The potential Nazi in all of us
If I'd grown up in a different time under different circumstances, I could have fought for Hitler. And you could have, too.
When every year is Year Zero, you can’t be expected to pay much attention to little details like “stuff that happened in the past” unless it can somehow be used to your political advantage.
So it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Justin Trudeau made it to his twenties without knowing that blackface might be considered kind of offensive.
Nor do I find it shocking that the Speaker of the House, a Liberal MP, invited an actual Waffen-SS veteran to the House of Commons in a show of support for the embattled President of Ukraine:
From The Globe and Mail:
When Mr. Zelensky finished his speech last Friday, [Member of Parliament and Speaker of the House of Commons] Anthony Rota drew attention to a 98-year-old man from North Bay, Ont., named Yaroslav Hunka, who was seated in the chamber as an invited guest, and lauded him for “fighting for Ukraine independence against the Russians” during the Second World War.
“He is a Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service,” Mr. Rota said. His comments led to cheers and two standing ovations, which included Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mr. Zelensky.
As Speaker, Rota sits on a prominent dais and directs what happens in the chamber. It is entirely understandable that in a moment of high emotion and ceremony, no one caught the implications of Rota saying that this man fought against Russians in the Second World War. They simply accepted that, as the Speaker told them, this man was a Ukrainian hero. Everyone stood and applauded.
Which was a horrible mistake.
Hunka was a soldier in the “First Ukrainian Division,” which sounds suitably patriotic at a time when Ukrainians are fighting a just war against brutal Russian aggression. But the “First Ukrainian Division” was a name taken by the unit only in the last days of the war. Before that, it was informally known as the “Galician Division.” Its formal designation was “14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.”
Hunka was a Waffen-SS soldier.
We Canadians often complain about how no one pays attention to us, and now we have to scour the country to find out who held the danged monkey’s paw and made a wish.
The most important thing is to let you know that the Prime Minister had absolutely nothing to do with this and also Pierre Poilievre once shook hands with a guy who subscribes to Alex Jones’ YouTube channel and also shut up shut up shut up.
I know there’s a war going on and that we’re all very angry with Russia, for damned good reasons. But when that leads us to applaud a man who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Soviet Union some time between June 22, 1941 and May 8, 1945,1 well, I have questions.
And it’s not just Russians whom Hunka’s army fought:
…it subsequently emerged Hunka had fought with the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, a unit of mostly ethnic Ukrainian volunteers that served under Nazi command during World War II.
The division has been accused of the mass murder of Polish and Jewish citizens.
Following widespread condemnation over the embarrassing incident, Rota resigned on Tuesday, having initially resisted calls to step down.
"I reiterate my profound regret,” he said in parliament, stressing that he had been unaware of Hunka’s Nazi ties and that inviting him had been a mistake.
Meanwhile, a Polish government minister said on Tuesday that he had initiated a bid to potentially extradite Hunka, by asking a Polish state body to investigate whether the 98-year-old was wanted for “crimes against the Polish nation or Poles of Jewish origin.”
Przemysław Czarnek, education minister in Poland’s right-wing populist government, published a letter on social media that he had sent to the head of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a state historical body with prosecutorial powers, stating that such crimes would “constitute grounds for applying to Canada for his extradition.”
[…]
According to the IPN, Hunka’s division was responsible for the massacre of about 850 ethnic Poles in the village of Huta Pieniacka.
In 2017, prosecutors from the IPN requested the extradition from the United States of another member of Hunka’s SS division. But the former soldier died two years later, aged 100, before his extradition could occur.
It’s bad enough that this disastrous incident has embarrassed Canada. It’s also cracked the fault line between Ukraine and Poland a little more, when Polish support for Ukraine was already waning.
The long history of conflict between Poland and Ukraine, despite their common enemy in Russia, illustrates that history is rarely black-and-white with clear, unambiguous heroes and villains.
That applies to the fight against the Nazis, which nearly all of us agree was justified, but included some tactics - most notably heavy bombing of German cities, with massive loss of civilian life - about which we’re still debating the morality and effectiveness to this day.
And even making the choice to collaborate with the Nazis, or actually fight for Hitler was more complicated than it appears in hindsight. Especially if you lived in a country which had been subjugated by the Russians for centuries.
Justin Ling looks into the mindset of a teenager who’s already seen his favorite teacher and some schoolmates deported to Siberia, and the arrival of an army which drove out the hated Reds:
Yaroslav Hunka was 14 years old when Nazi Germany and Communist Russia signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, invading Poland and divvying up Ukraine.
Ukraine had briefly achieved independence amid the February Revolution of 1917, a position that became untenable as Ukraine became a frontline in the First World War. Under a Polish-Russian treaty, Poland took control of Galicia, in the west, and the Bolsheviks took control over much of the east. Hunka, growing up in western Ukraine, was technically born in Poland. Things were worse in the east: Soviet policies intentionally withheld food from Ukraine, at least in part to suppress its strong independence movement. Millions died in the famine, the Holodomor. And now, the USSR was taking over all of Ukraine.
A teenage Hunka spent his days “hoping that those mystical German knights who were so kicking the hated Poles in the ass would appear any minute,” as he wrote in a 2011 blog. “Instead, one day a column of horsemen with red stars on their hats arrived.”
