Nazi Collaborators, Eastern Europe

"This is like a nightmare."
"This is all happening once again in the lifetime of survivors."
"It has to be tearing their hearts out."
Bernie Farber, former chief executive officer, Canadian Jewish Congress

"[Such events as Ukraine's honouring of Nazi collaborators are] internal issues of Ukrainian politics."
"[Israel's decision to condemn such parades is] counterproductive."
Gennady Nadolenko, head, Ukraine diplomatic mission, Israel

"We must challenge all those who distort the historical record on governments, military units or organizations that fought with, supported or sympathized with the Nazis during World War II."
"This includes government leaders who acquiesce in, or fail to condemn, a process of Nazi glorification that amounts to Holocaust distortion."
"Those who glorify the record of such organizations or units cannot dismiss criticism as 'fake news'."
Michael Mostyn, CEO, B'nai Brith Canada

Veterans of the Latvian Legion, a force that was commanded by the German Nazi Waffen SS during WWII, and their sympathizers carry flowers as they walk to the Monument of Freedom in Riga, Latvia on March 16, 2016 to commemorate a key 1944 battle in their ultimately failed attempt to stem a Soviet advance. Jewish groups, Moscow and some in Latvia's ethnic-Russian community see the parade as glorifying Nazism because the Legion, founded in 1943, was commanded by Germany's Waffen SS, the armed wing of the Nazi party's Schutzstaffel SS (Protective Squadron). / AFP / afp / Ilmars ZnotinsILMARS ZNOTINS / AFP/Getty Images

For Jews around the world the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Red Army's liberation of Poland's Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp where Nazi Germany engineered the death of almost a million Jews, along with Roma, Soviet POWs, Polish political dissenters, gays, the very thought that Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Poles would in the 21st Century, celebrate their national heroes who were Nazi collaborators is unthinkable.

Yet the reality is that throughout Eastern Europe countries are celebrating their nationals who collaborated with the Third Reich and took active participation in the rounding up and murder of Jews. Torchlight parades were held in a number of cities in Ukraine early this month in honour of Stepan Bandera, a nationalist Ukrainian and Nazi collaborator involved in the killing of thousands of Jews and Poles. Despite which, Ukraine sponsors such events celebrating Nazi collaborators with links to the Holocaust.

A school was named in Lithuania for Jonas Noreika whose own family agrees was involved in the killing of Jews. A Ukrainian diplomat talked about punishing "k----", while posing for photographs with a cake baked in the shape of Hitler's memoir Mein Kampf, and blaming Jews for the Second World War. Once a minor kerfuffle passed, when he was condemned by Jewish groups, he was reinstated to his diplomatic position.

For the approximately 200 Canadian military trainers currently deployed to Ukraine, it is likely that on the first of January they would have witnessed a torch lit procession. Throughout Kiev and numerous other towns in Western Ukraine, thousands of civilians took to the streets – not to usher in the New Year – but to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of a man named Stepan Bandera.  Scott Taylor, Canadian Military Magazine

Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine have all held parades in honour of those who fought in Nazi SS units. The Latvian SS units who fought for the Nazis in the Second World War were praised by Latvian Defence Minister Artis Pabrike in December, who spoke of them as "the pride of the Latvian people and of the state". One of the unit's officers, Viktors Arajs, participated in the murder of 26,000 Jews with his unit. At a dinner party in Riga he entertained guests with his method of killing Jewish babies.

Throwing the babies into the air, then shooting them would avoid any ricochets that might occur if the babies were shot while lying on the ground. Eastern European nations such as Latvia, Ukraine and Lithuania are involved in rebuiilding their national identities, "rediscovering" individuals from the 1940s to elevate them to the status of national heroes, according to Holocaust researcher, Professor Per Anders Rudling.

