The revelation that Rich Iott, a Republican candidate for Congress from Ohio, was an active member of a group of dedicated to understanding the experience of soldiers who served in the Nazi Waffen SS by dressing up in their uniforms — and staging recreations of their battles — has forced historical re-enactors to defend their hobby.
That Mr. Iott engaged in this pastime came to light on Friday, when Joshua Green of The Atlantic published photographs of him in an SS uniform beneath a headline asking, “Why is This GOP House Candidate Dressed as a Nazi?”
Mr. Iott admitted to Mr. Green that he had spent time playing a character he named Reinhard Pferdmann as a member of the 5. SS Wiking re-enactment group, which is described on its Web site as “a nonprofit, nonpolitical organization dedicated to the preservation of the history of WW II and the lifestyle of the German combat soldier (specifically Waffen-SS foreign volunteers).”
Even so, the Ohio businessman — who quickly posted photographs of himself playing American soldiers in recreations of three conflicts — insisted that his admiration for Nazi Germany was purely based on its achievements in battle. He told Mr. Green:
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 my colleague Brett Sokol reported last year, Mr. Iott is far from the only American to play the part of a Nazi soldier in his spare time. Reporting on a re-enactment of the Battle of the Bulge in Pennsylvania, complete with men in Nazi uniforms carrying authentic weapons (loaded with blanks), he noted:
Almost every weekend, there is a re-enactment somewhere around the country, and while most are invitation-only affairs drawing from several dozen to several hundred participants, last year’s World War II Weekend in Reading, Pa., attracted more than 20,000 to witness the liberation of a faux-French village.
Another former Nazi re-enactor in the news, a police captain in Portland, Ore., who may be disciplined for constructing a memorial to a Waffen SS commander in a public park, offered a similar excuse, calling himself “a history geek” after his hobby was made public.
As Maxine Bernstein reported in The Oregonian on Friday, an investigation by Portland’s police force found that the officer, Mark Kruger, had brought “discredit and disgrace upon the Bureau and the City,” by nailing five memorial plaques in honor of of Nazi soldiers to a tree in a city park.
Mr. Kruger’s former commander wrote that the officer should have known that a plaque honoring “a Waffen SS member and the commander of a battalion responsible for a large-scale massacre of prisoners of war could alarm a member of the public familiar with these historical events.”
While Mr. Iott’s Democratic opponent, Representative Marcy Kaptur, and the Republican minority whip, Eric Cantor, joined Holocaust survivors in saying that his hobby rendered him unfit for public office, the candidate told a local Fox News affiliate the dismay over his role-playing was “a good example of why people look at career politicians and say, ‘We just can’t trust these people — look how they act, they behave like children.’”
Changes have been made to the Web site of the group Mr. Iott used to be a member of, Wiking.org — and an affiliated YouTube channel — but The Atlantic managed to save a copy of a “recruitment video” for the group posted online (embedded above) as well this text, which attempts to justify the group’s apparent celebration of the Waffen SS Wiking unit:
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 Robert M. Citino, a military historian and professor at the University of North Texas, told Mr. Green that the Nazi division’s role in the Second World War was far from heroic:
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.
By Jessica Van Sack