Moral Indignation Over Reality Does Not Expunge It

"It is appalling that the Canadian government could attempt for no good reason to subject innocent Canadians, their family members and descendants to public scorn."

"When the announcement is made, we will have to be ready to go to the Federal Court challenging the government's authority to ignore Justice [Jules] Deschenes' [Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, February 1985] ruling on confidentiality. To do so, we need to prepare now."

"All alleged war criminals, regardless of their ethnic, religious, racial or cultural origin, or where or when they committed their crimes should be bought to trial in Canada under Canadian criminal law."

"If evidence of wartime criminality by any person found in Canada exists, that information must be communicated to the proper authorities for investigation."

Ihor Michalchyshyn, CEO, executive director, Ukrainian Canadian Congress

Ukrainian ultra-nationalists, carrying a banner with a portrait of Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) Roman Shukhevych (second from the right), march in the centre of the western city of Lviv on April 28, 2013. The march commemorated the 70th anniversary of 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division made up mostly of Ukrainian volunteers.  Photo:  (YURIY DYACHYSHYN/AFP/Getty Images)

When then-prime minister Brian Mulroney was lobbied by Jewish groups to conduct an investigation into the infamously well-known refuge that Canada had become post World War II for Nazi war criminals, he appointed Justice Jules Deschenes to head the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, back in 1985. Previous administrations were disinterested in examining the situation whereby known and unknown war criminals were living ordinary lives in Canada, protected by their postwar-acquired Canadian citizenship. 

The Commission created several documents, one titled Master List of Alleged War Criminals Resident in Canada with a List of Sources. 774 appeared on the list. Additional names of alleged war criminals, including Nazi scientists and technicians who arrived in Canada not as fugitives but as immigrants entitled to entry as landed immigrants simply because the immigration department appeared to find it unnecessary post-war to investigate backgrounds for war-incriminating evidence, brought the total closer to 900 names.

The documents were labelled secret and conveniently shelved, despite Jewish groups which had lobbied to have the investigation take place, then demanding that the result of the inquiry be made public. Justice Deschenes, having done his duty, felt it appropriate and declared his studied opinion that the Inquiry documents be withheld from public scrutiny. Among the large groups of named individuals a smaller number on the list are believed to be Ukrainian in origin, or people hailing from other eastern European nations, complicit with Nazi crimes.

Requests for the release of the documents have never been stilled under Canada's access to information law. It is Library and Archives Canada which must make the critical decision to release the documents. Or not. In June a secret meeting/consultation whose participants were present by specific invitation to attend; described as a "discrete group of individuals or organizations" were present to offer their opinion whether the list should be made public. 

 

Given the Jewish communities' urging over the years for the documents' release, it might have been thought they would be among those receiving invitations to attend. They were not. Given the reality that it was Jews in horrendous numbers that were the designated fascist victims of Nazi Germany's 'Final Solution', that Jewish groups, knowing of the presence in Canada of their persecutors, had a fully vested interest in having their presence revealed, thus finally forcing the government of the day to finally act. 

 

To divest recognized war criminals of their Canadian citizenship, to ensure, despite the passage of years, that their crimes, if proven in law, merited final accounting for.

Neither Holocaust survivors nor Holocaust scholars all of whom had advocated for full release of the documents, including the list of alleged Nazi war criminals, were included to attend the 'consultation' respecting the potential of releasing clearly incriminating documents. In the lead-up to Library and Archives releasing its final decision on the matter, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, which had been among the invitees, is seeking funding to finance a legal challenge in Federal Court.

As a declared representative of the Canadian Ukrainian community comprising one and 1/3 million people, the organization is encouraging its contacts within the Ukrainian community to donate to a fund that would aspirationally be in the neighbourhood of $150,000 to launch their legal challenge against the release of the documents with the intention of sparing humiliation, ignominy, harassment and possible charges against those of the Ukrainian community named in the documents.

