OTTAWA – Several Jewish advocacy organizations condemned members of Parliament on Sunday for giving a standing ovation to a man who fought for a Nazi unit during the Second World War.
During Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Ottawa on Friday, MPs honoured 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka in the House of Commons.
Hunka was invited by Speaker Anthony Rota, who introduced him as a war hero who fought for the First Ukrainian Division.
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The First Ukrainian Division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division or the SS 14th Waffen Division, a voluntary unit that was under the command of the Nazis.
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies issued a statement Sunday saying the division “was responsible for the mass murder of innocent civilians with a level of brutality and malice that is unimaginable.”
Why is this being downvoted? He was literally part of the SS. He was in a Ukrainian division that voluntarily worked with the Nazis. On the one hand, it’s understandable that you might get confused by the name because if you’re not aware of the connection then it sounds innocent. On the other hand, did no one do any screening of the event to ensure they wouldn’t be calling on a former member of the SS to be honored?
I was skeptical of it too at first, most of the media reporting on it so far are right wing chuds. So everybody is still in denial and assuming it must be some kind of an op.
It’s not, it’s real, the Speaker invited a man who fought for Nazi Germany into the House, and somehow every layer of the LPC did not remember who fought against the Russians in WW2.
The speaker issued an apology this afternoon.
Complete absolute morons.
Apparently the speaker made the decision without consulting too many people.
This has to be a hit job right. The speaker is a political science major whose worked in politics his whole career. How is this considered a mistake or incompetence because it should be seen as purposefully done I think
It’s his own party that’s in government, so I’m not sure what the motive would be.
He was probably in college 40 years ago and I’m not sure how much military history is involved in that major, so I don’t find it implausible he and a few select staffers wouldn’t realise. Going by the ones I’ve interacted with politicians are salespeople, not academics.
Uh, how has he not been tried as a war criminal? Damn.
The answer (which I do not necessarily endorse) is that the Canadian government decided this particular division was not guilty, back in 1986:
The Galicia Division (14. Waffen grenadier division der SS [gal. #1]) should not be indicted as a group. The members of Galicia Division were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada. Charges of war crimes of Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this Commission. Further, in the absence of evidence of participation or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.
So if he was found not guilty isn’t there no issue here?
A reminder “not guilty” isn’t “innocent”, especially when there’s fog of war involved. The dude was still in the Waffen SS.
Well, as far as I know, he was never personally investigated, but the division was, and they didn’t find any conclusive evidence.
Either way, surely they could have found someone who didn’t fight the Allies during WWII to make an appearance?
Yeah. This is a major gaffe. I’ve seen the odd post villanizing this dude in particular, which I’m not sure is called for. (I don’t know it’s not, but I’m hesitant to yell at a 90 year old over what uniform they wore when they were younger than I am now.) Regardless of who the dude is or was though, it’s a bad look, and they do deserve to be called out on the eminently stupid oversight to not to the bare minimum of research before choosing someone to bring in.
Do they not do any research at all before these kinds of events? This is incredibly badly judged.
Yeah everybody is talking about the soldier and the unit he was in and what they may have done and whether he should be shunned for fighting for the nazis. (Imo yes). But really it’s more egregious that there is so little oversight that something like this can happen, because they certainly wouldn’t have done it if they had KNOWN that he swore an oath to Hitler. It really isn’t that hard to think about looking into. It’s embarrassing that our government goofed like this.
What gets me is that the timing is so critical too. If you have this huge visit from zelensky I would have thought there would be tight scrutiny over honoring Nazis 😂
Opposite problem. He was a Ukrainian who fought against the Russians in WW2. Obviously some moron in North Bay thought “oh, we should celebrate our guy when the heroic Ukrainian president who fought the Russians comes!”
If Zelenskyy had never come, this debacle wouldn’t have happened.
Trudeau probably pulled a lot of strings to get Zelenskyy to come and endorse him. That was probably not a trivial bit of political work. And now, instead of Zelenskyy’s visit and celebration of Trudeau’s support for Ukraine and opposition to tyranny, the story is this mess instead.
Whoops…
It’s 1943. You are an Ukrainian lad in an area that your country lost in another senseless conflict, the Polish-Soviet war. You are eighteen years old, with limited knowledge of the world around you. The only thing you are certain of is that you hate the Polish, because they’ve been oppressing you in the area you’ve called your land since birth. A second class citizen in your own home. The elderly spoke of times when it sucked marginally less. The Empire, long gone in another great conflict. And then the Russians came and got their filthy hands on whatever the Polish did not. Stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The Polish got subjugated by the Nazi Reich, and just two years prior they’ve occupied the area you live in. You’ve seen their tanks roll in. Their planes fly overhead. Their troops marching in unison. From your point of view it was liberation. Things were sucking marginally less in East Galicia again.
However the rest of your country was still under Soviet rule. And the grip on it getting ever stronger. Stalin and his Communists want to absorb it completely into their machine as the bread basket of their empire. Food for the whole nation! For everyone, but your motherland. Or so you’ve heard. The elders tell of the great famine a decade ago.
The news papers warn of the evil that is the communists on every headline. You can’t help but feel some sense of urgence to do something about it. You are full of energy and rage! You’ve been slighted! Your people have been slighted!! And suddenly… there it is. The opportunity you’ve been waiting for: “AUFRUF.” reads the paper. A call for Galicia’s Ukrainian youth to take up arms against the Bolsheviks…
Of course. It’s very possible that as a Ukrainian being oppressed, he had good reason to sign up. And his unit was never found guilty of war-crimes.
But he still swore an oath to Hitler. He still served the Nazis. His unit butchered Polish civilians.
Maybe he’s a decent man, maybe he isn’t…
But SS soldiers don’t get to be heroes, particularly not on Parliament. Them’s the breaks.
Not found to be guilty of war crimes, but with many accusations and with a record of murdering civilians.
Wonderful.
But that’s clearly not the case here. We arent just talking about a Banderista here, we are talking about a SS member
Dude’s SS. Nazi apologism doesn’t really work when the SS was directly and willingly involved in many war crimes.
This might make more sense if the Ukrainian group who entered Lyiv with the nazis to declare an independent Ukraine weren’t immediately arrested and interned into a concentration camp, followed by the murder of 4 million Ukrainians and deportation and enslavement of millions more. I think the guy was just a nazi.
