New Delhi: On Friday, Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Canadian of Ukrainian origin was applauded as a “hero” in the Canadian Parliament, during a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The then Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons, Anthony Rota, Friday referred to Hunka as “Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero”, who had fought for Ukraine’s independence from Russia, prompting others to applaud for the nonagenarian who was seated in the gallery.
However, while Hunka did indeed fight against the Russians in World War II, he did so in a military unit commanded by Nazi Germany as a part of the Waffen-SS — a combat branch of the Nazi’s Schutzstaffel (SS) protective squads — which was later declared a “criminal organisation” by the Nuremberg trials which followed the end of World War II.
Hunka reportedly served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel (SS) (1st Galicia), a volunteer unit made up of Ukrainians who pledged their allegiance to Adolf Hitler. But Hunka is not the only Nazi collaborator to have made Canada his home over the past decades.
In 1985, the then Prime Minister of Canada, Brian Mulroney, ordered a commission headed by Jules Deschênes, a former Quebec Superior Court chief justice, to investigate the alleged presence of Nazi war criminals in the country. This reportedly came after a Member of Parliament had raised the issue that Canada may have sheltered Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor infamous for performing deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp.
The commission, however, found Mengele to have never set foot in Canada. The commission’s report also said members of the Galicia Division should not “be indicted” as a group, even though the organisation was considered to be a criminal organisation under the Nürnberg trials.
While not related to the Galicia Division, another Nazi collaborator, Helmut Oberlander, a translator and member of the feared death squads of the SS, was able to migrate to Canada in 1954 and became a citizen in 1960, according to a CBC News report. He passed away in 2021 at Waterloo. Since 1995, he had been reportedly involved in a legal battle with the Government of Canada for maintaining his citizenship.
Following the controversy over Hunka’s recognition in the Canadian Parliament — with Poland looking at the 98-year-old’s extradition, to investigate if he was wanted for war crimes against the Polish — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has termed the entire episode “deeply embarrassing”.
Rota has meanwhile not only apologised for the incident, but has since resigned from the post of Canada’s speaker.
In a statement, Sunday, Rota took complete responsibility for what happened, saying, “I have subsequently become aware of more information which causes me to regret my decision”, offering his “deepest apologies to Jewish communities in Canada and around the world”.
ThePrint explains Canada’s tryst with Ukrainians who served in Nazi-led units during World War II.
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The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS
The 14th Waffen-SS Division, commonly known as the Galicia Division or the Halychyna Division in Ukrainian, was created in the fall of 1943, according to the Deschênes Commission report seen by ThePrint.
In the summer of 1944, the division was largely destroyed by the forces of the Soviet Union in the Battle of Brody, near present-day Lviv.
According to the Deschênes Commission, 14,000 troops went to battle and only 3,000 returned.
In April 1945, the Galicia Division was formally attached to the Ukrainian National Army (UNA) as its first division under the overall command of General Pavlo Shandruk. The UNA withdrew from the Eastern front eventually making its way to Western Austria, fighting the Soviet Union once again in Graz, in 1945, before surrendering to the forces of the United Kingdom the same year. The UNA was interned at Rimini, Italy, for two years before being transferred to the United Kingdom in 1947.
According to a 1947 report by a Refugee Screening Commission, referred to in the Deschênes Commission, there were 8,272 officers and men of the Galicia Division in Rimini.
Parts of the report by the Screening Commission were republished in the Deschênes report, which highlighted the fact that the men from the division “do not seem conscious of having done any wrong”.
Furthermore, the Screening Commission report pointed out that these men “do not now seem to be at heart pro-German, and the fact that they did give aid and comfort to the Germans can fairly be considered to have been incidental and not fundamental”.
It was based on that information that on 25 September, 1950, members of the 14th Waffen-SS were allowed to emigrate from the United Kingdom to Canada.
The division was visited by the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler — a convicted war criminal and the ‘architect of the Holocaust’ — in 1944 and addressed the division with a speech that was greeted with cheers, as reported by the Ottawa Citizen, a Canadian newspaper.
The 14th Waffen-SS was accused of taking part in the burning of 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive in 1944 — now remembered as the Huta Pieniacka massacre — according to media reports.
The connection between the Galicia Division and Canada
Veterans from the division eventually immigrated to Canada during the 1950s without facing further investigation in their role in World War II, according to media reports and the Deschênes report.
The Deschênes Commission report stated that members of the division should not “be indicted” as a group, even though the organisation was considered to be a criminal organisation under the Nürnberg trials.
Furthermore, the report further added that “charges of war crimes by the Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in 1950… or in 1984″. The report explains that “mere membership” in the Division is insufficient to “justify prosecution”.
Veterans of the division living in Canada have over the years created multiple monuments — in essence Nazi memorials — in a country where reportedly over 10 percent of the population fought in World War II against the Nazis.
Canada has at least two monuments for the Galicia Division at Edmonton and Oakville, as reported by Forward, an American newspaper that caters to the interests of American Jews. But these are not the only monuments dedicated to Nazi units of war-time collaborators from Ukraine in Canada.
Roman Shukhevych, a Ukrainian military leader and a collaborator with Nazi Germany till at least the end of 1942, has a monument constructed in his honour on the grounds of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in North Edmonton.
According to a report in the Ottawa Citizen, Shukhevych commanded the Nachtigall Battalion (also known as the Ukrainian Nachtigall Battalion) — which is accused of “rounding up Jews in the town of Lviv in June 1941 and murdering them”.
The Ottawa Citizen cites the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organisation, which states that the Nachtigall Battalion was responsible for the murder of 4,000 Jews in Lviv.
Shukhevych’s Nachtigall Battalion was eventually reorganised into the 201st Schutzmannschaft Battalion in October 1941. The battalion served in Belarus in 1942, before disbanding in December of that year. Members of the 201 Schutzmannschat are said to have refused to repromulgate their contracts with the Nazis, leading to Shukhevych’s arrest by Germany.
Shukhevych reportedly eventually escaped and joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as their Supreme Commander. The UPA fought both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union before finally being defeated by the USSR in the 1950s.
Shukhevych’s statue was vandalised in 2021, with a Canadian charged by the Edmonton police for spray-painting the words “actual Nazi” on the statue.
Another incident where the 14th Galicia Division’s memorial in Oakville was vandalised, with the words “Nazi war monument” painted on the stone cenotaph in July 2020 was first investigated as a hate crime by the Ontario police, reported the Ottawa Citizen.
The investigation was later changed to a charge of vandalism, with the Halton regional police chief Stephen Tanner commenting on how the “most unfortunate” part of this incident was the existence of a monument for Nazis in the first place, the newspaper further reported.
Despite calls from Jewish groups across Canada for the removal of these memorials over the years, no action has been taken till date, claim media reports.
Now, Canada’s Nazi memorial problem and its history of looking the other way with regard to the Galicia Division, has again been brought to the attention of the global community by the incident involving Hunka.
In 1939, the country had also reportedly turned away the ship MS St Louis, carrying over 900 Jews fleeing persecution in Europe. At least 254 of those refugees later died in concentration camps, according to the BBC. In 2018, Prime Minister Trudeau apologised for the incident, calling it “long overdue”, according to media reports.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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