Wrong Question

Digby seems to be making a connection -- or trying to -- between Eastern European origins and sympathy for Nazis:

A Minnesota man accused of committing war crimes when he commanded a Nazi-led unit during World War II contributed thousands of dollars to the Republican National Committee, a Daily Beast review of federal campaign records found.

OK -- this guy was, for all intents and purposes, a Nazi. But she goes on:

I had a landlord who was a Polish immigrant of that generation and he worshiped Ronald Reagan too. I don't think he was a an actual Nazi. But he could have been. He certainly didn't like Jews.

Anti-Semitism was pretty much a given in Eastern Europe during the 1930s and 40s, and long before. But the idea that Eastern Europeans of that generation -- or the next -- were Nazis or sympatherizers I think misses one very important factor.

When I was the at the University of Illinois in Chicago, I met a lot of Lithuanians whose parents had fled the country after World War II. Most of them had been born in Germany in 1945-46 or thereabouts. And they were all very right wing. They weren't Nazis -- they were hard-core anti-Russian, simply because of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after the war. And I can't begin to describe just how much they hated Russians.* (Just to give an idea of the depth of nationalism in this group of displaced people, there was a Lithuanian government in exile in the U.S. as late as the 1960s. Noted science fiction writer Algis Budrys was president. To a certain extent, it's a very deep-seated case of denial.)

All of which is to say that it's a little simplistic to try to connect emigration from Eastern Europe in the 1940s with Nazi sympathies -- it's much more a matter of being anti-communist, or more specifically, anti-Soviet.

* This is in large part just the twentieth-century manifestation of attitudes that go back several hundred years. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Lithuania was the dominant power in Eastern Europe, stretching from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south and including Ukraine and a large chunk of Byelorussia. (It was also the only country in Europe with religious freedom, including Jews.) The Union of Lublin (1569), which joined the Kingdom of Poland with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in a unified political state (as opposed to the personal monarchy that had existed since the late fourteenth century) shored up the Lithuanian state in its wars with the emerging Muscovite kingdom, which had been going on since the Muscovites had thrown off the Mongols. So this antipathy goes back quite a way. This resentment of Russia was only exacerbated by the Partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century -- Lithuania and a large chunk of Poland proper wounder up as part of the Russian Empire. They gained independence after World War I, only to be re-occupied during World War II.

Yes, on top of everything else, I'm a history buff. I think it's genetic.