"Let’s be clear about the eight men for whom the University of Alberta maintains named endowments. They fought for the Waffen-SS, an armed wing of the Nazi Party which was declared a criminal organization at the Nuremberg trials because of its role in war crimes. Their division was implicated in brutal wartime massacres of civilians, including one atrocity in which Polish women and children were locked inside buildings and burned alive."

"It should publish a complete list of all endowments honouring a Waffen-SS member, together with a timeline for resolving them. It should pursue renaming, seek legal variations where necessary, and return to court if required. The university must make clear that those who fought in service of the Nazis have no place of honour at a Canadian university."

Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, Bernie Farber, Edmonton Journal 

Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler inspects volunteers of the Ukrainian Waffen SS division during the Second World War. Library and Archives Canada is now reviewing whether to release the names of alleged Nazi war criminals who fled to Canada after the war. (File photo)

 

 The Waffen SS Galicia comprised of Ukrainian volunteers and overseen by Nazi SS groups were implicated in WWII war crimes; Jewish groups as well as the Polish government denounced the Ukrainian volunteer group for its part in murdering civilians, as well as for massacres it was involved with. The Nazis made use of the division in Slovakia to crush a national uprising; another condemnation for war crimes committed by the group. 

 

In the wake of receiving a legal permission to proceed with dissolving a research trust in the name of Ukrainian SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka who received accolades in Parliament during a visit to Canada by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2023 when a standing ovation honoured the misconception that he was a war hero by Western standards by fighting against the Soviet occupation of Ukraine, at a time when Russia was viewed as an ally alongside the U.K., U.S. and Canada, the University of Alberta announced it would go no further in expunging Ukraine-centred research funding.

 

Yaroslav Hunka (giving a thumbs up) during applause in the Canadian Parliament, September 22, 2023. Photo: YouTube/CBC News: The National

 

The university planned to retain eight other endowments involved with Waffen-SS soldiers, claiming it would be too costly in time and legal fees to seek court approval for termination of the endowments. Researchers with the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. a Toronto-based Holocaust research organization, totaled a list of 12 endowments at the University of Alberta with a value to the university of $2.2 million in funding, linked to Nazi-allied individuals during WWII in Ukraine. 

 

"This is dirty money and it's unconscionable they are continuing with this. It's beyond despicable", 84-year-old Andy Reti, a child survivor of the Holocaust stated in condemnation of the university's position. An alternative, he felt reasonable was that the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the university should donate the endowment funding of he Waffen-SS to the Salvation Army so that something positive could result from the untenably tainted funds. 

 

Senior director at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jaime Kierzner-Roberts, stated that her group had called on a number of occasions for the university to divest all of the Nazi-linked endowments, including one named for Peter Savaryn, another SS-Waffen member, who had in time become chancellor of the university. In 2023, however, the office of the Governor General expressed its deep regret for having awarded the Order of Canada to Savaryn in 1987. In the event, at revelations of his wartime activities and connections, in consequence of which the Order was revoked. 

 

In its remediation defence, the University of Alberta revealed its intention to spend $100,000 to "deepen scholarship and education about the Galicia Division and other complex and difficult aspects of 20th-century history". None of which can expunge the reality that the university had accepted funds from the estate of Volodymyr Kubijovyc, a Nazi collaborator who had helped create the Waffen-SS Galicia, and was as well an advocate for ethnic cleansing to create an independent Ukraine without the presence of Jews or Poles.

 

Parade of recruits of the Waffen SS “Galicia” Division in Lviv. In the foreground is the head of the Military Administration, Col. Bisanz. July 18, 1943. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

 

Members of the Waffen SS Galicia are regarded as heroes -- who had fought against Soviet forces -- among nationalist Ukrainian Canadians. In summer day camps for Ukrainian children in Canada, this kind of folkhero history is taught to the campers, where they can also view commemorative statuary celebrating Waffen-SS WWII members for their courageous heroism in confronting and killing Red Army servicemen. Criticism of these heroes, they aver, represents Russian misinformation.

 

Critics of the volunteer SS battalion point out that in volunteering themselves to fight with the Nazis, Ukrainians were essentially freeing  up German soldiers to enable them to be redirected to fighting against the British, Canadian,and American soldiers, at that time advancing toward Berlin. Following the end of the war, the International Military Tribunal declared the SS a criminal organization, with the inclusion of Waffen-SS units. 

