New Delhi: Yaroslav Hunka, a Canadian of Ukrainian descent and member of Nazi unit during World War 2, was venerated by members of the Canadian parliament and UkrainePresident Volodymyr Zelenskyy for being a “Ukrainian hero” in the fight against Russia in late September.
As a result of this incident, the then Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons Anthony Rota resigned from his position and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unreservedly apologised on behalf of Parliament for the incident and to President Zelenskyy of Ukraine for the position “they were put in”.
Hunka, a member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel (SS) (1st Galicia), is one of the many Ukrainians who emigrated to Canada after World War 2. Hunka’s recognition by Canadian Parliament has brought to the limelight the unaddressed history of Ukrainian immigrants with a Nazi past, who arrived during the 1950s as the Cold War between the West and the USSR began in earnest.
“By 1950 anti-communism, not Nazism became the focus of countries like Canada. This allowed veterans from the Galicia Division (Hunka’s division) to immigrate across the West. Roughly 2,000 of them moved to Canada,” explained Per Anders Rudling, an associate professor of history at Lund University, Sweden to ThePrint.
“The Galicia Division that surrendered to the British in 1945 were not designated as Prisoners of War (PoWs) but surrendered enemy personnel, preventing their repatriation to the Soviet Union. Collaboration during the Holocaust was no longer an issue in 1950,” Rudling told ThePrint.
Rudling highlighted that only 250 or so individuals of the surrendered Galicia Division were investigated by Canada in a rushed manner before allowing their immigration from Italy, where they were interned at the end of World War 2.
Over the years, these veterans who collaborated with the Nazis eventually revised their participation in World War 2 as that of Ukrainian nationalists fighting for independence against the Bolsheiviks, as a part of the Ukrainian National Army, Rudling explains.
This viewpoint can be seen in blogs authored by Hunka for the American magazine —Combatant News, which covers Ukrainian war veterans — where he argues he fought for the idea of “cathedral Ukraine” during World War 2.
‘Faith in god and love for Ukraine’
In the 2011 blog titled ‘My Generation’ — Hunka describes his generation of Ukrainians being united by two great forces — faith in god and love for Ukraine. Hunka writes that he was born in the village of Urman, which lies in the historic region of Eastern Galicia, about 13 km from the town of Berezhany. Urman today is a part of Ukraine.
“My native village of Urman, it seemed to me then, was the most nationally conscious village in the district. The flame of national revival, in the years between the two wars, shone brightly over the village,” Hunka wrote.
Between the two World Wars, this region was a part of the Second Polish Republic, which existed from 1918 till 1939. “We all knew that there was also an underground organisation of nationalists in the village — OUN (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists), but we did not know who belonged to it,” Hunka wrote.
Founded in 1929, the OUN was one of the largest right-wing organisations that functioned in inter-war Poland. It eventually split into OUN-M and OUN-B following Andriy Melanyk and Stepan Bandera, respectively.
The more conservative of the Ukrainian nationalists supported Melanyk, while the more radical and violent members supported Bandera. “The Melanykites while more conservative supported Hitler more than the Banderites (OUN-B) under Bandera. But Bandera’s faction was far worse in killing people,” Rudling told ThePrint.
Hunka was 14 when World War 2 broke out in 1939. He wrote in his blog about a Polish teacher whom the students all fell in love with and treated them like a “good grandfather.”
“He was not with us for long. One very winter day in January 1940, he, one boy and one girl from the class were summoned and two NKVD (officials) led them under escort directly to the railway station, where their families, who had been brought from the villages at night, were already loaded into the wagons,” Hunka wrote.
This was his first experience seeing people punished by Stalin’s regime as “enemies of the people” with a trip to Siberia. “One Saturday, the director of the Tkachuk school called three tenth-grade students from the bursa, and no one saw them again,” Hunka added.
Also Read: Did China launch disinformation campaign to ensure Trudeau win? Canada’s other Asian tussle
‘The liberator’
The NKVD — USSR’s interior ministry — enforced a reign of terror in the region where, “friend to friend and brother to brother could not speak sincerely for fear of betrayal,” Hunka writes.
When Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941, they were welcomed with great joy, Hunka pointed out. “The new ‘liberator’ of the Ukrainian people — Führer Hitler — reigned over the Berezhany land.”
Hunka describes how as the Germans planned to retreat westwards in 1943, the OUN and the Ukrainian Central Committee called for volunteers to fight against the USSR, albeit at the behest of the retreating Nazis.
“In two weeks, 80,000 volunteers volunteered for the division, including many students of the Berezhany Gymnasium. None of us asked what our reward would be, what our provision would be, or even what our tomorrow would be. We felt our duty to our native land — and left!” Hunka wrote.
The chairman of the Ukrainian Central Committee at the time was Volodymyr Kubijovyč — an open anti-Semite — who was considered to be Hans Frank’s right hand man, according to Rudling. Hans Frank, a convicted war criminal, was the Governor General of the General Government that governed Nazi-occupied Poland.
An enthusiastic proponent of “ethnic cleansing”, Kubijovyč first raised the idea of an “ethnically pure” Ukrainian enclave in April 1941 with Frank, according to a paper published by Rudling in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies in 2012.
Kubijovyč worked closely with SS-Obergruppenführer Otto Wächter, a senior member of the SS and the then governor of District Galicia, to create the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, which Hunka joined in 1943.
Unaddressed history in Canada
After the Ukrainian World War II veterans were allowed to immigrate in 1950, they went on to become successful members of Canadian society. Rudling told ThePrint that the Ukrainians became successful members of Canadian society and with an organised diaspora in the country, left the issue of collaboration with the Nazis as “unaddressed”
“Ukrainians are a large diaspora in Canada — almost 1.2 million people. They are organised and strong donors to political parties, which allowed the history to remain unaddressed in Canada,” Rudling said.
This allegedly allowed for an extensive whitewashing of the complicated history of the Ukrainian diaspora. In 2019, the University of Alberta had accepted a $30,000 donation in the name of Yaroslav and Margaret Hunka to support research related to the Ukrainian Catholic Church, according to their website. In November 1986, it is said to have accepted an endowment of about $437,757 from the estate of “Professor” Volodymyr Kubijovyč and his wife Daria.
The list of donors to the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta is no longer accessible, but an archive of the page from the end of September is available.
The University announced on 2 October that it was returning the donation received from Hunka’s family and reviewing other donations from other SS veterans as reported by The Globe and Mail.
“I had raised this issue with my alma mater — the University of Alberta — in 2005 on the funding from former SS veterans but received no interest in it,” Rudling told ThePrint.
He highlighted how the lack of addressing this issue feeds Russian propaganda, hurting Ukraine’s reputation. The Russians can now state that they are fighting against a “fascist” Ukrainian government supported by Nazi Canada, Rudling explained.
In countries where Ukraine received a lukewarm response such as India, Venezuela and Brazil, these kinds of statements would further erode any support for Kyiv, Rudling added
(Edited by Tony Rai)