War makes us terrible historians

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The fog of war is a well-understood phenomenon. It teaches us to recognize that there are many reasons we cannot access the full truth of a situation in the middle of combat. Sometimes the enemy is going to falsify data to demoralize outsiders and boost internal confidence. Sometimes our side is going to do likewise. Sometimes we cannot reach the site of a war crime to do a thorough investigation of its facts ourselves, before being asked to make critical decisions around it. Sometimes evidence of past violence is destroyed too soon by further violence, and then the full truth of an incident might be lost forever.

READ: Meet the Fab Five of misleading information

But there’s another impediment in our struggle to be as informed as possible in the middle of war, and it lies in how ongoing conflict tends to flatten preceding histories. We are 78 years out from the end of World War II: its survivors almost all to their graves, and plenty of Western media having replaced direct testimony with highly stylized versions of a complex history. We can dangerously assume that we know all there is to know about WWII’s moral dimensions, and we do dangerously misapply that moral righteousness to the many erasures of war today.

An incident in Canadian parliament

On Friday, September 22, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed Canadian parliament for the first time since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A chorus of Ukrainian-Canadian children greeted Zelenskyy, many displaced by the war themselves. The audience of elected officials and gallery attendees applauded, and continued to applaud wherever its attention was directed. This was a time to celebrate Ukraine and all who had fought for its independence.

After Zelenskyy’s speech, the Speaker for the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, directed the audience’s attention and adulation to a 98-year-old in the gallery. Canadians applauded the man hailed then as a Ukrainian “war hero”.

In Ukraine today, there are nationalists who celebrate Yaroslav Hunka’s division as a key part of the country’s road to independence. As of Spring 1945, it was called the First Ukrainian Division of the National Ukrainian Army. Before that time, it went through a few names, including the Waffen-SS “Galicia” Division or the SS 14th Waffen Division. It was a mostly voluntary outfit on the Eastern Front, fighting against the West’s Russian allies, under the command of the Nazis.

Outcry came swiftly once a few groups realized Hunka’s WWII positioning. In the wake of this event, wherein Canadians were inadvertently directed to give standing ovations to a soldier with Nazi ties, Rota announced that he was stepping down as Speaker for the House. Someone needed to take responsibility for this embarrassing and demoralizing national event, and quickly.

But in our swiftness to hold one person accountable, we can easily lose sight of a deeper culpability. It can’t be helped, of course. When a parliament run by one party makes a faux pas this blatant, it’s open season for other parties eager to improve electoral standing. Irrespective of the deeper moral questions, it’s the optics that first and most pressingly guide political action. In the case of Canada, that means right-leaning press and party members seizing on the opportunity to critique the nation for being soft on war crimes.

Pushing past the optics, though, we come to a deeper cultural problem, which Rota’s departure will now make it easier for Canadians and other onlookers to set aside.

But reader: this deeper problem should not be set aside.

Historical illiteracy

War flattens us. It flattens our histories, and it flattens our sense of the value of fellow human beings. Today, there is much made of the pathology of all Russians, for allowing Putin to continue his attack on Ukraine; and conversely, much is made of the heroism of all Ukrainians, irrespective of whatever hateful ideologies exist among subgroups in its armed forces. In the push to be in solidarity with the “right side of history”, complexity is lost for the sake of surviving the conflict at hand.

Yet so long as complexity is lost, grievous wounds can always be reopened.

Three very different groups condemned Hunka’s presence in Canadian Parliament.

The first is Jewish advocacy groups, who have long expressed concerns about Canada’s 20th century decisions to accept members of the Galicia Division in Canada. In 1985, Canadian government opened what was called the Deschênes Commission, to investigate accusations that Canada had become a haven for war criminals. One section of the report was released in 1986, and produced legal clarification that allowed Canada to charge Canadians for foreign war crimes in its courts, and deport as necessary naturalized citizens for war crimes elsewhere.

But the second part of that report, which pertained to evidence gathered about specific individuals, was never made public. Canada employed a screening process when it first allowed around 600 members of the Galicia Division to settle in Canada, and also drew on a complex gray zone created by international determinations of culpability. At the Nuremberg Trials, the whole Waffen-SS organization, including 38 divisions of almost a million men, had been ruled guilty of war crimes as part of a broader criminal organization. But conscripts had been individually excluded from this blanket condemnation, and there was ongoing debate about the concreteness of evidence for the Galicia Division’s actions in particular.

That ongoing debate is much more definitive, though, when it comes to Poland: a country that in the wake of this whole parliamentary affair has announced interest in seeking the extradition of Hunka to stand trial for the known crimes of this unit against Polish civilians.

