Significant progress has been made in taking down monuments to Confederates who waged war against the United States.

Many of the removals have resulted in controversy, and even violence, but the weight of history generally has prevailed against honoring traitors who, by the way, lost.

But, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the impulse to honor people who should be condemned is pervasive.

Though it’s harder to believe even than statues in Tennessee honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest — a notorious Confederate general and founder of the Ku Klux Klan — there is a monument near Philadelphia to a Nazi SS unit.

The memorial, in St. Mary’s Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery in Elkins Park, is dedicated to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Nazi SS.

That division comprised German troops and Ukrainian collaborators. It surrendered in 1945 and about 8,000 of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators were allowed to resettle in Canada and the United States, including the Philadelphia area.

Monument defenders contend that the collaborators did not fight so much for the Nazis as against Soviet communists, but that’s a rationalization.

As Jared McBride, a UCLA historian of Eastern Europe, told the Inquirer: “The Nazi regime was a genocidal regime. This idea of parsing these things out — that ‘We were the good SS division,’ or ‘The good police unit,’ or ‘The good mobile death battalion’ — is not the strongest of arguments.”

No, it is not. Any monument glorifying Nazis has no legitimate place in the United States.

— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre, via TNS