Ninety-eight-year-old Ukrainian Nazi veteran Yaroslav Hunka, who fought in the ranks of the Schutzstaffel’s (SS) 14th Waffen Grenadier Division, was enthusiastically hailed by Canadian lawmakers and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The incident triggered a wave of fierce criticism, prompting House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota to apologize for featuring a Nazi soldier in the Canadian legislature.
Sputnik reached out to Dr. Efraim Zuroff, a legendary Nazi hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the director of its Israel Office, to ask why the scandalous honoring of a Nazi became possible in a modern Western state.
"It's no secret that hundreds, at least hundreds, if not thousands of people who committed Holocaust crimes and/or collaborated with the Nazis were able to emigrate to Canada," Dr. Zuroff told Sputnik. "And by the way, Canada is not a unique situation. Ten thousand Nazi war criminals emigrated to the United States, thousands to Australia, Great Britain, and in fewer numbers to New Zealand."
Dr. Zuroff is unfamiliar with the particular case of Yaroslav Hunka, but it is still well known that the Waffen SS Galicia Division was "very involved in the mass murder of Jews and Poles in eastern Poland and Galicia," he pointed out.
"And it's a very sad thing that the heroes, the leadership of the Ukrainian nationalists during World War II, which was headed by Stepan Bandera, for example and the UPA*, the army raised by the Ukrainians to fight with the Germans, with the Waffen SS, which was led by Roman Shukhevych, these are the heroes of Ukraine," the Nazi hunter highlighted.
Nazi Collaborators' Crimes Remain Overlooked
It is common knowledge that Nazi Germany played the lead role in the Holocaust – the systematic state-sponsored killing of European Jews in the Second World War. Still, Westerners are not fully aware of the incredibly important role played by local collaborators in the mass murder of the Jewish people, according to Dr. Zuroff.
Nazi Germany's Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units organized by the SS (tasked with the "final solution of the Jewish question, i.e. the genocide of the ethnic group), "covered an area from Tallinn in the north of Estonia, all the way down to Odessa, near the Black Sea, a front of 1,500 kilometers, and murdered 1.5 million, primarily Jews, in less than two years," the expert said.
"There were only several thousand people who served in the Einsatzgruppen, and they were working in territory, which they didn't know the language, they didn't know the topography. They needed help from the locals," he explained, adding that this help was provided. "And they're [locals] the ones who carried out these murders, in many cases without any Germans present. We know in Lithuania, for example, that there were less than a thousand Germans in Lithuania. In Lithuania, there were 220,000 Jews who lived under the Nazi occupation, of whom 212,000 were murdered, 90% of them by shooting near their homes."
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Much in the same way, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)* led by Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych collaborated with Germans and were involved in the genocide of the Jewish people and other ethnic minorities on the territory of the Nazi-occupied Ukrainian Soviet Republic.
In particular, the Nachtigall Battalion, consisting almost exclusively of OUN-B activists serving in German uniforms under Shukhevych's command, carried out mass shootings of Jews near Vinnitsa in July 1941. At least 58 pogroms were documented in western Ukrainian cities, the estimated number of victims of which range between 13,000 and 35,000. On September 29-30, 1941, Nazi forces and their Ukrainian collaborators executed nearly 34,000 Jews in Babi Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.
People lay flowers at the monument at the Babi Yar national historical and memorial park during a commemorative rally.
© Sputnik . Grigoriy Vasilenko
/ From 1943 and until the arrival of the Soviet Red Army, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators also carried out massive ethnic cleansings of Poles in Volhynia and Galicia which claimed the lives of at least 88,700 people, including women, children, and the elderly.
Why Did Canada Fail to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice?
"I myself have found 250 suspected Nazi war criminals whose names were submitted to the Canadian government. Once the Canadian government set up a special unit, which they did, to bring Nazis to justice in Canada. In Canada, there was a very, very horrible history in terms of the efforts to prosecute Nazis," said Dr. Zuroff.
To illustrate his point, the expert referred to the case of Hungarian gendarme Imre Finta, who was responsible for the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Finta evaded justice in Canadian court since he said he had no choice but to carry out the orders of his higher-ranking Nazi commanders. Previously, the so-called "superior order's defense" was not accepted anywhere when it came to Nazi crimes. But it worked in Canada, according to Dr. Zuroff. After the verdict was approved by the Ontario Supreme Court, it became clear that many former Nazi collaborators would use the same sort of defense to evade punishment.
Even though Canada later resorted to stripping some former Nazis of Canadian citizenship, it failed to deport many of the Einsatzgruppen veterans while a powerful Ukrainian diaspora of former OUN-UPA members continued to thrive in the country.
Glorification of Nazism is Unacceptable
"We don't know who's alive now, and we've frankly given up. To be honest, once [member of the Einsatzgruppen death squads Helmut] Oberlander died in his home, unfortunately, in his bed [in Canada], even though he served in an Einsatzgruppe that murdered 90,000 Jews in southern Ukraine, we're not sure that there are more. There might be others. We don't know specifically any others that I can point to. All I can say is the Canadian government failed miserably to do what it had to do, what it should have done. And Australia failed miserably. Britain failed miserably," said Dr. Zuroff.
He lamented the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a Jewish-born Ukrainian, supports honoring Nazi criminals.
"I have to say that President Zelensky, even though he is a Jew, he was born a Jew, he's not much of a Jew, he supports the glorification of people who committed war crimes against his own people."
"How can you glorify people who are mass murderers? What do you think Jews feel, how do you think the Poles feel, when someone like Shukhevych is turned into a national hero, and Bandera, and others? These people fought with the Nazis for a victory of the Third Reich, the most genocidal regime in human history. And therefore, they cannot be heroes," the Nazi hunter said.
In Denial of Their Crimes: Nations Want Comfortable History
Per Dr. Zuroff, Speaker Anthony Rota's decision to feature a Nazi soldier in the Canadian Parliament could have been caused by total ignorance, but nonetheless it's a "horrible thing."
"They're supporting the wrong people," the Simon Wiesenthal Center expert said. "They are the ones who are promoting what we call ‘Holocaust distortion.’ Everybody knows about Holocaust denial. In other words, that the Shoah, the Holocaust, didn't take place. But there's a new threat to memory, commemoration, and education, which is distortion. What does that mean? It means they don't deny that the Holocaust took place, but they change the narrative of what actually happened. So these countries, these new democracies, when they became independent and they became democracies, all of a sudden, all the crimes were committed by the Nazis, and there were almost no locals who helped them, which is a total lie."
"My mentor and my adviser for my master's and doctorate at Hebrew University in Holocaust Studies was Professor Yehuda Bauer. Professor Yehuda Bauer is the most distinguished, most accomplished, most knowledgeable Holocaust historian in the world. And several years ago, he gave a talk about Holocaust distortion. And he said, very simply, ‘Nations want a comfortable and favorable history.’ And if their history is not really, you know, very happy or very good, they make up a different history. So this is exactly what's happening in Ukraine. The people that they are turning into national heroes are mass murderers. And if they murdered Jews, apparently no one cares, or if they murdered Poles, apparently no one cares," Dr. Zuroff concluded.
*The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA*) is an extremist organisation banned in Russia.