 

Ukrainians dressed in SS Galicia Division uniforms march past graves during a re-burial ceremony at the SS Galicia Division cemetery near the village of Chervone, Ukraine, in 2013. Photo by Efrem Lukatsky/AP/File

  

Canada, a Harbour For Nazi War Criminals

"Canada has a really dark history with Nazis in Canada."

"There was a point in our history where it was easier to get in [immigrate to Canada] as a Nazi than it was as a Jewish person."

"I think that's a history we have to reconcile."

Immigration Minister Marc Miller 

"What little we know of their [SS members] war record is bad."

"We're still hoping to get rid of the less desirable Ukrainian PoWs either to Germany or to Canada."

British Home Office official Beryl Hughes, 1948

Ukrainians dressed in SS Galicia Division uniforms march past graves during a re-burial ceremony at the SS Galicia Division cemetery near the village of Chervone, Ukraine, in 2013. Photo by Efrem Lukatsky/AP/File

Documents compiled by a commission set up in the 1980s to scrutinize Canada's record in permitting members of the Nazi SS into Canada through government-sanctioned visas, including members of the Ukrainian collaborationist special ethnic SS-linked divisions meant to work with German SS units in

rounding up Jews in massive pogroms of shooting deaths -- part of the Holocaust's 'Final Solution', a priority with Nazi Germany while it was prosecuting World War I --, have never been made available for public scrutiny.

 

In the wake of a public scandal where a North Bay Ukrainian military veteran was invited to parliament to meet with visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who was to address the House of Commons, where the entire House inclusive of parliamentarians and diplomatic guests rose on the introduction of the 98-year-old, a former volunteer serving with a Ukrainian SS division, Jewish groups in Canada are now demanding the release of the documents, unredacted.

 

The 40-year-old report along with allied documents that contain details relating to Nazi war criminals residing in Canada remains in a 'secret' category. It represents a second portion of a 1986 government-commissioned report on Nazis who were permitted to enter and settle in Canada. Another 1986 report was heavily censored, one that examined how it was that Nazis were enabled to enter Canada to begin with, post World War Two. That commission was struck in the wake of years of Jewish groups urging the government to investigate and extradite Nazi war criminals known to be living in Canada.

Over 600 pages of the document finally obtained through the country's Access to Information law, was censored. B'nai Brith is now demanding the release of RCMP and Department of Justice files on Nazi war criminals in Canada. "We've run up against a brick wall", commented David Matas, counsel for the Jewish advocacy organization ... in view of the government's ongoing decision to withhold such records from public view. A ray of hope shimmered briefly when Canada's Immigration Minister Marc Miller allowed that the government might reconsider whether the records could be released.

Canada's track record, he commented pointedly, with Nazi criminals was notoriously poor. B'nai Brith pointed out in a submission to the House of Commons committee on Access to Information in February that the government's approach to Nazi war criminals reflected its "intentional harbouring of known Nazi war criminals" along with "deliberate inaction".

And that historical puzzle has now been resurrected since MPs in the House of Commons a week ago honoured a Canadian-Ukrainian who had served in a Nazi SS division. Two standing ovations from those present were awarded Yaroslav Hunka, sparking outrage on social media, prompting the resignation of the House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota on whose invitation to the man living in North Bay, arrived at the House of Commons, with no one apparently aware, despite that House security and Canadian intelligence services were to have scrutinized the man's background prior to his entrance.

 

Yaroslav Hunka, right, waits for the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the House of Commons in Ottawa last Friday. Photo by Patrick Doyle /The Canadian Press

 

The now-98-year-old had volunteered to fight with the 14th Waffen-SS Division Galicia, a Nazi military unit recruiting Ukrainians to fight alongside German SS groups, and more to the point, help in the extermination of Europe's Jews. Poland, along with Jewish groups denounced the infamous division, citing its role in killing civilians in grouped massacres during the war. Poland, in fact has petitioned Canada for the man's extradition as a war criminal.

Large numbers of SS soldiers and other Nazi collaborators from eastern Europe settled after the war in Canada. Jewish refugee-survivors who had also come to Canada, spoke in shocked whispers to one another when they recognized on the streets of Toronto, German SS members they had last seen in the ghettos and death camps. Many of the records sought have links to the 1986 war crimes commission that was led by Justice Jules Deschenes.

