The president of the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada is defending a World War II veteran, a member of a Waffen SS unit who was recently hailed as a hero in Canadian Parliament.
Jurij Klufas has not met 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, but believes his treatment is unfair.
He said Mr. Hunka was a soldier who understood that he was fighting for Ukraine – not Germany – and that countries, including Canada, exonerated his division of war crimes.
“If you are a soldier, it does not mean that you are a member of a certain party in the country,” Mr. Klufas said Friday in a telephone interview. In this case, the veteran gentleman here was a soldier, according to him, fighting for Ukraine. »
Mr Hunka received a standing ovation in the House of Commons on September 22, sparking international criticism after it was revealed he had fought with a mostly volunteer unit created by the Nazis to help fight Soviet Union.
Ivan Katchanovski, a Ukrainian-Canadian political science professor at the University of Ottawa, says the actions of Mr. Hunka’s Waffen-SS Galicia division have been downplayed in Canada.
He claims its admirers tried to present the division as a Ukrainian patriotic force, despite the fact that it collaborated with the Nazis and was involved in various atrocities, including the murder of Jews, Ukrainians and Poles.
“They represent this division as a struggle not for Nazi Germany, but for the independence of Ukraine, even though there was never a possibility of fighting for any Ukrainian independence,” he said. he declares. They fought under German command until the end of World War II. »
He noted that the heroic interpretation is particularly prevalent in Canada, where many members of the division immigrated in a controversial process opposed by Jewish groups.
About 600 members in Canada at one time
In 1950, the federal cabinet decided to allow Ukrainians living in the United Kingdom to come to Canada “despite their service in the German army”, provided they passed a security check.
A 1986 commission report on war criminals living in Canada found that approximately 600 former members of the Waffen SS division were living in Canada at the time.
But Judge Jules Deschênes, who chaired the commission, said that membership in the division did not in itself constitute a crime and that “charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia division have never been founded.” , nor in 1950, when they were filed for the first time, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or even before this commission.
Jewish groups have noted the existence of at least two Canadian monuments to the division, in Oakville, Ontario, and Edmonton.
In response to questions about Mr. Hunka, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) said Thursday that the people of modern Ukraine, including its Jewish population, have suffered successive occupations by “foreign empires and colonizers” dating back to for centuries.
“There are difficult and painful pages in the shared history of the communities that have called Ukraine home,” Congress Speaker Ihor Michalchyshyn said in a statement. The UCC recognizes that recent events that have brought these pages to the forefront have caused pain and distress. »
Not the only group in the same situation
Frank Sysyn, a history professor at the University of Alberta, says it is accurate to say that Mr. Hunka was not a Nazi, even though he fought for Nazi Germany, because non-Nazis Germans were not allowed to join the party.
He noted that Canada’s choice to allow the unit’s veterans to live out their lives in the country ultimately came down to the decision that membership in the unit was not a sufficient reason to prosecute someone. ‘one, if there was no evidence that he had committed crimes himself. Ukrainians are far from the only postwar immigrant group to benefit from such an approach, he added.
“Most of our Italian immigrants from the 1950s, if they were men of a certain age, had probably served in the Italian army and fought for Fascist Italy,” said Mr. Sysyn, a member of the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies.
John-Paul Himka, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and author of a book on Ukrainians and the Holocaust, said many of the young men who joined the Galicia division in 1943 were motivated by the atrocities which they had witnessed under Soviet occupation, including the murder of thousands of political prisoners and mass deportations to labor camps.
“So for the people of that region, the Soviets were a nightmare and the Germans were relatively tolerable,” he said. This explains, I think, why so many of them thought their fight against the Soviets was patriotic. »
He claimed that some Galician units had participated in atrocities, including murders in Polish villages. The division had an anti-Semitic newspaper and accepted into its ranks “police officers who had played a very important role in the Holocaust, who had rounded up Jews for execution and sometimes executed Jews themselves,” he argued.
He criticizes the Ukrainian community for failing to fully recognize and address the country’s history during World War II, including its ties to the Nazis. However, he adds that many Canadians are guilty of not learning enough about the truths of the war on the Eastern Front, including the rapes and murders carried out by the Soviets on the Allied side.
Mr Klufas attributes Mr Hunka’s being called a Nazi to “Russian disinformation”, adding: “The fact that he was a soldier does not mean he was a Nazi”. He also argued that there was nothing wrong with Parliament applauding a man “who fought for his country”. However, he admitted that it was “perhaps not right” in the circumstances, given that those present did not fully understand the nature of their action.