September 26, 2023 - 7:00am
Justin Trudeau’s government has been forced to apologise to Canadian Jewish organisations, after House Speaker Anthony Rota honoured a 98-year-old war veteran — who then turned out to have fought under the Nazis.
The incident occurred following a visit to the Canadian government by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Rota called out Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran sitting in the gallery, prompting a round of applause. Then someone dug up a blog post Hunka wrote in 2011 describing his wartime service — under Hitler.
It’s easy enough to laugh and point at a politician making such a gaffe. But perhaps the lesson is that the Manichean moral lens we’ve inherited from the Second World War sheds very little light even on how people at that time understood what was afoot — let alone on contemporary conflicts.
When the Second World War broke out, Ukraine was part of Soviet Russia. In his memoir post, Hunka describes the disappearance of friends and acquaintances to Siberia at the hands of the secret police. He recounts that Germany was reputed to be a highly civilised country; no one, he recalls, understood why so many Jews seemed to be fleeing this beacon of light.
Under Soviet rule, Hunka recounts longing for aid from the “German knights” who might rescue them from tyranny. And Hitler did indeed occupy the Ukraine from 1941 onwards, where many Ukrainians — presumably including Hunka — greeted them as liberators. Hunka suggests that German occupation wasn’t as much of an improvement over the Soviet kind as they had hoped, but at least fewer people seemed to be sent to Siberia. So when faced with the threat of Soviet re-invasion, he and many others from his school enlisted to fight against their former oppressors — which meant, unavoidably, fighting under the Nazis.
If this account is true, the picture here isn’t of full-throated ideological endorsers of Nazism, but of a provincial young man between a rock and a hard place, and doing what seemed most likely to be in the interests of his people. Hindsight, though, has so thoroughly entrenched Hitler’s regime as the ne plus ultra of evil and the Second World War as so simple a binary battle of Good versus Evil, that such a tragic view has become all but impossible.
I dare say someone will call me a Nazi apologist for suggesting such a view here. Meanwhile, though, the side keenest to identify itself as inheritors of the Good that defeated Hitler’s Evil is, today, indulging in just such Nazi apologism — in the course of legitimising even ideologically unsavoury combatants in today’s Ukraine conflict.
Until Putin invaded, the Western press would periodically point out fascist elements in that country’s politics. Now Azov is on the side of the Goodies, though, Forbes blithely declares them ‘deradicalised’, as does the ADL. So that’s alright then.
None of this is to take a position on the Ukraine conflict itself, or even Azov. It’s simply to note that the crude binary lens of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil has zero interpretive value save as a crude propaganda bludgeon.
The world is often an ugly place, where sometimes there are no unambiguously good choices. The most measured way of understanding Hunka’s story would be in this light. And perhaps, whether national or international, contemporary political debates would also be less unhinged if we were willing to embrace this tragic dimension.
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SubscribeI can’t imagine the Canadian courts regarding the Canadian truckers as favourably as Justin Trudeau regards former members of the Waffen-SS.
One case is morally complicated, while the truckers were evil personified in the eyes of Trudeau.
Thank you for this objective and nuanced article.
“…the crude binary lens of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil has zero interpretive value save as a crude propaganda bludgeon.”
Bingo.
Agree entirely, but it is not really the point here. We know the smug, self-satisfied, virtue signalling moral superiors who populate the Canadian parliament would not have let Mr Hunka through the door had they known his background.
Had they been capable of putting 2 and 2 together, 98 year old Ukrainian who fought against the Russian in WW2 they would have realised he fought for the Germans.
The people who aspire rule us are plainly as thick as two short planks. So let us enjoy a proper emperor’s new cloths moment. Truly beyond parody. In fact we should never let any of them forget it.
Except you can bet your bottom dollar they did know but they assumed the general public either wouldn’t know or care. We are the ones they think are the proverbial thick ones. Thank goodness they got pulled up on this.
Hunka’s comments on Jewish refugees are a bit disingenuous (anti-Semitism has long been an environmental condition where he grew up) but generally his account rings true. A lot of people who had lived under Stalin welcomed the Germans as liberators and saw Nazis as the lesser evil. There were Estonian and Latvian Waffen SS divisions too and I’m sure many of their countrymen regard those who fought against the Red Army as patriots and heroes even if they were also involved in war crimes. History is messy. In Eastern Europe, it’s even messier.
Which is a very good reason for us lot not to get involved in a far off country of which we know little and care even less.
I can recommend the miliary museum in Riga which displays both Nazi and Soviet decorations. Also the chocolate museum in the same city. The 1941 chocolate wrappers show heroic German troops marching in and the 1945 wrappers show heroic Soviet tanks….
