On 22 September 2023, Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian Canadian who fought in the SS Division Galicia of the military wing of the Nazi Party, the Waffen-SS, was invited to the House of Commons of Canada to be recognized by Speaker Anthony Rota, the Member of Parliament for Hunka's district. Hunka received two standing ovations from all house members, including Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, other party leaders, and visiting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Hunka's membership in the Waffen-SS was reported initially by The Forward, which quoted a tweet by the academic Ivan Katchanovski.[1] The story was picked up by the Canadian media, receiving international attention.

The incident, seen as a political blunder[2][3] and a scandal, such that it drew comparisons to the most embarrassing moments in Canada's history,[4] was leveraged by the Russian establishment to further its justifications for waging war in Ukraine, which had been started under a pretext of "denazification", among other stated reasons. Rota resigned as speaker five days later, and the House unanimously adopted a motion to condemn Nazism and withdraw its recognition of Hunka. Prime Minister Trudeau and Canadian government officials apologized to the worldwide Jewish community. The handling of suspected World War II war criminals in Canada became a renewed matter of public interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal

[FORWARD - JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.] Editor’s note: This article is part of a years-long project documenting more than 1,600 monuments and streets honoring Nazis and their collaborations across 30 countries.

Two monuments to a Nazi military division with a record of war crimes have been hiding in plain sight in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Detroit. Both honor the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), commonly known as SS Galichina.

Formed in 1943, SS Galichina was a Ukrainian unit in the Waffen-SS — the combat branch of the SS (Schutzstaffel) wing of the Nazi Party. Such units “were heavily involved in the commission of the Holocaust through their participation in mass shootings, anti-partisan warfare, and in supplying guards for Nazi concentration camps,” according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and were “responsible for many other war crimes.” 

Marches and monuments honoring SS Galichina in other nations including Canada have been condemned by Jewish organizations and the governments of Ukraine, Germany and Israel. The Forward has over the last three years documented more than 1,600 monuments, memorials and streets honoring Holocaust perpetrators and Third Reich collaborators in 30 countries.

That includes 42 in 16 U.S. states, almost all of which focus on individual Nazi Party members, SS officers or collaborators. (The sole exception is a memorial to the Russian Liberation Army — a unit of Germany’s armed forces — at a convent in upstate New York.)

One of the newly discovered monuments sits in a Catholic cemetery outside Philadelphia, the other on the side of a Ukrainian credit union building in Warren, Michigan, a city of 140,000 people near Detroit.

Asked about the memorial, the mayor of Warren, James R. Fouts, said, “There’s not even a minute chance that we would support anything like this.”

“We would never allow anything like that to go on public property,” Fouts told me, “but I don’t think we can do much for a monument on private land.”

The Philadelphia-area monument, which is more prominent, was revealed in May on Twitter by Moss Robeson, a researcher of Ukraine’s far-right. Its large stone cross bears SS Galichina’s insignia and the inscriptions “In memory of Ukrainian soldiers” in English and “1st Ukrainian Division” and “Fighters for Ukraine’s freedom” in Ukrainian.

(Shortly before the end of WWII, SS Galichina was renamed the 1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army; many similar memorials use this name rather than the one including SS.)

After this article was initially published, the American Jewish Committee issued a statement calling for the Philadelphia monument’s removal. It noted that in the early days after the fall of communism, some Eastern European countries “saw independence as an opportunity to rehabilitate wartime fascist leaders” but that many have since “come to recognize that this is wrong.”

“We trust our Ukrainian friends and colleagues recognize that this cannot remain,” the group said of the Philadelphia monument. “We look forward to being a resource to our partners as they explore how best to condemn and remove this statue.”

The cross sits in Saint Mary’s Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery in Elkins Park, an unincorporated community of about 7,000 some seven miles from the center of Philadelphia. Officials in the township that includes it did not respond to requests for comment.

Next to the cross are numerous graves of SS Galichina veterans with identical tombstones that include the unit’s SS insignia, which the Anti-Defamation League considers a hate symbol.

The memorial has the year 1993 inscribed in a corner. An almanac published by a veterans’ group to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the unit’s founding said it was erected in 1994, and that the group had begun purchasing 90 burial plots for division veterans in 1987.

In Warren, the memorial consists of a stone tablet of about nine feet near a main street. The front is inscribed with a sword, a dedication to Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American Veterans, and the year 1993; the back states that it was erected by veterans of several military units including the “1st division Ukrainian National Army.”

