There's an interesting article in the Globe and Mail today that puts a little bit of nuance into the story about Canada's embarrassing faux pas in inviting a 98-year old surviving member of the 2nd World War Waffen-SS Galicia Division in Ukraine to appear in Parliament, and introducing him to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the watching world as a "Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero". The individual responsible for the invitation, House Speaker Anthony Rota, has since apologized for his egregious mistake and resigned, and will probably never hold his head up in polite society again. But the international blowback from the gaffe continues.
The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) was set up in 1943 by Heinrich Himmler himself, and was made up mainly of Ukrainian military volunteers (Galicia is a historical name used for western parts of Ukraine). It changed its name to the 1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army when that was created in 1945, not long before it surrendered to British and US forces. That name change was probably part of the confusion over Yaroslav Hunka's status, although a bit of research should probably have made this clear.
There is no denying that the Galicia Division was a part of the Nazi armed forces, and it was established as essentially cannon fodder against the advancing Soviets, as the Nazi war machine was faltering in the region. It was headed up by Nazi SS commander Fritz Freitag, and was run by officers trained in Nazi ideology. Recruits would have sworn allegiance to Hitler and given the Nazi salute.
But this also misses some of the geopolitical context of the time and place. As Hunka himself wrote in a 2001 essay for an American online magazine, Ukrainians were reeling after years of repressive Polish occupation, followed by 18 months of brutal Soviet rule. Many Ukrainians welcomed the invading Germans as a possible way of fighting back at what they saw as the dominant yoke of Soviet Russia, out of a desire to "protect" their Ukrainian homeland. They saw it as a step towards Ukrainian independence after years of foreign occupation, and most were not motivated by antisemitic ideology or even support for the Third Reich. Indeed, many of them were bitterly disappointed when - surprise, surprise! - the Nazis turned out to be just as brutal as the Soviets, and proceeded to dismantle the provisional Ukrainian government and imprison its leaders.
It maybe hard for us to believe, in retrospect, the naivety of these Galician Ukrainians. It's also hard to believe that Canada was persuaded to accept large numbers of the unit's soldiers ("several hundred", possibly as many as 2,000) in the 1950s. A Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals was established in 1986 to look into this particular chapter of Canadian history, but it ultimately concluded that there was no evidence that any of the Ukrainian veterans participated in war crimes (although it admitted that it was unable to access and investigate records kept in the Soviet Union).
The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies says the involvement in war crimes of the division as a whole is still disputed and "under prosecutorial investigation in Poland". Others maintain that the unit's history has been gradually reconstructed over the years to minimize its links to the Nazis, and deny that all of its members were freedom fighters with no involvement in war crimes, atrocities and Jew-hunting.
Long after the war, in the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet agents in the West worked to portray the Ukrainian veterans as Nazi sympathizers, largely to sow division between those Jews and Ukrainians striving for independence for Ukraine. At the same time, members of the Ukrainian community in Canada worked to rehabilitate the reputation of members of the Galicia Division as war heroes. Muddy waters became still muddier.
The unit still sparks polarizing reactions - war heroes or collaborators? - and the historical background remains murky. None of this, of course, excuses Mr. Rota and his actions (although, to be fair, even Zelenskyy and his wife did not seem to know anything about Hunka, and gamely joined in the applause). Any connection, however tenuous, to the Nazis, and even the mention of "fighting the Soviets" - who at that point were on the side of the Allies - should have been a huge red flag. But it's interesting how much nuance can be found if you look for it.
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