The International Military Tribunal had declared the SS a criminal organization, including units of the Waffen SS, like the Galicia division that Yaroslav Hunka had fought with. There are nationalist Ukrainian-Canadians today, who view the 14th Waffen Division as heroic for battling Soviet forces who at that time were allies with the US, Canada and Britain after Russia was invaded by Germany despite Russia having begun the war as part of the Axis group.

The release in Britain in 2005 of documents from British archives outlined concerns relating to the members of SS Galicia along with intentions to ship them to Canada. "The Division was an SS division and technically all of its officers and senior NCOs are liable for trial as war criminals", noted one report for the British government. In another report dated 1948 there were discussions on sending SS members to Canada. And they did.

Righteous Among The Nations

 

"They brought their factories of death to the Polish lands."

"In Poland, even if you gave a glass of water or a slice of bread [to a Jew during the Nazi occupation] that was considered help and was punishable by death."

"The Polish state has a special obligation, a special duty to make sure that remembering the Holocaust is preserved. We need to make sure that this remembrance is passed on to the future generations."

Wojciech Kolarski, Polish culture minister

"The government tries to impose a certain narrative showing Poland as the most pure nation of the world. Many governments do this; it is not a very original idea."

"There's no doubt whatever that the Ulma family were heroes and what they did was absolutely heroic. We should remember them."

"The problem is that using the righteous people for an electoral campaign is very low."

Piotr Wrobel, history professor, University of Toronto, Konstanty Reynert Chair of Polish Studies

"Jews were generally accepted in Poland when they weren't necessarily accepted in other places in Europe."

"Most of the Holocaust survivors are people who survived in hiding, either because they went east [fleeing to Russia], or because they were given out by their family members to non-Jewish families [to hide and give Polish names and backgrounds to]."

"What we try to do is we try to expose people to the idea that war is complicated and it brings out the best and the worst in people."

"Did Poland perpetrate the Holocaust? No. Were there Poles who contributed to the suffering of the Jews? Yes."

Sebastian Rudel, deputy director, Jewish Community Centre, Krakow, Poland

People stand at the Ulma grave during the beatification of the family in Markowa on September 10, 2023. Photo by BARTOSZ SIEDLIK/AFP via Getty Images

The Catholic Church in Poland earlier this month beatified Wiktoria and Jozef Ulma, along with their children and their unborn child, in what is potentially the first step on the path to sainthood in the Church for the family. It will represent the first time in Catholic history that an entire family will have been so honoured. Poland holds this family in the highest regard, memorialized in postage stamps and coins. A museum is even dedicated to the family and to hundreds of other Polish families who stepped into the lethal danger zone of aiding Jews during the Holocaust.

 Ulma Family, circa 1943

In the case of the Ulmas, an indigent rural family with a stern moral outlook on life that committed them unequivocally to face danger in exchange for self-respect and empathy for the plight of their neighbours, they undertook to shelter two Jewish families, eight people in total in their modest home close to the village of Markowa in the war years. Jozef was 44, his wife Wiktoria 31, their daughters Stanislawa, 7, Barbara,6, Maria, 18 months, and sons Wladyslaw, 5, Franciszek, 3, and Antoni, 2.

The Jews they sheltered and who were summarily slaughtered by the Nazis in the crowded little farmhouse were 70-year-old Saul Goldman, his sons Baruch, Mechel, Joachim and Mojzesz, along with Golda Grunfeld and her sister Lea Didner with her young daughter Reszla, according to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance which documented the Ulmas’ story. The family was previously memorialized as 'righteous among the nations' by Yad Vashem in Israel in 1995.

On March 24, 1944 when German police --  responding to an informer who became aware of the family's involvement in sheltering Jews and then reported them to authorities -- raided the home. Not only were the eight Jews being sheltered by the Ulma family murdered, but the murder spree included Jozef and Wiktoria, pregnant at the time, and their six children. During the violence, Wiktoria went into sudden labour and the Ulma family's youngest was briefly introduced to the world. None survived.

 

 

A nun views a display about the Ulma family outside the presidential palace in Warsaw.  Photo by Ryan Tumilty

 

The family has been recognized as an important symbol of national honour for Poles, fitting right in with the national narrative that Jews and Catholics lived a peaceful co-existence before the German occupation shattered the status quo and produced the Holocaust, drawing Poland into Germany's state-sponsored genocide through its orchestrated mass extermination of Europe's Jews.

Before the advent of the Second World War, an estimated 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, 90 percent of Polish Jews were murdered, along with hundreds of thousands of Poles whom the Nazis also considered to be a sub-human species. It was not only Polish Jews that were annihilated in the many death camps established in Poland by Nazi Germany; Poland became a gathering-point for Jews transported from other parts of Europe.