On February 28, 1944, some 500 to 600 members of the division returned to Huta Pieniacka, where two of its men had been killed by civilians days earlier, and slaughtered their way through the village. Estimates range between 500 and 1200 dead (though most are closer to 900), many burned alive in locked barns or otherwise tortured. Before its recent conflict with Russia, Ukraine had a problem with some of its nationalists desecrating the Ukrainian monument honoring the Polish minority civilians murdered by Ukrainian soldiers during WWII.

The fog of war resurfaces

But even then, the call placed by Poland’s education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, has a performative edge to it. There is no active warrant for Hunka’s arrest on the international stage, much as Western media is acting like the extradition will happen tomorrow. Czarnek instead published a letter written to the Institute of National Remembrance, asking them to “urgently [establish] whether Yaroslav Hunka is wanted for crimes against the Polish nation or Poles of Jewish origin”.

This is taking place in the middle of an election-season shift in Polish politics. As noted in “At the breaking point: Canada, India, Poland, Ukraine, and the UN“, there are strong right-wing pressures to reduce military support for Ukrainian defence from Russian invasion. Holding a trial now for a Ukrainian whose Waffen-SS division brutally murdered Polish civilians cannot help but serve more as a political wedge than as a genuine fact-finding and healing mission.

Which leads to the third group quick to flood the internet with the “vindicating” spectacle of Canada celebrating a Ukrainian member of the Waffen-SS: Russia.

Russian propaganda since before its invasion of Ukraine has been advancing the narrative that it is in a war with neo-Nazis. Never mind its own antisemitism. Never mind its own oppression of political opponents, LGBTQ+ people, and religious minorities: even now, much of the propaganda out of Russia, and circulating within it, holds that theirs is a righteous war to pull Ukraine safely from the clutches of US/Western interference, and to rid the region of viper’s nests of neo-Nazis slaughtering ethnic minorities within contested territories.

There is no universe in which most Jewish advocacy groups, in striving to keep remembrance of the Holocaust alive even as its last survivors turn into blessed memories, are happy about finding themselves on the same “side” here as an invading force intent on eradicating another people.

Rota’s misstep as Speaker for the House, in platforming Hunka during Zelenskyy’s visit, absolutely merited his assumption of full responsibility and resignation.

But if we’re to avoid future missteps, future wounds of this type in general, we need to mark what this event also teaches us about how easily key histories are lost.

Waffen-SS and the world’s other wars

The Galicia Division both was and wasn’t atypical for the Waffen-SS.

It had been formed with many concessions made to Ukrainian leaders by the Nazis, who were desperate for soldiers to help fight on the Eastern Front. The presence of Nazi indoctrination had been argued down to minimal levels (the most notable coming from speeches from visiting Nazi officials), the unit was allowed Christian chaplains, and their oath to Hitler was contingent on being sent to fight Bolsheviks, not Westerners. This was fine for the Third Reich, which had simply hoped to leverage Ukrainian hatred of the Soviet Union to its advantage.

And Ukrainians had very good reason to hate the Soviet Union. In 1932-33, millions of Ukrainians died in Holodomor, a famine expressly created by Stalin’s Russia to eradicate the Ukrainian people. While US war films taught Western citizens to cheer for “Uncle Joe” in WWII, Ukraine had also entered the war fresh from the “Great Terror” of 1937-38, when Stalin’s forces further “purged” perceived dissidents throughout the Soviet Union.

In other words, despite Western propaganda teaching us that World War II had a singular moral valence, and that our grand struggle against the Nazis is what everyone was most concerned about, the reality is that many different groups had their own moral injuries. Many will point out that even if some did “volunteer” to serve in the Galicia Division, it was entirely possible that they did so out of hunger, or fear for their families’ lives if they refused.

But even though coerced enlistments happened, does one really need to go so far for a justification? Ukrainians who had lived through Holodomor and Stalin’s purges were being offered a chance to reclaim or defend their territory, and maybe even to kill people from the land that had slaughtered their own. Yes, Hitler would not allow them to fight as Ukrainians (thus the geographic name Galicia, imposed on the unit instead), because the Third Reich had its own confused sense of what to do with the territory after the war. But what did this political insult matter to people who thought this might be their ticket to future independence? They weren’t thinking about how well this would play with Westerners years later, in the event that they would lose the war and have to resettle halfway across the world.

It is our own sheer ego to imagine that their moral calculus in that moment had our version of World War II ethical dilemmas in mind.

Other nations with no love lost for the West

And this was true for other Waffen-SS groups the world over. As with imperialist powers throughout history, the Nazis were quick to make use of locals to serve their own ends, and leveraged the fact that locals were far more interested in their own ethno-religious conflicts than in acquiring a fuller understanding of what their benefactors were up to on other continents.