The monument appears to honor troops on both sides of the war. A Ukrainian-American veterans’ website says it was erected by an entity called “Post 101” for Ukrainians who served in four different groups, including the U.S. Armed Forces and the 1st Division of the Ukrainian Army — aka SS Galichina.

Marie Zarycky, treasurer of the Ukrainian American Civic Committee of Metropolitan Detroit, insisted the tablet is “not commemorating Nazis.”

“We are commemorating young people who lost their lives attempting to get independence for Ukraine,” she told me. “The common Ukrainian young man that joined the division actually worked for Ukrainian independence, not for success of the Nazis.”

In a 2022 speech for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Ellen Germain, special envoy for Holocaust issues at the U.S. State Department, warned of the rehabilitation of collaborators who “are considered national heroes because they fought against Soviet tyranny,” an example of Holocaust distortion.

And Efraim Zuroff, director of Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem branch, said of the SS Galichina, “The bottom line is that these men were fighting for a victory of the most genocidal regime in history.”

The unit was created in 1943 out of recruits from the Galicia region in western Ukraine. The soldiers took an oath of loyalty to Hitler and were trained by the Third Reich. In May 1944, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and one of the main architects of the Holocaust, inspected the division.

“I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles … I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway,” Himmler said during that visit, according to several historical accounts. A few months before, the division had taken part in what historians call the Huta Pieniacka massacre, when SS Galichina subunits burned 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive.

Several years after the end of the war in 1945, thousands of SS Galichina fighters who had surrendered to the Allies were freed and allowed to resettle in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia. The sheer volume of displaced people and postwar chaos made it relatively easy for people to obscure dark pasts and, according to both a 1985 Congressional report and a 2004 CBS article based on declassified documents, U.S. government agencies saw former Nazi collaborators as useful intelligence assets during the Cold War.

These ex-SS Galichina fighters formed veterans’ associations and erected monuments — at least 11 of them in Canada, Australia, Austria and the U.K. have been around for at least 30 years. One, in Feldbach, Austria, had the divisional insignia removed in 2018.

In 2020, B’nai Brith and the Simon Wiesenthal Center called for the removal of those in Edmonton, the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta, and Wayville, a suburb of Toronto, but they both remain standing.

There are also annual marches commemorating SS Galichina in Ukrainian cities including Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk. The ADL condemned a 2018 procession featuring Nazi salutes in Lviv, and in 2021, a march in Kyiv led to denunciations by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Germanand Israeli governments.

The cross in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, and tablet in Warren, Michigan, have been added to the Forward’s list of U.S. monuments to Nazis and Nazi collaborators. We have also recently updated our lists for eight other countries.

Recent additions include:

• Two busts of Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian dictator whose country deported hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, in Csátalja and Szekszárd, Hungary.
• A plaque honoring Lithuanian collaborator Kazys Škirpa, who had advocated for the genocide of his country’s Jews, was erected in Vilnius earlier this year, as documented by the watchdog organization Defending History.

Meanwhile, a giant stone Iron Cross, a Third Reich military honor, was toppled in the Czech Republicthis March by unknown parties in the middle of the night. There have since been community discussions over whether to return the cross to its original location or perhaps display it in a museum.

Also in March, the Austrian city of Linz renamed a street that had honored SS officer Ferdinand Porsche, who built Hitler weapons and whose factories used slave labor.

If you know of Nazi-related monuments or streets not included in our list, or updates on the status of those that are, please email editorial@forward.com, subject line: Nazi monument project.

• On Holocaust Remembrance Day, reflections on 2 years of documenting monuments to Nazi collaborators

https://forward.com/news/558622/ss-galichina-ukraine-nazi-monument-memorial-detroit-elkins-park/

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Howard Margolian. Unauthorized Entry: The Truth about Nazi War Criminals in Canada, 1946-1956. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. viii + 327 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8020-4277-4.