Agree completely. Mary Harrington has nailed it once again
Oh we must always see the nuanced side to everything . Pity no one has ever extended that nuance to me. I (nearly) had sex once and I’ve been a w***e all the years of my existence. No ones ever said,she was 17,she was confused,she was in a society where every word and image told you that being sexually valid was the acceptance into society and the community. Come on then if weve now got to be nice to Nazis,let’s have be nice to Whores week.
Objective and Nuanced. I think we saw a propaganda bludgeon in action. So he was just a confused boy,he didn’t know what he was doing,he didn’t inhale….participate in any unpleasant activities. He wasn’t a Nazi,he was just a very naughty boy.
To be a Ukrainian or Belorussian in the 1930’s and 40’s meant having 3 enemies: the Russians, the Germans and then the Russians again. It was therefore almost impossible not to be involved in combat. The losses in these 2 countries were horrendous (20-25% of the population).
Not one of us knows how we would behave in such an awful situation and we can only pray we never have to find out.
True – no one knows how they would behave in such circumstances. On the other hand, take the example of Poland, stuck in between two great enemies, Germany and Sobiet Union. There are no Polish national heroes that joined Waffen SS or collaborated with the Germans in any capacity whatsoever (the same applies to collaborating with the Soviets) – and the reason for that is simple. There was a third path – organised national resistance. No one in the right mind in Poland back then would deem Germans as liberators and bearers of civilised order – quite the contrary.
True, apart from the tragic fact that many Jews who survived until the end of the war perished in the hands of Polish anti-semites who may be indistinguishable from the Polish war heroes later… So shades of black abound in history, not just shades of grey…
Still, it’s a qualitatively different story from applauding a former SS Galizien soldier, who hailed Nazi occupation of his own country as the happiest period of his life and who, by then, knew pretty well what was happening to the Jewish population. Let’s just remember who built the concentration camps on Polish soil.
Let’s also remember Ukraine’s history preceding the German invasion. In the 1920s the Russians snuffed out Ukraine’s independence movement, and in the early 1930s Stalin’s confiscation of all foodstuffs killed millions more Ukrainians by deliberate starvation. And then, later in that decade, came the dictator’s mass-murdering ‘purges’, with quotas set for how many of various nationalities, including Ukrainians, must be killed for made-up crimes. No wonder that quite a few Ukrainians did welcome the Germans as liberators, mistaken as they turned out to be.
And then — I hesitate to bring this up but it’s based on many personal recollections I’ve read — in the Soviet government and the secret police terrorizing Ukraine, Jewish officials were very prominent. Genrikh Yagoda, who designed and ran the Gulag camps and forced labor projects in the 1930s was only one of many. Of course those were secular Jews, not religious ones, but today still, many of the former continue to be drawn to radical leftist politics … History is complicated, clearly too complicated for the Trudeau government.
Great post.
I replied is similar vein, but my post is censored.
History of this region is complicated as author says, and while my family suffered from Ukrainian nationalists (just watch film Wolyn) I support Ukrainian war against genocidal Russian imperialism.
Only idiots believe that if Russia succeeds in Ukraine it will be peace in Europe.
Then we had Munich agreement.
Soviet Ukraine wasnt his country.
All true.
But you fail to consider it from Ukrainian perspective.
Choice was between being subjugated by Russia or hoping to be part of Greater Reich, however unrealistic.
Unfortunately many Jews collaborated with Soviet occupiers, which clearly did not help their situation when Germans invaded.
Let’s remember as well that Russian soldiers were surrendering an mass in 1941.
It was mix of Germans starving them and NKWD troops shooting anyone falling back, which caused them to start fighting.
It was clearly not love of communism.
Few of my comments are already censored, so let’s see how this one goes.
NKVD
It wasnt the “happiest period of his life” They quickly acknowladged that german occupation is not that much better then soviet, its literarly written in the article you were suppoused to read as well as that he states they didnt know why jews where fleeing germany because for them it seemed like it was a civilised country. Im from Poland, im a jew, iv been to Auschwitz and i know that really not so many people knew about holocaust at the time. First reports came in 1942 and were dismissed as not credible.
Yes, there were Polish antisemites.
Np different from ones in France, uk and many European countries.
It did not help that Communism in Poland was mostly introduced by Jewish people with the help of Russians.
My aunt was Jewish, so it is quite complicated.
But fact remains that if your country is occupied again by Russia, after German occupation, and the main stooges of Russia are Jews, you are unlikely to become less antisemitic.
Many of them left for Israel in 1968 after Soviet support fro Arabs in 1967 war, caused Jewish communist to be regarded as traitors.
And stole the land of the people who lived there.