Britain, for instance, was no friend to India during World War II. Responsible for the Bengal famine in 1943, and withholding wheat relief from India while compelling it to keep exporting rice for the war effort, Churchill had defined himself as a leader with no real interest in “protecting” the state under his government’s control. This did not intrinsically mean that all Indians automatically supported the policies of Britain’s enemies, but it did mean that people like Leo Amery, India’s secretary of state, admitted to not seeing much difference between Churchill and Hitler.

READ: Fascism in India: The role of Nazis in Hindu nationalism

Some Indian nationalists therefore turned to Britain’s enemies for aid, and helped in their war efforts in turn. As noted in the above article,

In 1941, Subhas Chandra Bose, of the Indian National Congress and Indian Liberation Movement, escaped British house arrest to Nazi Germany. In Berlin, he rallied Indian students in residence, along with recently captured Indian POWs, into an collaboration under the Waffen-SS. The Indian Legion went by many names (Tiger Legion, The Free India Legion), and its missions varied. Initially, it was meant to help Germans pathfind through India to reach British targets, but the group was then deployed more widely. Meanwhile, Bose went on in 1942 to transform the Indian National Army, an Axis-Indian group forged with Japanese support. He then presided over the Provisional Government of Free India, in the Japanese-occupied Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Those still with the Free India Legion at the end of WWII were of course seized by the Allied powers, and set to face trial for treason. However, Indian outcry was so great that authorities quietly put such proceedings to bed instead.

M L Clark, “Fascism in India: The role of Nazis in Hindu Nationalism”

Nor were Indian nationals the only foreign group frustrated by Western colonial treatment of their territory and their people’s struggles for self-determination.

In Mandatory Palestine, the war that broke out around the modern state of Israel involved Arab leaders who had served in Waffen-SS divisions. It’s not that the Third Reich considered these Arabs “honorary Aryans”; they were simply interested in supporting groups that could destabilize British and other Western forces, and found common cause among groups given short shrift and otherwise betrayed by a British government that flip-flopped in its promises during its era of colonial control. World War II was a European concern, and these Arab leaders were more interested in acquiring the training and equipment necessary to fight for the eradication of Western control (including, as many saw it, the eradication of Jewish settlers: another common cause, if for different reasons) in the Middle East.

To this end, Hajj Amin al-Husseini aided in recruitment drives for Waffen-SS, and lived on Nazi payroll in Germany before serving in the Arab Liberation Army. Hasan Salama, his aide, participated in Nazi missions in Mandatory Palestine before becoming commander of the Holy War Army. Fawzi al-Qawuqji, also of the Arab Liberation Army, first lived in Nazi Germany and served in its military. The 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar also had many members who went on to fight against Israeli forces.

Western histories of World War II are so Eurocentric that we routinely forget how many other major moral contests were more pressingly on other nations’ minds.

War flattens us. It flattens our histories, and it flattens our sense of the value of fellow human beings.

Complexity, not excuses

Even today, a Ukrainian war memorial in Ontario and another in Alberta bear references to the Galicia Division, while honoring Ukrainian military for their services to independence and in Canadian foreign actions. These, along with a bust of another participant in the slaughter of Polish minorities, have been vandalized in recent years for this same reason: marked with reminders that the group was Waffen-SS, under Nazi control. They carry in them the complex histories of individuals who did harm out of duress, vengeance-seeking trauma, or pure hatred for other demographics. Heroes to many Ukrainian Canadians. Nazis to others.

Either way, today we more often read these markers of a complex and unforgivably brutal past through whatever our wars need as simple truths.

There is one simple truth here, of course: there can be no grand public shows of adoration for a figure who participated directly or by close proximity in war crimes, even if some believe his division was also involved in an heroic lineage of fighting for independence. Hunka should never have been platformed in Canadian Parliament.

But beyond that simple truth…

Whether he should stand trial in Poland is for the Institute of National Remembrance to decide, based on their own sensitive understanding of what best serves collective healing. May they choose an option that respects the families of those harmed, and seeks restorative justice in ways that do not make further political theatre out of deep and important wounds.

Meanwhile, as for the rest of us?

One day Russia’s war in Ukraine will end, and on that day we will be left with whatever pockets of antisemitic, racist, xenophobic Ukrainians are right now fighting alongside the peace-seeking rest of Ukraine, against a plainly unjust invading force.

And we will be left with Russian citizens and soldiers, whose individual complicity will vary from full indoctrination into genocidal fury, to trapped in a country of imperialist bloodlust with no way out, and maybe even persecuted for speaking up.

History will be complex again.

History will be allowed to be complex again.

How can we keep it better, for victims and survivors here and now?