Reviewed by Urs Obrist (University of Toronto)
Published on H-Canada (October, 2002)

Even though the debate on the admission of Nazi war criminals to Canada after World War II seemed to have reached its apex in the mid-1980s, with the investigation of the Jules Deschênes Commission and its inquiries on war criminals, the issue has continued to stir historical interest in the 1990s and beyond.[1] This recent publication by Howard Margolian, Unauthorized Entry, revises the widely held view that Canada has been a safe haven for Nazi war criminals. Margolian is a Canadian historian with a special interest in the history of World War II and Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. As the author of Conduct Unbecoming, he has already shed light on the story of the murder of Canadian POWs in Normandy and the trial and fate of the SS-General Kurt Meyer.[2] In Unauthorized Entry, Margolian challenges and refutes accusations stating that the King and St. Laurent governments had been negligent in the admission of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to Canada. His study concludes that neither the immigration bureaucracy, nor the immigration lobby in Canada, nor the western intelligence community were as responsible for the influx of about 2000 war criminals and collaborators as has been generally assumed. Instead, he argues, the blame is to be put on the war criminals and collaborators who gained entry to Canada by forged identities or by giving false information about their wartime history. The great majority of Nazi war criminals and collaborators who settled in Canada after the Second World War were admitted not on purpose, but as a result of the absence of, or inaccessibility to, information about their wartime activities. Margolian summarizes that, in view of the benefit drawn from the immigration of the 1.5 million immigrants arriving in Canada between 1945 and 1955, it was worth taking the risk and admitting some 2000 war criminals to Canada. 

For the purpose of his book, Margolian defines "war criminal" in a footnote as: 

"any enemy or Allied national who perpetrated crimes against Allied soldiers or civilians during the Second World War. The term 'collaborator', on the other hand, refers to any Allied national who assisted the Germans in maintaining the occupation of conquered territories. Thus, while a western European national who took a job as a clerk at the local German Army headquarters might be considered by some to have been a traitor, such action does not, in my view, rise to the level of betrayal of one's country. The definition posited here requires a more active role, and is therefore limited to persons who enforced German rule in an official capacity, for example as civil administrators, auxiliary police, or volunteers in the German armed forces." (p. 214)

While this definition is acceptable, it might have been helpful to expand in the main text on the definition of these two categories and to explain particularly for the latter element the perception among Canadian immigration officials. It seems safe to say that in many specific cases a strict line of separation between collaborators and non-collaborators was hard to define.[3] This is particularly the case in view of the war-time activities by Balts, Romanians, Croats or Slovaks.

Margolian's first chapter deals with the postwar refugee crisis in Europe. The tumultuous time right after the war allowed Nazi war criminals and collaborators from Eastern Europe to evade justice, disguising themselves as refugees and making their way towards the west. Canada kept itself in the background with regards to a solution of the postwar refugee crisis. Its initial contribution was "limited to providing money for international relief efforts" (p. 20). 

Chapter 2 depicts the various actors involved with "Fortress Canada's" immigration questions. The greatest influence is attributed to Norman Robertson, who held a liberal view on immigration (p. 30). Other important men identified by Margolian include Prime Minister King, who was rather hesitant in 1945 to change immigration restrictions, Hugh Keenleyside, Maurice Pope at the Canadian military mission in Berlin and Morley Scott. It is interesting to note that the immigration branch of the Department of Mines and Resources was run by only four men: Arthur L. Jolliffe, his deputy Charles E. S. Smith, Laval Fortier and George R. Benoit. The immigration bureaucracy, as Margolian points out, gave in only to a very limited partiality. If it existed, "it tended to manifest itself in the formulation of screening criteria aimed at keeping out Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, not communists" (p. 36). This statement is a flat-out rejection of the argument made by David Matas, who in 1987 had stated that Canada was "far more concerned--indeed, obsessed--with screening out Communist sympathizers than suspected Nazi war criminals."[4]

As Margolian argues, a ban on suspected Nazi war criminals seemed unnecessary, since Canada had barred enemy aliens from Canada soon after the declaration of war in 1939. Only in the fall of 1945 did the Canadian government consider a loosening of this ban. Margolian takes a particularly strong stand against the views expressed by critics of the immigration system, such as Rodal or Matas, and emphasises that the criteria did not make it easier for ex-Nazis to enter Canada (p. 40 and p. 234 n. 101). 

