Canada Must Reckon With Its History of Harboring and Celebrating Nazi War Criminals

 

Canada’s disgraceful history of covering for and even feting Nazi war criminals is finally receiving the attention it deserves. Yet some mainstream figures are still parroting far-right nationalist propaganda under the guise of resisting “disinformation.”

When word initially broke that the Canadian Parliament had offered a standing ovation for a ninety-eight-year old veteran of the Waffen-SS, it was disappointingly easy to imagine the story coming and going in a matter of days.

For one thing, previous reporting on monuments honoring veterans of the 14th Waffen Grenadier (or 1st Galician) Division had somehow failed to elicit any significant national outcry. After it was revealed in 2017 that Chrystia Freeland, then Canada’s foreign minister and now its minister of finance, knew of her grandfather’s past as the editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland, the story mostly seemed to fall on deaf ears — despite her having previously paid tribute to him.

And when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the specter of “Russian disinformation” in the wake of the recent episode in Parliament, it was eerily plausible to imagine that the same might happen again. The grotesque spectacle of mainstream pundits prevaricating on the question of whether volunteering for the SS and swearing an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler technically made someone a Nazi only appeared to confirm the worst.

Whatever else can be said about the media discourse that has followed, however, the issue absolutely hasn’t gone away. In fact, Parliament’s feting of Yaroslav Hunka — who willingly joined a military unit that carried out war crimes and has continued to celebrate his membership in the SS into old age — seems to have punctured the silence. As Jeremy Appel speculated last month: “Perhaps the Hunka affair will serve as a catalyst for a long-overdue reckoning with how Canadian officials, in the name of anti-Communism, turned a blind eye to Nazi sympathies among eastern European nationalist émigrés . . .”  (more...)

Canada Must Reckon With Its History of Harboring and Celebrating Nazi War Criminals