The Poles didn’t have the options that the people of the USSR had. For them the Germans were never anything but conquerors. The Nazis made no secret of the fact that they thought Poles were suitable only for slavery. Almost from the day they invaded they routinely rounded up every Pole they could find who they thought would be capable of providing leadership, murdered many of them and threw the rest into concentration camps. On the other side of the demarcation line, Stalin was doing the same thing. The Poles knew from the beginning that nobody was trying to liberate them and that they had to either submit or fight for themselves.
Nazi doctrine regarding Slavic people, including Poles and Ukrainians, and their slavish submission was clear to everyone from the very outset. I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove here.
It seems that you assume that Mein Kampf was widely known in the Ukraine. I think it more likely that it wasn’t, but that the knowledge of starvation, disappearance and random murder under the Stalin’s rule was vivid.
Stop with the bullshit. I am Belarusian, we were fine living under the Soviets. The Ukrainians loved the German Nazis because they are unhinged and always were. They were rounding up Jews with delight for the Germans who were their friends before the Germans came. Belarusians never did this, so don’t you dare put us all in one basket.
Nobody was fine living under the Soviets, except for the Politburo.
You are nothing but pathetic Russian stooge.
Belarusian are now under dictatorships of some demented Soviet farm manager.
Just look where Poland and Baltic States are in comparison to Russia minor slave state.
it seems you’ve been there and seen everything xD
Well we’re going to aren’t we.
Taking the messy nuances of history as a given – presenting this man as a hero to parliament without due diligence (or even a quick Google search) was a pretty unambiguously bad choice.
It’s interesting that Rebel News exposed the story, a small right wing news service that didn’t qualify for govt subsidies for news outlets.
Interesting? It is shocking that anything good can come out from ‘unofficial’ sources.
I take that as sarcasm. Apparently at least five people didn’t. Rebel News is routinely described as right wing for not hewing to the left wing slant of most Canadian mainstream media and the Trudeau government and instead asking and reporting what people think and say about events. If you’re not left, you’re right it seems, now that the formerly liberal centre has been effectively obliterated from public discourse in Canada.
The same in Australia. Except that what people actually think seems impossible to gauge: Daniel Andrews was re-elected in Victoria to become our longest serving premier. I cannot unsee his smirk.
Canada’s entire media ecosystem is predominantly left to extreme left so this is not surprising. Until very recently Trudeau has enjoyed a very cozy relationship with the media, particularly the CBC which is entirely propped up by tax payer dollars and can’t be classed as journalism in any true sense. However, given how instantly this rattled the Jewish community across the country, there’s no version where this is some sort of right wing plot against him. This calls out incompetence and rank hypocrisy in its truest sense as Trudeau has pivoted to the Nazi slur against Canadians to great effect in the past.
It’s been reported that Hunka’s grandchildren, who probably don’t have full knowledge of their grandfather’s past, approached his MP, who happened to be the House speaker. If it was the speaker’s choice to call Hunka a war hero (a Canadian one even!), he’s guilty of overblown rhetoric and carelessness, but the government was disturbingly careless as well.
Because lefty idiots dominating academia in the West present Communism as good and Fash**m as bad.
And obviously telling lies about about all “right minded people” fighting the latter.
So it never occurred to lefty idiots in Canadian government to consider that for some people fighting Communism is patriotic endeavour.
almost nobody is presenting communism as good lol
Yes, it is nuanced. And charity is required in understanding Mr Hunka’s motives. But does the same apply to Prime Minister Trudeau? He deserves that very same same charity which he dished out last week to the tens of thousands of pro-family protesters when he slandered them as being motivated by “hate”.
Given that the Ukrainians were on the receiving end of Soviet genocide a decade before the Holocaust commenced, it’s not surprising that the Germans were viewed as the lesser or two evils.
And the crushing of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
Yes, it is obvious to anyone who knows real history of the region.
Unfortunately, universities in the West are infested with far left.
What should be done with infestation?
Wokes see the world in black and white (in many senses of the phrase) and are unable to see moral nuance.
They sit in judgement from their soft chairs in 2023, condemning white men from history while understanding nothing of the world.
Soft people with soft lives condemning those who lived in unimaginably harsh times who had to make impossible choices.
It is not ‘impossible’ to decide not to join the SS, especially after they had committed so many genocides in 2 years of occupation of your country – a period you later described as the happiest in your life.
The author makes good points but none of them detract from the joy I experienced at the spectacle of an opportunistic, woker than thou Canadian politician’s (already a crowded field) attempt at virtue signalling biting him on the caboose.
The principle of “Absolute Good and Absolute Evil” totally commands the Western media.
Does it ever. It’s like we’re children.