The third chapter presents test cases of immigration screening after the war. A particular kind of drôles de guerre is presented with the fate of German POWs in Canada.[5] By 1946, the Canadian government expressed its hope to keep some of the German POWs as farmers and attempted to delay their repatriation. In view of British frustrations about this attitude, Norman Robertson suggested that if Britain would agree to make an equal number of demobilized Poles available, then Canada would honor its commitment to finish repatriating the German POWs. Therewith, Canada's economy would not suffer much from the loss of POW labor (p. 52). The prospect that 4000 Poles--some of whom notably had a record of collaboration with Germany--might be admitted to Canada, while there were still Canadians abroad, posed another dilemma and did not sit well with the Canadian people. Therefore, Norman Robertson worked out a new formula. The only Poles to be barred from admission to Canada would be those members of the 2nd corps who had joined the unit too late to have fought against Germans. Margolian qualifies Alti Rodal's claim, that Polish veterans were not subjected to security screening, as absolutely wrong (p. 244 n. 99). Rather, as far as European refugees were concerned, Canada's system of immigration screening had been put on a solid footing (p. 66).

At the end of 1946, the intensified pressure of business interests and lobby groups led to an increased danger of infiltration by Nazi war criminals and collaborators. Among the major lobbyists, the Canadian Christian Council for Resettlement of Refugees (CCCRR) stands out as an umbrella organization for various German-Canadian immigrant-aid societies. Its goal was to act as a surrogate IRO and bring in as many Volksdeutsche as possible. In November 1947, it was recognized as an agent of the Canadian government. 

A shift occurred with the appointment of C. D. Howe as acting minister of the Department of Mines and Resources. Strongly in favour of immigration, Howe supported a speeding up of immigration procedures and the Cabinet followed suit. On June 6, 1947, the government enacted PC 2180, therewith formally authorizing the refugee movement. Within eighteen months, immigration reached a total of 50,000 with a significant part of Volksdeutsche included. Among the immigrants taking advantage of the IRO programs in the years to come, some 1500 evaded their criminal past as Hitler's henchmen and fled to Canada, most of them disguised within the bulk-labor contingents (p. 82).

Despite this immigration of criminals, Margolian makes his point that Canada was generally not a safe haven for them. Under the provisions of PC 1373, most German nationals, as enemy aliens, were not eligible to immigrate to Canada, unless they could demonstrate their opposition to the Nazi regime. Only by 1950 was the government willing to ease up the restrictions on German nationals. A major change took place in March 1950, when PC 1606 authorized the admission of Volksdeutsche who had been granted citizenship during the war. Furthermore, in September 1950, the German nationals were removed from the category of enemy aliens. Margolian identifies three factors that contributed to this change: The CCCRR lobbying began to affect policy-makers in Ottawa; Germans, particularly those with professional and technical skills, were considered among the most desirable European immigrants; and the refusal to issue short-term visas to German nationals inhibited the restoration of trade between Germany and Canada (p. 90). One might criticize Margolian here for not pointing at the overriding political developments on the world stage with the integration of West Germany, i.e. since 1949 the Federal Republic, into the Western community. However, the author mentions the significance of the Cold War, particularly in the context of the war crimes tribunals, if somewhat superficially, later in the book (p. 161). 

In chapter 6 Margolian describes three exceptions, namely German scientists, Estonian refugees from Sweden and former members of the Ukrainian SS-Division "Galicia", that proved the rule of a well-administered, good-faith effort on the part of Canadian immigration officials to prevent the entry of undesirables. The threat of war criminals entering Canada diminished after the autumn of 1950. Margolian finds that only about 500 war criminals gained admission to Canada during the time from 1950 to 1955. This reduction in numbers might be surprising when we consider the comparatively less restricted access. But, as Margolian argues, the shift in priority from eastern European refugees to western European immigrants raised the chances to detect war criminals. 

The chapter dealing with the period from 1951 to 1956 is entitled "Era of Risk Management". Margolian admits that the preoccupation of immigration officials now shifted from the threat of Nazi infiltration to the fear of communist entries. Furthermore, Germany made its participation in the defence of central Europe dependent on an easing of the war crimes trials. This point deserved further elaboration by Margolian. German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was well aware of this diplomatic asset in his hands and used it to his favour. By the mid-1950s, Germany's demand for lenient treatment for convicted Germans was met and the trials were winding down. 

Along with the growing German self-consciousness, the CCCRR intensified its calls for a facilitating of immigration restrictions, sometimes even stating in revisionist tones that Waffen-SS troops had been subjected to the same military draft as regular army counterparts. In spite of Charles Ritchie's urges to maintain restrictions on those who had served voluntarily in the Waffen-SS, this criterion, by February 1956, was no longer a reason for automatic refusal of entry. The new role of the Federal Republic, particularly its admission to NATO, and its expectations for equal treatment called for the termination of the remnants of the past (pp. 180-181). 