The six most-infamous extermination camps were established in Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka. Although Jews felt more accepted in Poland than in many other countries in Europe, particularly in the east, there was ample persecution and antisemitism along with deadly pogroms carried out against Jews in the country. Violence by Poles, stoutly religious Catholics where the church itself acted in promoting antisemitism, was not uncommon before the war.

There were many Jew-hating Poles who took their hate out in persecution and violence against Polish Jews. The Ulma family was an exception, among even the thousands of Poles who sacrificed their security in favour of trying to help neighbours frantic to escape mass death. Postwar, when Communists ruled Poland, they encouraged the Jews that remained to leave the country, continuing the old tradition of antisemitism. In fact, Jews who survived the Holocaust, returning to their towns and villages were met with threats from former neighbours now living in their homes.

Relations between Jews and the Polish Law and Justice party government in 2018 became strained when the country's Holocaust denial law made it illegal to publicly claim Poland or the Polish nation to have been involved in Nazi atrocities. The changes were withdrawn under outraged protests, including from the government of Israel. What remains is the potential of civil penalties for anyone implying Poles had any element of an active role during the Holocaust. Which, in certain documented instances they did have.

 

Jan Gross, Polish American history professor, has received opprobrium and has been investigated for libel, criticized by the current Polish government in relation to his work identifying a number of pogroms carried out in Poland against Jews by Poles themselves in the early period of the war. As Piotr Wrobel, University of Toronto history professor points out, Poland's view of history and Jews is accurate enough, albeit politicized by the government Law and Justice party.

The estimated 16,000 people comprising the Jewish community in today's Poland is small in a country of close to 38 million, yet the many synagogues that serviced Poland's large pre-war Jewish population have been protected and preserved. Sebastian Rudol, deputy director of Krakow's Jewish  Community Centre, states that the contemporary community views the debate surrounding responsibility as more nuanced in view of various aspects of the past in Polish-Jewish relations.

His centre caters to their small Jewish community. And it has  reached out to respond to the war in neighbouring Ukraine to help the conflict's refugees. Its agenda is also to help people whom ancestry searches identify their families' hidden backgrounds as Jews. When their forbears sought to protect themselves from antipathy to and persecution of Jews, by hiding their Jewish identity and assuming a Christian background in its stead.

Clergy attend the beatification ceremony of the Ulma family, who were murdered by German Nazis for sheltering Jews in Markowa, Poland September 10, 2023. Patryk Ogorzalek/Agencja Wyborcza.pl via REUTERS

The Vital Imperative of Remembrance

"It is where it all began for the Jewish community, and it has such historical significance."

"It's going to be eco-friendly. It's going to have a memorial garden. It's going to be a beautiful space. It's going to be a hub of research and education. It's going to have a beautiful auditorium with 150 places." "It's going to have a gallery that can host temporary exhibits."

Richard Schnurback, president, Montreal Holocaust Museum 

"It will transform the landscape of the area. It will help to revitalize downtown and so we feel we're really contributing to our city in a significant way as we all hope eventually to come out of this pandemic."

"We expect it to be an internationally renowned, world-class institution and an architectural statement."

"It will be a gathering place for other communities who have been targeted by genocide, for the local population, for students, for tourists. We are going to be a warm, welcoming, accessible space that draws people in and that transforms them and encourages them to stand up today, to act, to remember."

Dorothy Zalcman Howard, co-president, Montreal Holocaust Museum renewal project

"We've outgrown our physical facilities and we have to regularly refuse school groups."

"This museum will really be Canada's Holocaust Museum. It will tell the story of the Holocaust and also talk about the Montreal survivors, people who came to Canada, to Quebec, and helped to build our city."

Julia Reitman, campaign cabinet president, Montreal Holocaust Museum

Eva Kuper, standing in front of the Montreal Holocaust Museum, tells how her life was saved just as she and her mother were being loaded onto cattle cars for transport away from the Warsaw Ghetto

 

"[The] relocation to downtown Montreal should allow increased accessibility and that is all the more necessary, as we have seen in recent days."

"Unfortunately, many people are not sufficiently aware of the Holocaust and of the consequences and the lingering after-affects of that tragedy."

"Let's hope that having a museum that allows us to better understand this reality will lead people who have trivialized the use of the yellow star and trivialized certain Nazi symbols in the past few months to reflect." 