A disappointing piece from the usually very astute and perceptive Harrington. For the issue here is not at all the moral status of Yaroslav Hunka, who was caught up in the sort of hideous world-historical catch-22 which would have presented any of us, had we found ourselves in such a situation, with an impossible moral conundrum, but rather the mindless idiocy of Canadian parliamentarians virtually falling over each other to give a standing ovation to somebody who they had just been told had fought in the Second World War against the Russians. A display of virtue signalling which could have been avoided if they had just asked themselves the very obvious question: on whose side then was he in fact fighting? Or perhaps we have to assume the parliamentarians in question are utterly clueless about 20th century history; but that shames Canada just as much, for electing a bunch of such ignorant obsequious virtue-signalling clowns in the first place.
Sorry, Canadian parliamentarians are trained seals who applaud when they are told to. Asking them to ‘ask questions’ is like asking the seals to ask questions. Lower the bar please.
People get elected because they are good at self-promotion, crave power and have a thick skin.
Being clueless about WW2 is a very mild failing for MPs.
Try the consequences of Clare O’Neil’s spectacular technology illiteracy only matched by her chirpy hubris.
Clare O’Neil was appointed as Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security and Home Affairs (no less) on 1 June 2022.
Clare O’Neil may, or may not have unleashed state-sponsored cyber-terrorism on planet Earth late 2022 with her harebrained hack-back idea*. She is a beautiful blonde who evidently knows how to cash in on the halo-effect of her appearance and her evidently fortunate origins. She has been the MP for my electorate since 2013 in Melbourne.
Coincidentally I have been devastated by ongoing, unpunished crimes, including government-grade cyber-crimes against me by a stalker ex-coworker whom I never even dated since 2009. The stalker has criminal Victoria Police officer accomplices who flash their uniforms participating in the stalker’s crimes in broad daylight. Clare O’Neil ignored my pleas for help. I am only a taxpayer, she risks nothing by ignoring people like me.
The fact that Australia never had functional law-enforcement, we only have corrupt police who are at best as clueless about crime-fighting as Ms O’Neil is about anything technology while Australia faked its way into Five Eyes, AUKUS, etc. does not bode well for industrialised countries.
We may look back on the vacuous wokeness of Justin Trudeau and co with nostalgia in the not too distant future.
* https://www.itnews.com.au/news/australia-sets-up-100-strong-permanent-operation-to-target-hackers-587691
Mary, your analysis is interesting and thought provoking but in the modern age and the speed with which we travel from one crisis to another what this demonstrates is the Trudeau government can’t even complete the most basic of tasks like vetting parliamentary guests. The whole affair is completely symbolic of the utter incompetence on display everyday by Justin. No more analysts needed than that. The days of being charitable to thus government are long gone.
‘Hunka suggests that German occupation wasn’t as much of an improvement over the Soviet kind as they had hoped, but at least fewer people seemed to be sent to Siberia.’
Perhaps because the Ukrainians were being used as slave labour by the German ‘liberators’ that Hunka was so keen to fight for.
‘He recounts that Germany was reputed to be a highly civilised country; no one, he recalls, understood why so many Jews seemed to be fleeing this beacon of light.
How many Ukrainian Jews were murdered by Germans before Hunka decided to join the Waffen-SS?
Hunka only thought the Germans were highly civilised because they were killing Poles and killing Ukrainian political opponents – ‘Every day we looked impatiently towards the Pomeranians, hoping that those mystical German knights who were so kicking the hated Poles in the balls would appear any minute. ‘ ‘The Führer immediately showed his intentions towards Ukraine by liquidating the provisional Ukrainian government in Lviv and sending Ukrainian leaders to concentration camps.’
That assumes absolute clarity of information, updated in real time, during WW2 on the eastern front. Since we don’t know exactly what’s happening in Ukraine now, that seems unlikely.
Hunka described the two years of German occupation of Ukraine, where genocide was carried out on a vast scale , and 2 million Ukranians were used as slave labour as ‘the happiest years of my life’
Ok fair enough, that’s hard to explain away
No it is not.
Read my reply to Steven.
But in the 30s Ukrainians were genocided by Russia.
So slave labour of 2 millions might look an improvement on genocide of 5 million.
Only people living in the comfort of the West, protected by USA can pontificate the way you do.
I think it was the case that the Germans were focused on rounding up/killing the leaders and supporters of the Soviet regime, that is if the Ukrainians did not get to them first
Good points, but you say this from the perspective of 80 years or so.
From a perspective of Ukrainian nationalists, Poland was no more and genocidal Russia was being attacked by Germany.
What was Ukrainian choice at that time?
There were many in uk government in 40s who wanted accommodation with Germany.
What do you think would happen to British Jews?