Latvian Herbert Cukurs was a key member in the Arajs Kommando, known as the "Butcher of Riga". In 2014, the Israeli government raised concerns relating to a musical performed in Latvia celebrating his life, that of a Nazi war criminal whom Holocaust survivors linked to the murder of Jews. Over 50 members of the U.S. Congress in 2018 condemned Ukraine's efforts to glorify leaders of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, along with the 14th SS Galizien Division, comprised of Ukrainian volunteers.

"It's particularly troubling that much of the Nazi glorification in Ukraine is government-supported", the letter stated. Poland passed legislation to make it illegal to accuse Poles of any complicity in the Holocaust when the simple reality is that fascist Germany felt confident in placing a number of forced labour and death camps in Poland, knowing there would be no popular outcry from a country where antisemitism was well entrenched.

In Western Ukraine, thousands of civilians took to the streets to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera

Lithuania's pro-Nazi government had been involved in the rounding up and murder of Jews, according to well-researched conclusions, yet a new law is under consideration in Lithuania to declare that neither Lithuania nor its leaders had ever participated in the Holocaust. Ukrainians, for their part, push back against Israel's condemnation, insisting that Stepan Bandera had never supported Nazi Germany, just as the Latvian government claims the Latvian SS units hadn't fought in support of Hitler, but to fight the Soviets.

News articles and research relating to Nazi collaborators have been dismissed by officials in Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine and Lithuania, claiming them to be the product of Russian disinformation campaigns meant to cast their countries in a bad light. Canadian officials failed to join Jewish groups condemning Latvian Defence Minister's Pabriks praise of the Latvian SS and two months later, he met with Canadian Minister of Defence Harjit Sajjan, while next month he returns to Ottawa for a defence conference.

Chrystia Freeland, formerly Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs and in this new Liberal government named as deputy Prime Minister, is of Ukrainian background. She has been banned from entry to Russia. Her grandfather was a Ukrainian patriot who collaborated with Nazi Germany, publishing a newspaper in Nazi-occupied Poland, supportive of the Third Reich and rife with antisemitic tropes. The Ukrainian-Canadian community has always denied that members of the 14th SS Galizien were Nazi collaborators, many of whose members immigrated to Canada.

After Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, their initial collaboration with the Nazis and participation in the slaughter of Ukrainian Jews prevented Bandera and Shukevych from being considered national role models. However, much to the consternation of the Jews, and the Poles – whom Bandera’s OUN also massacred in the thousands – over the past three decades history in Ukraine has been revised.

At the time of the Maidan uprising in 2014, the spirit of Bandera was revived by the right wing, ultra-nationalists, and, just five years later, his past crimes have been whitewashed to the point where his date of birth is a national holiday.  Scott Taylor, Global-Politics,EU

Project Final Solution

"It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory."
"Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes."
"After Auschwitz, the human condition is not the same, nothing will be the same."
Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, Night

Soviet soldiers arriving at the gates of Auschwitz in 1945.

REUTERS:HO AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM REUTERS

It is now 75 years since Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz, opened the gates and met the sight of gaunt, starved prisoners who had managed to survive their years in the concentration and death camp, while others, of a total count of 1,100,000 were sent to the gas chambers, their bodies then incinerated in giant furnaces whose smoke stacks belched black ashes over Poland. It is fitting that liberation of the camp came at the hands of Russian soldiers, since Auschwitz originally functioned as a prisoner-of-war camp for Soviet prisoners of war whom the Germans captured.

Most of those Russian prisoners did not survive their internment in Auschwitz. The camp was later transformed to an extermination camp for Jews. Auschwitz itself was a number of 'camps' linked together, and it also had a slave-labour component camp as well, where relatively healthy and still-strong prisoners (forced laborers) worked in mines and rock quarries or road building until they died of overwork, starvation or disease; in other concentration camps, there were factories producing armaments for the Nazi war effort.

Children who have lived to be liberated by the Red Army from the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945.

