS soldiers for their "basic desire to be free."
And while Iott later claimed he participated in historical re-enactments in order to "remember that history" of the Holocaust, initially he seemed more interested in talking up how cool Nazi military exploits were.
When asked about it by the Atlantic, Iott stated, "I've always been fascinated by the fact that here was a relatively small country that from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things. I mean, they took over most of Europe and Russia, and it really took the combined effort of the free world to defeat them. From a purely historical military point of view, that's incredible."
As Green noted:
Iott says the group chose the Wiking division in part because it fought on the Eastern Front, mainly against the Russian Army, and not U.S. or British soldiers. The group's Web site includes a lengthy history of the Wiking unit, a recruitment video, and footage of goose-stepping German soldiers marching in the Warsaw victory parade after Poland fell in 1939. The Web site makes scant mention of the atrocities committed by the Waffen SS, and includes only a glancing reference to the "twisted" nature of Nazism.
Instead, it emphasizes how the Wiking unit fought Bolshevist Communism: "Nazi Germany had no problem in recruiting the multitudes of volunteers willing to lay down their lives to ensure a 'New and Free Europe,' free of the threat of Communism. National Socialism was seen by many in Holland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and other eastern European and Balkan countries as the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life, despite the true underlying totalitarian (and quite twisted, in most cases) nature of the movement. Regardless, thousands upon thousands of valiant men died defending their respective countries in the name of a better tomorrow. We salute these idealists; no matter how unsavory the Nazi government was, the front-line soldiers of the Waffen-SS (in particular the foreign volunteers) gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free."
But as historian Charles Sydnor Jr. told Green, "These guys don't know their history. They have a sanitized, romanticized view of what occurred."
Today, said Sydnor, re-enactment groups like the one Iott participates in are illegal in Germany and Austria. "If you were to put on an SS uniform in Germany today, you'd be arrested," he said.