Sorry to say this but the image of the British public as offering a safe haven to the threatened Jewish people is a post WW2 media twist on the facts. I grew up with the teaching at school,and reinforced by tv and even novels etc that we British people loved the Jews and if only more of them could have escaped in time they could all have come and lived here. But the truth is,ha,more NUANCED. Actually Jewish immigration to Britain was very unpopular and made as difficult for them as possible. This is the sad truth. The British working class was mildly anti-Semitic,it varies but the main view was as ever,they’ll come here,take our houses,take our jobs. The British Aristocracy was loaded through.with strong anti- semitism.
They didn’t hate Jews,they knew many charming artists,singers etc who were Jewish. But one due not marry them etc. The upper classes knew about the camps and some …it was a narrow band of the British population who cared about the plight of the Jews. That was the educated middle class and many of them Quakers.
“fewer people seemed to be sent to Siberia.”, which would anyway have been quite difficult for the germans who never controlled any siberian territory AFAIK.
“ no one, he recalls, understood why so many Jews seemed to be fleeing this beacon of light. ” really, are we supposed to believe Hauka was so naive? See here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lviv_pogroms_(1941) ? To complicate the picture a bit more let me mention the Nazi enabled UPA of Stefan Bandera whom are responsible for genocide of 100 000 ethnic Poles. Bandera is a national hero in Ukraine whom statues are erected and after whom streets are named! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera_monument_in_Lviv
For as much as I respect Harrington, she completely missed the point here, in my opinion. An array of officially acclaimed Ukrainian heroes, who led ethnic pogroms and collaborated with Nazis is far too long – and Hunka is indeed one of them. This is rather a disagrace, than a nuanced story, given the testimonies of Hunka himself.
But Britain and USA collaborated with Soviet Russia.
Russian killed tens of thousands of Polish officers, civil servants and university professors in Katyn and other places and deported over million to gulags.
Obviously it doesn’t bother you?
As a Polish citizen whose family was deported from the then Polish Vilnius by the Soviets, the massacre in Volhynia, instigated by Bandera and his organization, bothers me just as much as what the Soviets did in Katyn. What bothers me as well is that neither side took full responsibility for those crimes, while Bandera remains a Ukrainian hero. And, by no means do I mean that all Ukrainians acted this way or that all Poles were crystal clear – there were scoundrels on each side. What I see though, is a disconcerting pattern here. And, given the fact that Hunka served in the 14th Division of the Waffen SS, that was officially recognised as a criminal organisation in Nuremberg – as its members hunted down Poles and Jews – applauding him by a democratically elected body bothers me just as well.
I am reminded of when Pres Clinton announced his new Chair of JCS as an ethnic Ukrainian whose parents fought against the Soviets in WW2. until it was pointed out that meant they were our enemies.
History is complicated and many people are stupid or of ill will.
Are you stupid enough to actually believe that?
Clinton was probably, along with Obama, the smartest US president since WW2.
You are talking about Trump levels of idiocy here.
35 downvotes but nobody willing to make an argument for Trump’s intelligence or Dubya’s wisdom.
The silence is deafening!
Well, Clinton was a moron and women molester who allowed growth of China and globalisation to detriment of both USA and wider West.
Obama was similarly moronic dopehead president who invented his life story as black man.
Whereas he was brought up by white side of his family when his drunkard father died in a car accident in Africa.
Obama was an idiot, who ignored renewed imperialism of Russia and China, while doing nothing to stop German and French appeasement of Putin.
So reason for downvotes are obvious.
You are moron like your heroes Clinton and Obama.
Most people on here can not be bothered to engage with you because it is a waste of time.
Germans also briefly occupied Kiev at the end of the 1st World War in 1918 and were seen as reasonable and well-organised.
Moreover, the city changed hands repeatedly over a short time as described in the novel ‘White Guard’ by Bulgakov and the people yearned for an end to the chaos and unpredictability.
Hence, many Ukrainians in 1941 who loathed the Soviets, naively thought the Germans would be like the previous leaders. They were of course sadly mistaken.
Nevertheless, there was also a very strong strain of anti-semitism in most of the nationalist movements in Eastern Europe and many of the population gladly helped the Nazis do their work.
Indeed, many of the staff at extermination camps outside Ukraine (eg Treblinka) were Ukrainians and the Germans affected concern/amazement at their brutality and ‘terrible behaviour ‘.
The history of Eastern Europe was in many ways far more bloodstained and fraught than that of Western Europe at the time and explains the divergence of ideas since EU enlargement.
Thank you for this. Why in the world can we not get a nuanced perspective like this in Canada’s regime media? It’s very discouraging. Even if everyone disagrees with the author, it’s important to have more information.