TASS via Getty Images

At Auschwitz at the present time, maintained as a museum, there are pavilions housed on site; one primary exhibition details the Shoah. Others curated by a number of countries; a Polish pavilion, and a Russian pavilion among them. Poland, during the Second World War, was occupied by Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union, which first signed a non-aggression pact with Germany, was later invaded by Germany, the two consumed in a massive conflict which Russians endured at the loss of millions of the Soviet Red Army, and millions of citizens. The Soviet victory over the Nazis on the Eastern Front effectively broke the back of the Third Reich, and the Allied victories in the West finished the job.

Nazi death camp of Auschwitz I, in Oswiecim, Poland   AP

But not before close to a million Jewish corpses were fed into the giant maws of the ovens, the greatest number of Jews exterminated in any of the countless death camps strewn all over Europe which succeeded in demolishing the lives of six million European Jews. The Auschwitz site has been preserved as a memorial ground despite calls for its destruction as a 'cursed' place, after the end of the Second World War. It was the demand of the survivors that led to its preservation as a place of remembrance.

Under communist rule, Poland lacked the financial resources to maintain the camp, though the Polish government in 1947 had declared the site would be preserved forever, by law. Lack of resources made it difficult to preserve barracks, barbed-wire fences, watchtowers and gas chambers fallen into ruin. Prisoner artefacts seen to be critical in showing visitors the scale and dehumanization of the atrocities carried out in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp were difficult to maintain without resources.

Jewish children, survivors of Auschwitz, with a nurse behind a barbed wire fence, Poland, February 1945.

Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

The inventory of personal remnants of the millions who passed through those infamous gates declaring "Arbeit Macht Frei" has among its sad treasures of the past, 110,000 shoes, 3,800 suitcases, 12,000 pots and pans, 40 kilograms of eyeglasses, 470 prostheses, 570 pieces of camp clothing, and several tons of women's hair, sheared from the heads of prisoners by the Nazis. These are what is left of the millions of personal effects the Nazis took from helpless prisoners, along with more valuable items including gold pried from teeth, marriage bands, jewellery, to help the Nazi war effort.

The Auschwitz Museum regularly consults with conservationists, historians and heritage experts on preservation and reconstruction with a view to preserving the site as it was at the time. The risk being that alteration of the site might support claims of Holocaust deniers that the reality of the Holocaust has been embellished beyond its actual occurrence, supporting their denials and their claims that the program of genocidal extermination had never taken place.

Poland is where Auschwitz was established and where the Polish pavilion was organized as The Struggle and Martyrdom of the Polish Nation 1939 - 1945. Claiming for itself the place of first victim of the Nazis, emphasizing Polish resistance in occupied Poland. Its focus is on Polish losses, not on the number of Polish and other European Jews who were gassed, their ashes fertilizing the countryside. The Russian pavilion too emphasizes its role, with the theme of Tragedy, Valour, Liberation.

Soviet soldiers with survivors of Auschwitz in 1945.

REUTERS:HO AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM

The world now views Auschwitz as the symbol of Nazi depravity in its vicious extermination of Jewish lives. Before Poland liberated itself from the stranglehold of the USSR, visitors to Auschwitz came mostly through representatives of Soviet satellite countries, with 400,000 annual visits. The turn of the century has seen an increase in the number of yearly visitors to 1.3 million by 2009 and over two million by 2017. The largest number of visitors at the present, come from the United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Spain, Germany, Israel and France.

A pathway leading to an observation and security tower between what were electric barbed wire fences inside the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz I in Oswiecim, Poland, Sunday, Dec. 8, 2019. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

China's Voracious Appetite for Global Wildlife Species

"[The decision] is one I'm only prepared to make with appropriate consideration of the evidence."
"We will need some time to understand the specific measures that are being taken [by China to control the outbreak of the novel cornavirus that erupted in Wuhan, central China last month]."
"[While] China is a sovereign nation with the autonomy to take steps it believes in its interests, [the WHO's role is to provide] rational and science-based [recommendations. We hope the transportation shutdown would be] short in duration."
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyess, director general, World Health Organization

The Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan, China, was closed as part of a shutdown of public transportation — an effort to control the spread of what's being called the Wuhan coronavirus.

