The controversy surrounding the presence last Friday in the House of Commons of Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran who was part of an SS unit during the Second World War, raises a question: how did soldiers who belonged to the SS arrive in Canada ?
In the years following the Allied victory in World War II, the question of the fate of the thousands of soldiers who fought in Hitler’s ranks arose.
This included the soldiers of the 14e grenadier division of the Waffen-SS (1D Galicia Division), which was made up of Ukrainian soldiers fighting alongside Nazi Germany, notably against Russian troops. The Waffen-SS was declared a “criminal organization” at the Nuremberg Trials.
“Those who served in the 14e Galicia’s Waffen-SS division swore oath to Hitler and were trained in Nazi doctrine, military review analysis notes Esprit de corps. The Ukrainian officers were trained in the SS facilities of the Dachau concentration camp. In fact, some members of the division noted in their memoirs that concentration camp prisoners had to remove their hats as a sign of respect for the Ukrainian SS. Members of the unit received SS tattoos under their left arm indicating their blood type. The division’s leadership included figures who had been directly involved in the Holocaust. »
On May 31, 1950, the Canadian government adopted a decree to admit men who had served in the Waffen-SS, after requests to this effect from the British government.
The question of the presence of war criminals in Canada led in 1986 to the creation of the Deschênes commission.
In its report, the commission of inquiry concluded that the number of war criminals who could be living in Canada was not several thousand, as was commonly reported by the media at the time, but between 400 and 600.
The commission of inquiry also concluded that “the members of the Galicia division were subject to a security check before their admission to Canada”, and “that no evidence came to support the accusations of war crimes » brought against members of the division.
In 2005, new documents declassified by the British government shed light on the identity of military prisoners whom the United Kingdom wanted to send abroad in the aftermath of the war.
“What little we know of their war records is poor,” wrote the British Home Office in 1948. “We still hope to get rid of the less desirable Ukrainian prisoners of war by sending them to Germany or Canada,” reports Esprit de corps.
“Disastrous”
Dominique Arel, chair of Ukrainian studies at the University of Ottawa, notes that the symbolism of having a soldier from an SS unit honored in Ottawa is “disastrous” for the Ukrainian cause.
It was a mistake. The Canadian government had no idea, but Ukrainian organizations should have known.
Dominique Arel, chair of Ukrainian studies at the University of Ottawa
“In their minds, it [l’homme présent à Ottawa] fought Soviet aggression, but in the wrong uniform. When you see an SS logo, especially in a context where Putin calls Ukrainians Nazis and wages his war supposedly to de-Nazify Ukraine, it doesn’t help the cause, that’s clear. »
Mr. Arel adds, however, to make a distinction between these soldiers and the Nazi troops who exterminated more than 6 million Jews.
“One has the impression that if you serve in an SS unit, then you are a Nazi of the same type as a guard in a concentration camp… That’s not quite right. These guys, who were very young, joined this unit because they wanted to gain military experience and wanted access to weapons to then fight for the independence of Ukraine. And independence against whom? Against the Soviet Union which had annexed their region in 1939. We are then talking about a region which had never been part of Russia before. And the Soviet forces and the police and everything had committed all kinds of atrocities, deportations and so on. They experienced Soviet terror for two years. »
This unit couldn’t deal with the Holocaust because the Holocaust was over in Galicia by the time they were operational, he said.
“They arrived in 1944 and there were no more Jews. Everything had been done before. […] Even from a legal point of view, you can’t say that they are war criminals just because they were part of an organization that committed atrocities before or almost everywhere in Europe. We need to see what this individual and his unit did. »
With André Duchesne, The Press