Interestingly enough, and in line with applauding a former Waffen SS Ukrainian soldier, another national Ukrainian hero, Bohdan Khmelnystsky, instigated mass murders of several dozens of thousands of Jews during his uprising (1648-1657). By the same token, Stepan Bandera is yet another Ukrainian “hero” whose organisation was responsible for mass pogroms of Poles in Volhynia (c. 40-60 000). Not only did he collaborate with the Nazis, but also, he’s still deemed as a national hero by many in Ukraine. It’s quite an unsettling pattern to be honest – and it has nothing to do with the lack of “unambiguously good choices.”
Yes, you are right.
But extermination of Polish officers and professionals in Katyn by Russia, did not stop Britain and USA to collaborate with Stalin.
Reality is that Ukraine had no good choices.
Hitler was considered lesser of the bad ones.
It would be terrible for the world, but if Hitler was sensible dictator he would have armed Ukrainians and most likely defeated Soviet Russia.
Why did Hitler not arm the ukies then. Did he guess they were treacherous and unreliable and useless too.
That he would fight the Soviets makes sense.
That as a young man, barely out of HS and from another country, in an age before the internet or even TV or even universal phone service, he would not know about what the Nazi’s were doing. Heck, most of the west had no real idea the extent of the German atrocities. That is understandable.
The question to be asked is; As a soldier what did he do? What acts did he engage in, when and where?
Because regardless of his initial motivations, if he engaged in herding Jews onto trains or mass killings in cities and towns, or he engaged in persecuting Gypsies and others, then regardless of his initial motiviations, he committed war crimes.
As soldiers, we have an obligation to not participate in atrocities if we see them. We have an obligation to follow the laws of war.
Many in the East were conscripted by the Germans. Disobeying an order would mean death. Many did bad things just to stay alive. Your demise would seriously affect your families chances of living through the horror. Do you condemn the Jews who fed their dead brethren into the ovens – They were just staying alive (Many until it was their turn to be ‘despatched’.) Ever been shot at? Ever bled from a bullet wound? Do you understand the term “Under Duress”?
Membership in the SS was voluntary, everywhere. You could be conscripted into the Heer, but not into the Waffen-SS.
So why just a year ago was an old lady of about 98 on oxygen forced to go into a court every day and why was this frail very old lady convicted as a vicious war criminal when she was recruited to keep the accounts at a c.canp. every day she wrote in a ledger the names of the people who had been removed. No one spoke a word in her defense. She was a young woman.It was a job. They made her do it. Etc. No nuancing going on there. Someone once asked why they didnt try the train drivers at Nuremberg. They knew where they were going. But they answered their own question.
The USA realised they had to draw a line somewhere or pretty much every German citizen would be in court. And it would have made their whole trial process so unpopular the German public (who liked to pretend they knew nothing) would have turned against it and the court age it’s verdicts have lost authority
Well, the 14th Waffen SS-Galizien Grenadier Division, where Hunka served, was recognized by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as a criminal organization.
To my knowledge, it was the Waffen-SS in general that was deemed a criminal organisation, there was no differentiation by individual units. Also, it was more in the nature of a preliminary finding rather than judgement – essentially, as a member of the organisation, you’d have to prove your innocence. But tribunals proper were held against individuals, not organisations.
True for the entire Waffen SS, the Galizien division, however, was notorious for hunting down Polish communities. To some extent, its members participated in the massacres in Volhynia and in several other pogroms in Western Ukraine. Let’s not underplay those facts.
Yes, the same tribunal which, at instigation of Russia, tried to blame Katyn massacre on the Germans.
Yes Waffen SS was criminal organisation but uk and USA collaborated with mass murderers of Russia in ww2, so why to blame single soldier for collaborating with Germany?
Victor’s justice.
Let me just remind that we’re discussing applauding a former Waffen SS soldier by Canadian parliament. The tragic story of Katyn has absolutely nothing to do with that.
Quite.
The Nazis despised the Prussian officers who headed the Wehrmacht, and Hitler was consistently frustrated that he could not do without generals such as Rundstedt, Arnim, or Manstein, who firmly believed in the laws of war. He tried to promote generals such as Rommel and Kesselring, who were from middle class backgrounds, but they too believed in the laws of war.
The Waffen-SS was an effort to create an elite fighting force that was committed to the “higher” ideals of Nazism, who would understand that middle class and upper class notions needed to be sacrificed to create the New Germany.
Do you mean as Germans did?
There is documentary, based on a book, about Hamburg battalion 501 of special police.
One of many established to genocide Jewish population of newly conquered territories.
Very few of them were punished after ww2.
Both uk and USA etc turned blind eye to Germans crimes.
So why should we use different criteria to judge this guy life?
So we should ‘understand” this man but not the old lady from a year or so ago.