The last chapter is based on secondary sources and deals with the prominent cases of undetected entry of Helmut Rauca and Count Jacques de Bernonville. Due to its touch of mystery, the chapter makes for particularly interesting reading. The networks of operatives smuggling fugitives and undercover agents out of hostile territory, the so-called ratlines, grab the reader's attention, but Margolian has to admit that--due to still-classified documents--the actual number of collaborators who made it to Canada via the ratlines cannot be determined (pp. 194-195). Thus, the "truth about Nazi war criminals in Canada", as claimed in the flashy subtitle of the book, is not yet complete or absolute. As a matter of fact, in an appendix that should have been part of the introduction, Margolian admits the limitations of his own sources. Regrettably, it is almost impossible to gain access to the highly restricted files of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) or the reports on individual cases. 

In straightforward language, Margolian negates the accusations of Canada's presumably failing immigration screening procedures. He particularly attacks the findings of a report on war criminals prepared in 1986 by Alti Rodal for the Deschênes Commission. Rodal's extensive study had noted that the "predominant concern of screening policy and practice in the postwar decade was, in fact, not to identify and bar Nazis or Nazi collaborators, but, rather, to weed out possible communist infiltrators and spies, now seen as the primary security threat."[6] In contrast, Margolian emphasises that Ottawa was not indifferent to the problem of war criminals immigration. Rather, it was the imperfect screening system combined with fraudulent statements of war criminals and collaborators that opened up possible sneak-in holes. 

The fact that that Ottawa was simply not in a position to deal properly with the waves of immigrants from Europe presented one of the major problems in the early post-war period. The system of immigration screening had to be developed from scratch and was "a work in progress" (p. 202). The Canadian immigration teams that were sent to Europe to interview and select the candidates out of the thousands of displaced European refugees had to improvise screening procedures. The detection of subversives and undesirable immigration candidates was based on German civil and military records. It was only after 1950 that the until-then significant criteria related to World War II were relaxed, particularly in response to the changing international circumstances. 

In the era prior to 1955, Margolian depicts several problems in the system of immigration screening: the inadequate training of visa-vetting officers; an overburdened security-clearance apparatus; and the occasional political interference, human frailty, and the even more dominant problem of qualitatively inconsistent sources concerning the applicants' background. The problem of corroborating sources was beyond the capacity of the Canadian government to resolve. Since a majority of "criminals" were Nazi-collaborators who had escaped from Eastern Europe, the evidence of their crimes remained hidden behind the Iron Curtain for decades. Relying on professional experience alone, Canadian immigration authorities were bound to commit mistakes. As Margolian argues, the mistakes committed were within acceptable limits. 

Overall, Margolian's study makes for an interesting counterpoint to the works presented by Alti Rodal or Reginald Whitaker.[7] The exaggerated numbers of some alleged 6000 war criminals living in Canada is corrected by Margolian to a number of 2000, as was already mentioned by Edward Greenspan in 1983.[8] Margolian's study impresses with its meticulous research (106 pages of notes for 206 pages of text), based primarily in the National Archives of Canada. Other sources include a limited number of archival holdings from the national archives in the United States and in France. The inclusion of some holdings in the Archive of the German Foreign Office (Politisches Archiv Auswärtiges Amt, Berlin) might have added to the discussion of the war criminals issue. In particular, there are documents in the Record Groups B10, B11 and B32 that deal directly with the issue of war criminal tribunals in Canada and shed light on the significance of Germany's changed role in the 1950s. Furthermore, the link between the war crimes issue and German participation in the defence of Western Europe, even though mentioned by the author, would deserve a closer examination. These are, however, only suggestions for a book that deserves the reader's attention. 

The juxtaposition of Margolian's positive judgement of the Canadian policy makers, who "followed a sensible middle path", with Alti Rodal's negative assessment of "the policy of inaction with regard to alleged war criminals settled in Canada" promises a continuing historical controversy. Margolian's book will enhance the continuing research and debate on Nazi war criminals, as a balanced and less emotional account of the issue is still wanting.

https://networks.h-net.org/node/3449/reviews/27200/obrist-margolian-unauthorized-entry-truth-about-nazi-war-criminals

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.