In 1940, Hunka recounted, he had begun to look at one of his Polish teachers as a member of his family, a grandfather. One day, his teacher — and two students — were escorted from the school, to the railway station. He watched as the train left the station, headed east. He would learn later that his aunt, uncle, and two cousins were also aboard the train. “It was the first demonstration of ‘Father’ Stalin's care for us. The first echelons of ‘enemies of the people’ to Siberia. More and more followed.”
He moved to a new school, where he studied with a mix of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jewish refugees from elsewhere in Europe. “We wondered why they were running away from such a civilized Western nation as the Germans,” Hunka wrote.
After a brutal year of Soviet occupation, Nazi Germany swept into Eastern Europe under Operation Barbarossa, capturing Ukraine as they advanced towards Russia. “We greeted the German soldiers with joy,” Hunka recalled.
The arrests and detentions continued, but he said German occupation was easier. Unlike the Russian NKVD, German intelligence didn’t speak their language and didn’t seem interested in imposing German culture onto a people they saw as inferior. “The next two years were the happiest years of my life,” he wrote. Groups like the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists sprung up and organized Ukrainian youth: That became the nucleus of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought all foreign powers inside Ukraine: Soviet and German alike. (Some factions also sought to “cleanse” Poles from its territory.)
It wasn’t until 1943 that Germany, facing declining fortunes in the war, opted to organize legions in its occupied territories. That’s when Hunka joined the Galicia Division, formed under the SS under the encouragement of the Ukrainian Central Committee. “The thought of turning those beasts into human form with a red star on the forehead became real,” Hunka wrote.
And there’s this from Dan Gardner, in the Substack essay to which I linked earlier:
In November, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks stormed to power, igniting the Russian Civil War. Desperate to get out of the war with Germany, Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918. Under the terms of that treaty, large swathes of the Russia Empire populated mostly by non-Russian peoples became independent countries. They included the Baltic countries — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania— along with Finland, Poland, and Ukraine.
With the war in Germany’s east concluded, Germany launched a major offensive in the west. Initial success sputtered and the offensive failed. In the autumn, a joint British, French, and American offensive finally broke Germany’s back. The First World War ended in November, 1918.
But the Russian civil war continued. Lenin renounced the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and attempted to restore the Russian Empire’s lost lands by force: Poland and the Baltic countries successfully fought off the Red Army and kept their independence. Ukraine fought, too, but suffered a devastating loss. In 1922, Ukraine became a Soviet republic.
In 1932 and 1933, Stalin used starvation as a weapon to bring Ukraine firmly to heel. The “Holodomor” killed as many as five million people living on some of Europe’s most fertile lands.
In June, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and many of the subjugated peoples — including the Baltic countries, which had recently been re-occupied by the Soviet Union — were initially hopeful that their liberation was at hand. But the Nazis had no interest in anything beyond conquest and slave labor and rather than cultivating aggrieved peoples as allies they exploited them mercilessly. Only when the war turned against Germany, and the need for manpower grew, did the Nazis seek to enlist the enemies of their enemies.
[…]
This is the barest political outline of those years, omitting countless coups and treaties and border changes. All the new nations had a majority ethnic group but also substantial minorities, and where there was no longer an imperial power in control — all these lands had been part of the Russian, German, and Austrian Empires — and no established modus vivendi, ethnic conflict was rife. Neighbours turned on neighbours. There were lootings, murders, pogroms. Where the Soviets ruled, arrests, political crimes, and “re-education” were part of daily life, while orders to pack a suitcase immediately and leave for Kazakhstan or Siberia could come at any time.
And this, please note, all preceded the horrors of the Second World War.
For ordinary people, this was an era of uncertainty and fear inconceivable to those of us lucky to live in a modern country with security, democracy, tolerance, and the rule of law. A country like Canada, for one.
In 2023, it’s easy to look at what our ancestors did, and to criticize actions which look so damnable in hindsight. Hence, a spate of re-namings and rewritings and statue-topplings that shows no sign of slowing down.
Of course, sometimes we should re-evaluate how we view historical figures, many of whom were once as whitewashed and sanitized as they are today condemned and dehumanized.
And when we’re looking back at the moral ambiguities of history, we should be careful not to absolve people like Yaroslav Hunka of any responsibility for their actions. He was a young man who’d already been through a lot when the Nazis drove the Russians out of Ukraine, but the Germans’ own cruelty and genocidal atrocities were an open secret, assuming they could be considered at all secret. Many more Ukrainians ultimately fought with the Red Army than with the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS.
History is really, really complicated, especially when you don’t know how the story will end.
We know Adolf Hitler mainly from his public speeches, in the climactic moments of which he is yelling and ranting and whipping up the crowd into a violent, genocidal frenzy. But there are recordings of his “normal” speaking voice, sometimes from different points of the very same speeches:
If Hitler had always talked like he did during his speeches, he never would have become Chancellor of Germany in the first place, and might have spent his life in a mental institution.
He could turn it on and off whenever it suited his purposes. And when you hear him in a regular conversation, it is unnerving how “human” he sounded.
Because he was human, just like us. That is much scarier than if he were some kind of inhuman monster.
Or May 9, 1945, depending on whether it’s Berlin time or Moscow time.