I think this analysis is spot on.My enemies enemy becomes my friend, then enemy. Between a rock and a hard place indeed. Thanks Mary.
Somehow I doubt Mr. Hunka s losing much sleep over any of this – unless it causes a loss of support for Ukraine, which I expect would upset him.
The entire Canadian Parliament has just given a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old Nazi collaborator, but so many of the same SS Division ended up in Britain that, for example, on Sunday 16th November 2014, there was a march in their honour from Trafalgar Square to the Cenotaph, where a wreath was laid. To a Division of the SS. At the Cenotaph. One week after Remembrance Sunday.
One of my neighbours as a child was a Ukrainian who had fought against the Soviets in the Waffen SS. Elderly and unrepentant he saw himself as a patriot. Moral judgements of this kind are easy to make especially when you haven’t had to make one.
How far east does this begin? You would not say it of a French collaborator.
There is a chapel near Lockerbie which was built by members of that 14th SS Division. And now it is both a historic building and a place to serve current Ukrainian refugees.
https://www.scottishconstructionnow.com/articles/ukrainian-chapel-undergoing-ps80k-renovation-to-serve-refugees
Just bear in mind that the Canadian parliament – including a rapturous President Zelensky – applauded not this nuanced story, but the black-and-white portrayal presented by the Speaker.
Bear in mind also that it was Hunka’s successors in ideology who threatened to string Zelensky up by one of the trees of central Kiev if he insisted on implementing the platform of peace on which the people of Ukraine elected him by a thumping majority. And sure enough, he didn’t.
I agree, this would have been a “teaching moment” – especially how the aspirations of the Ukrainian people have been instrumentalised and exploited by outside powers, from the Kaiser’s government when they first created an independent Ukraine in the Peace of Brest-Litovsk to secure Ukraine’s grain, to the Soviets who deliberately created a toxic mix of ethnicities to blunt Ukrainian nationalism, to WW II Germany which leveraged Ukrainians’ hatred of the Soviets, to the US and NATO today.
Nobody accuses the Finns for being national socialists despite them fighting alongside Germany against the communists.
That’s becauseFinland never displayed any sympathy for National Socialism and indeed remained a democratic state throughout the war; because there were no Finns in SS units; because Finland did not participate in the Holocaust; and because Finland later joined the allies in fighting Germany.
This is an incredibly naive article that ignores history in its sympathy for Ukraine.
Ukrainian nationalism was stained by anti-semitism and indeed anti-Polish feeling well before the 1930s; Anna Reid’s excellent history of Ukraine ‘Borderland’, which is very sympathetic to the Ukrainian nation, shows that progroms and persecution of the Jews blighted Ukrainian attempts to assert their nationhood from Khmelnytsky onwards.
During the War, Ukrainian SS volunteers executed Polish civilians and there was extensive participation by Ukrainians in the Holocaust.
The appalling nature of Putin’s regime and its crimes in Ukraine now should not lead to any revisionist view of the Second World War or exculpate the perpetrators of the crimes of the period.
German war criminals (Barbie most obviously) and Nazi sympathisers escaped justice after the War because of the West’s preoccupation with resisting communism.This was wrong and undermined the moral and ideological case against the Soviet Union.We should not repeat this mistake.
Thank you for this enlightening article. I couldn’t understand what was going on and what the fuss was about.
Thank you for this article, nuance still stuggles on.
I find it astonishing that no one in the Canadian parliament realised that they were applauding someone who fought for the Nazis.
How many people know about the Waffen SS?
How many people know that they recruited from all over Europe including Ukrainians, Danes, Dutch, Belgian, Italians, Swedes, Swiss and apparently even some Brits.
The grasp of history by supposedly educated people is astonishingly bad.
Many people in the Baltic Countries faced the same problem, extermination by the Soviets 1939 to 1941, invasion by Germans in 1941, then return of Soviets in 1944.
In the Ukraine it suffered from the Soviets when it tried to become independent in the 1920s and Holodomor when millions starved to death.
Holodomor – Wikipedia
One issue is that those who aided the KGB were often killed in revenge when the Nazis invaded.
Thank you for this thoughtful, historically and morally nuanced reflection. Decontextualized and dehumanized analyses of past “wrongs” fail to capture the complexity of history and the people swept up in it.
Exactly. Thanks and thanks for the thanks. If only it were so simple to identify the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. We remember that the Finns sided with the Nazis because they more or less had to — the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Right now the Patriarchy, the Christians and … the Muslims(!) are making common cause against the Genderwankers, so thereyago.
Alliance with Muslims?
Like alliance with Soviet Russia it is not promising.
