The consensus was immediate: Nazis are bad. No one disagreed. Canada accidentally praised one. This was cut and dry. No room for debate, a deeper discussion or reconsideration. Canadian officials appeared deeply embarrassed and were likely eager to move on.

Now, Politico: ‘Not so fast!’

On Monday, the news outlet published an op-ed by author Keir Giles with the curious title, ‘Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi,’ in which he writes (bold font compliments of Matt Taibbi):

This history is complicated because fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi, just someone who had an excruciating choice over which of these two terror regimes to resist. However, the idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide. And simple narratives like “everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes” are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp.