Astonishing and disgraceful:
Before he launched a campaign for Congress in northwest Ohio, Republican candidate Rich Iott took part in World War II reenactments dressed in the uniform of Nazi Germany’s Waffen SS.
Iott was involved with a group called Wiking, which reenacts the exploits of the 5th SS Panzer Division, mainly on the Eastern Front fighting the communist Soviet Union’s Red Army, the Atlantic reported….
See, Republican Candidate in Ohio Took Part in Nazi War Reenactments.
More from The Atlantic, that reported initially on Iott’s perverse membership in the Wiking ‘reenactment’ group, about the SS Division the group celebrates:
The actual Wiking unit has a history as grisly as that of other Nazi divisions. In her book “The Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria in the Spring of 1945,” Eleonore Lappin, the noted Austrian historian, writes that soldiers from the Wiking division were involved in the killing of Hungarian Jews in March and April 1945, before surrendering to American forces in Austria.
“What you often hear is that the [Wiking] division was never formally accused of anything, but that’s kind of a dodge,” says Prof. Rob Citino, of the Military History Center at the University of North Texas, who examined the Wiking website. “The entire German war effort in the East was a racial crusade to rid the world of ‘subhumans.’ Slavs were going to be enslaved in numbers of tens of millions. And of course the multimillion Jewish population of Eastern Europe was going to be exterminated altogether. That’s what all these folks were doing in the East. It sends a shiver up my spine to think that people want to dress up and play SS on the weekend.”