There was that uproar in 2019 in Birmingham over Muslim children attending LGBTQetc lessons. It was soon buried by COVID, which concealed a climbdown by the education authorities. Some Christian activists turned up to support the Muslim parents. But the multiple potential ideological muddles in such opportunistic alliances were hilariously illustrated by one local activist who declared that he was 100% opposed to both homophobia and Islamophobia….
https://news.sky.com/story/parents-permanently-banned-from-protesting-lgbt-lessons-outside-school-11870548
Canada’s current regime would actually provide a better match to Kiev’s ultranationalist neo-Fascists than the US Democrats, but the latter are doing more than enough with their long-running affinity with the likes of Azov.
The point that is missed is that Canada’s liberals are constantly accusing people who disagree with them Nazis. While the real Nazis are cavorting among THEM.
Its NOT his Naziness 50 years ago that’s the issue of Trudeau’s ever contemptible hypocrisy.
Mary is dead right. There are many thousands of men who fought alongside the Germans in WW2 for the same reason, and who could blame them? If the Russians are brutalising your whole community and the Germans roll in and oppose them, what do you do? Take time out for consciousness raising or information gathering?
Superb article. These insights need to be aired more frequently.
‘Bloodlands’ by Timothy Snyder provides a compelling, documented account of the plight of civilians between the Soviets and Nazis from the 30’s through the end of WWII. It supports Harrington’s points.
For those who hold that Soviet depravity was somehow preferable to Nazi depravity, it will be hard to read. They differed in whom they chose to murder, but they both succeeded in killing millions.
I’m a big fan of Ms Harrington’s articles but I’m not sure I understand the purpose of this article. I mean it’s obvious to anyone with a reasonable degree of critical thinking abilities that dividing the world into Goodies and Baddies is in most cases quite complicated. The fact that this is the case of the mass-media’s narrative today (unlike Unherd) it’s just because most of it it’s propaganda.
And one more thing: it’s not true that sometimes there are no unambigously good choices. I disagree, there’s always a good choice (just think of the SS policemen described in Ordinary Men) it’s just that it takes a lot of courage to chose it.
I do wonder whether commenters wouldn’t be more sympathetic to Harringtons point of view if it wasn’t quite so pleasing to be able to lambast that idiot Trudeau for something that is currently totally acceptable to revile.
Thank goodness we have UnHerd. No other form of media would be brave enough to publish this nuanced view. I feel that I now have a better understanding of the tensions that existed during that time between Germany, Ukraine and Russia.
To my mind, the difference between the Soviets killing their citizens and the Nazis killing Jews is that the former was based on an imposed ideology (however cruelly implemented) and the latter on racial identity.
I’m not accepting a word of this nonsense. Prior to reading this id been listening to The Happiest Man on Earth on Audible. It’s an account of being in Buchenwald by someone.who.survived it. I know that if I’d been back then I would have been rated subhuman. He was just a lost confused boy. He was in the Waffen SS. I know that life in Soviet countries back then was grim but how is it then that the you tubers I follow who live in those countries now have land,family land,delightfully scruffy farms or homesteads. They have orchards. They live The Good Life in a way we can’t afford to. We in the.free,prosperous West. Of course the people who booked the old guy to appear knew about his past. Unless the Canadian education system is so dire it doesn’t even teach you how to do research. They applauded vociferously because they wanted to impress that thief Zelensky. It’s ironic that a Jew was hailing a Nazi as a hero of liberation. Doing the triumphant power fist. What a villain. This must be the most egregious example so far of history being rewritten. Do they think we’re stupid. The answer is pretty obvious. To put on record I don’t like Ukranians,and I don’t have to. No one HAS to like me. I dont care about the territory they occupy which has always been a part of Russia and DNA wise they are the same people. All descended from.the wide ranging Vikings,the first in history to establish slavery as a business on an industrial scale. Not nice people.
“The world is often an ugly place, where sometimes there are no unambiguously good choices”
The argument over passing ethical-historical judgement is an old and fiery one, Lord Acton, in his inagural lecture at Cambridge in 1895 memorably exhorted his students to –
“never.. debase the moral currency or lower the standard of rectitude, but try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.”
We must beware of casting the baby out with the bathwater. No historical actions are without context, neither are they free of influence. But Good and Evil, right and wrong still remain.
Ms Harrington exprersses something close to the classic Historicist position here. A position which seems at odds with her other output which strains after objective, shared values.
This is my original thought as well. I think people forget that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invaded Poland together.
And another little fact, the Soviet Union starved to death 30M (opps 3.5- 7.5M , or more) Ukrainians.
Its not surprising that people in Ukraine joined the SS(special service, like the French Foreign Legion).
All I have to say is, its a good thing Hitler belief structure led him not to take advantage of such divide and conquer opportunities.
Agreed.
Utterly and reprehensibly wrong.
Next question?