Family Ties: Ukrainians and Nazi Germany

 

A little more than a year ago, Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old war veteran of Ukrainian extraction, received two standing ovations in the House of Commons after its Speaker, Anthony Rota, singled him out for recognition. The visiting president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, were among those who honored Hunka with rounds of applause.

Little did they know that Hunka had been a soldier in the SS Galicia Division, a unit of the German army formed in the final years of World War II. Once the embarrassing blunder was exposed, Rota resigned, Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution condemning Nazism and withdrawing its recognition of Hunka, and Trudeau issued an apology.

Russia exploited the incident to justify its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which it implausibly described as a “special military operation” designed to “denazify” its neighbor.

As Canadian journalist Peter McFarlane suggests in a new book, Canadians should not have been surprised by the Hunka affair. Canada, the first Western nation to formally recognize Ukrainian independence in 1991, has a record of tolerating Nazis. Canada, after 1945, welcomed Ukrainian Nazi collaborators as immigrants.

Thousands of them, like Hunka, served as foot soldiers in the German army. Still others, such as Mykhailo Chomiak, the grandfather of Canadian Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, edited a Nazi-financed antisemitic newspaper in German-occupied Poland.

Hunka and Chomiak worked for the Germans in the expectation that Adolf Hitler’s genocidal regime would recognize Ukraine, a province of the Soviet Union, as a sovereign state.  (more...)

Family Ties: Ukrainians and Nazi Germany