 

Canadians in general have hugely supported doughty Ukraine in its epic existential battle against the modern equivalent of the Soviet Union, against a tyrant who will stop at nothing to achieve his aims at dominating a smaller neighbour that has no wish to be other than fully independent of Russia, its ideology and grasping territorial ambitions. Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin have been recognized in the commission of war crimes in Ukraine. The conflict continues and so does Russian disinformation. Yet Ukraine itself and its expatriates must also recognize reality of the past.

Another issue identified was the awkwardness of the Soviet involvement in the Second World War; first as an Axis ally of fascist Germany, and later as a member of the Allied forces following Moscow's invasion of Russia. The Soviet Union, loathed by most countries in eastern Europe for its stranglehold on their sovereignty, capturing them all in a forced wide web of enforced 'socialism' within the United Soviet Socialist Republic. During the War and Holocaust years voluntary recruits from some of those nations augmented the Nazi SS, fighting alongside them, participating in deathly carnage.

 

Russia, before and after its invasion of Ukraine, had infiltrated Canadian news through social media to sow divisions between various groups in Canada, particularly through statements both unofficial and official alluding to Ukraine as 'fascist', and a 'neo-Nazi' state. Since Ukraine had ousted its former Russian-oriented President who represented the interests of Russian-Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine and Moscow, to release itself from Russia's imposed bondage, a campaign of Russian propaganda has painted Ukraine as fascist.

 

Russia's top prosecutor has asked the Supreme Court to designate the Azov Regiment, seen here in 2014, as a terrorist group

 

Ukraine most certainly had its fascism-inclined demographic that saw more in common with Nazi Germany than its Soviet occupier. And no one could argue that Ukraine was free from the ancient virus of antisemitism. And the fact that the infamous Azov Battalion was comprised largely of fascists infected with the virus of acute antisemitism. Attention was riveted on the issue of Canadian war criminals when in 2023, Canadian Members of Parliament offered two standing ovations to a 99-year-old war veteran, a Ukrainian-Canadian living in North Bay.

Until it was revealed that Yaroslav Hunka, hailed as a wartime hero in the Canadian Parliament, had done voluntary service in a Ukrainian Waffen SS unit, fighting for and with the Nazis. Canada was the involuntary, disinterested, oblivious recipient of large numbers of soldiers from a Ukrainian Waffen SS division following the war. Jewish groups and the Polish government made it clear that Hunka's unit was involved in war crimes; massacres of women and children.

In the final analysis, the Commission reached the decision that claims of large numbers of war criminals entered Canada were exaggerated, yet as a result of inadequate government screening post-war, it also stated that: "it would be rash to assume that significant numbers of war criminals and Nazi collaborators did not enter Canada". Investigations into the hundreds of individuals alleged to have been war criminals did not fall under the purview of the Deschenes Commission.

According to Professor Jared McBride, an American who had been a fellow with the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, his researchers made use of declassified American government records alongside other materials, to compile a list of 275 alleged war criminals held to be most likely to be included in the Canadian records, although  his research is expected to add more names as their own investigation proceeds. 

 

The monument to Roman Shukhevych, commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army from 1943 until his death in 1950, at the entrance of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in North Edmonton, Alberta, since mid-1970s. Critics of the monument say it glorifies a Nazi henchman who sided with Germany in hopes of winning independence for Ukraine.  Photo: (Photo courtesy of John-Paul Himka)

"Whether Library and Archives Canada [LAC] likes it or not, these names are going to be released to the public."

"Instead of moving toward a path of openness and transparency about its record on allowing war criminals into the country and its failure to prosecute them, the Canadian government held a secret meeting to discuss the secret names from the secret report from 40 years ago that still has not seen the light of day."

"Moreover, they invited to this meeting the same people who helped to keep the report under wraps four decades ago."

Professor Jared McBride, specialist, Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, UCLA, U.S. Holocaust Memorial fellow