Barcroft Media via Getty Images

"I think it's [Chinese health authorities decision to close down entrance and exit from Wuhan and several other Chinese cities] really unwise."
"There's very good reason to believe that it could actually backfire very badly [should people start to see the government as oppressing them, sowing fear and mistrust]."
"The most important thing in public health is not to drive the population underground and make them fearful. You want them to cooperate. You want them to report their symptoms. You want them to believe that the government is there to help them and not to violate their rights. It's very, very difficult to control an epidemic once you've lost the trust of the population."
Lawrence Gostin, director, O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, Georgetown University Law Center,Washington

From today until further notice, Wuhan, the city of 11 million people 1,000 kilometres from Beijing, will be in quarantine. Air, bus, ferry and rail terminals are all shut down to prevent the spread of the mystery virus sweeping China and turning up in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Mexico and the United States. A suspected case of the coronavirus has been reported as well in Russia. It first emerged in Wuhan in December and swiftly began spreading. 17 victims have died, and 551 people have been infected. The WHO has decided to hold off on declaring a global health emergency just yet.

Should that occur, affected countries are obligated to officially report cases to the organization giving them the authority to impose trade and travel restrictions. So far the majority of new cases have been diagnosed in China. When the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS) emerged 17 years ago, it infected about eight thousand people worldwide, before it was brought under control, and of that total up to 774 people are known to have died of its effects.

After China, Canada realized the most deaths from SARS, at 44 people succumbing in Toronto, including several health workers. Much is yet a mystery about the virus. There were hopes it would not be transmissible person-to-person, but that hope has been dashed. Speculation is that the virus emerged in bats, and snakes, known for their bat-predation, now carry the virus. Snakes were among the other live animals carried and sold for human consumption in the Wuhan central open-air market, now closed, where the virus is felt to have emerged.

Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, on January 12, 2020.

NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images

"It's difficult on the basis of that [knowing that the novel coronavirus shares a 71 percent similarity in its genome sequence with SARS] to predict exactly how it's going to behave."
"[The WHO meeting scheduled for Thursday] will tell us if we were getting all of the information, because if suddenly what was 300 cases is now 1,700 cases, we need somebody to explain to us how that happens."
"We understand as human beings, the concept of germ theory. We all have a healthy respect for the fear of contagion."
Dr.Dick Zoutman, emeritus professor, departments of pathology and molecular medicine, Queen's University, Kingston

The World Health Organization withheld naming the situation a global pandemic, awaiting more information from China, and feeling that for the present, that country is managing the situation. Unknown definitively as yet is which animals were responsible for transmitting the virus beyond speculation about snake transmission, and how quickly it is spreading from human to human. The pneumonia-like illness caused by the virus leading to fever, coughing and breathing difficulties is spread through coughing and sneezing.

Researchers at Imperial College, London, showed thousands of cases may have emerged but not yet identified. As many as 4,000 people in Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, are likely to have been infected, according to the figures they are coming up with. According to Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College, over coming weeks the number of cases would rapidly increase. "It will be much more complicated to estimate for the whole of China". Based in authorities in China warning the virus was quickly "adapting and mutating".

"The virus gradually adapted once it was transmitted from the animals [to humans], and we need more time to study further", stated George Fu Gao, director-general of China's centre for disease control and prevention. For the moment, Mr. Gao added, children and young people don't appear to be susceptible to the virus.

Customers in a Chinese wet market on January 22, 2016.

Edward Wong/South China Morning Post/Getty

"Governments must recognize the global public health threats of zoonotic diseases."
"It is time to close live animal markets that trade in wildlife, strengthen efforts to combat trafficking of wild animals, and work to change dangerous wildlife consumption behaviours, especially in cities."
Christian Walzer, executive director, Wildlife Conservation Society's health program