My Afternoon with Ukrainian Nationalists in Edmonton

 

Lubomyr Luciuk claims Nazigate was all just a big misunderstanding rooted in Russian propaganda and Jewish "prejudice."

A Royal Military College professor who once fantasized about defacing the National Holocaust Monument in an error-riddled Ottawa Citizen column was hosted at Edmonton’s Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex to promote a new pamphlet defending the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS. 

Lubomyr Luciuk spoke to a crowd of about 50 people on April 28 at the complex, which features a bust of Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) commander Roman Shukhevych outside, as well as a shrine to Shukhevych and the UPA in the lobby.

In pursuit of establishing an independent Ukrainian state, Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War found common cause with the Nazis against the Soviet Union, collaborating with German forces in the mass murder of Jews and the ethnica cleansing Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. They were united in common fear of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” a conspiracy theory which regarded Jews as inherent agents of Communism. 

A quarter of all Holocaust victims lived in Ukraine and academics like John-Paul Himka and Per Rudling have studied and cataloged the extent to which Ukrainian nationalists took part in the killing of Ukraine’s Jewish population. 

The UPA—the armed wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ (OUN) radical Bandera faction—was independent from the Nazis, who later turned on and arrested them, but not before these nationalist partisans assisted the Nazis in murdering some 100,000 Poles, Jews and other Ukrainians by 1943. 

At least, that’s what most historians of the era argue—but Luciuk, and nationalist elements in the Ukrainian diaspora, say that history is communist and Putinist propaganda.  (more...)

My Afternoon with Ukrainian Nationalists in Edmonton