Benoit Charette, Quebec minister of Culture

A collection of yellow stars, worn by Jews during the Holocaust, is one of the many exhibits by the Montreal Holocaust Museum. (Simon Nakonechny/CBC)

 

A museum, another museum dedicated to the premise that to forget is to airbrush history out of existence. Can there be too many museums and edifices whose sole purpose is to remind humanity of its obligations to ensure that the organized mass elimination of a people -- whose humanity had been denigrated amidst accusations of sinister conspiracies to rule the world, to establish themselves as an ethnic-religious-ideological world power, subjugating all other peoples to their command -- is never repeated?

A criminal, deliberately purposeful campaign undertaken by Nazi Germany to dehumanize Europe's Jews, to justify the Third Reich's carefully staged enterprise of delegitimization of what they labelled sub-humans belonging to a specific ethnic-religious group in preparation to launch a program of mass slaughter, one that would not raise objections among populations inured to compassion for the men, women and children slated for death, because they were exposed to a lethal hatred and believed that Jewish dominion over the globe must be stopped at all costs.

 

A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942, the 1,700 people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before the uprising was finally put down. The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot. Photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial.

 

The cost was six million lives. The European Jew-cleansing pogrom cost Jewish children their future, Jewish women and men their hopes, as they were gathered up, murdered en masse, buried in mass graves, used as slave labour, died of starvation and disease. And then the Final Solution seeking more efficient, quicker methods thought of Zyclone B to gas assembled Jews whose humanity had been stripped away, just as their worldly possessions, their hair, their gold rings and gold teeth were gathered to help the World War II effort of the Axis forces.

 

Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in 1942, on their last stop before the German concentration camps. Some 13,152 Jews (including 4,115 children) were rounded up by French police forces, taken from their homes to the "Vel d'Hiv", or winter cycling stadium in southwestern Paris, in July of 1942. They were later taken to a rail terminal at Drancy, northeast of the French capital, and then deported to the east. Only a handful ever returned.

 

This was their destiny; a giant sacrifice for their noble cause; ridding the world of Jews for the greater purpose of elevating Aryan qualities of physique, emphasizing the health virtues of abstaining from alcohol, smoking, poor nutrition, and global command of lesser nations. The golden mean of 'doing unto others as you would have them do unto you', underpinning Jewish traditions only emphasized their suffering as they cried out to the heavens for having abandoned them. Remembering the atrocities, the humiliations, the suffering is integral to modern Jewish life. 

The promise made Never to Forget was forged in blood and bone in memory of those whose lives were taken. So, no, such places of memorial and teaching must carry the torch of remembrance. There are far too many in today's world who doubt the very existence of a machinery vast enough and dedicated enough to have murdered six million Jews. And many among them feel the effort was halted before it could properly complete its goal. The spectre of once-hushed Jew-hatred has resurfaced with a vengeance.

 

The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob.

 

The Montreal Holocaust Museum's current location in a building shared with other Jewish community organizations has outlived its ability to convey the full measure of what fascist Germany accomplished. A mere 400 of its 14,000 artifacts are displayed, reflecting a lack of room to amply and effectively expose visitors to a fuller understanding of the Holocaust. With a purpose-built edifice for which funding is being raised, for construction to commence in 2023 in the expectation of the museum opening two years later, a generous endowment by the province's Culture Ministry of $20 million, another $15 million from the Azrieli Foundation, as well as public, corporate and private sources see the project on goal for $80 million.

The museum is to move from Cote Ste-Catherine Road to what once was the beating heart of the Montreal Jewish community, St.-Laurent Blvd., The Main. Where a parking lot now sits, a building to house the Holocaust Museum is to rise, with 71 percent of its funding already raised. Destination Montreal represented the third most important city per capita after Israel and New York, for Holocaust survivors leaving the charnel house of Europe for a new beginning. Of the roughly 40,000 survivors immigrating to Canada after the Second World War, 9,000 arrived in Montreal.

Among the museum's collection, there are 858 recorded survivor testimonies. Research indicates that people who learn about the Holocaust are likelier to be aware of and to care about other communities, to oppose persecution and to tend to develop anti-racist values. "For so many victims, there are no places that mark their existence. In a way, we are their voices. We are the repository for those people who were killed. We tell some of their stories and we encourage future generations to care about what happened and to translate those stories so they find expression in their own times", explained Dorothy Salcman Howard.

An urn containing ashes from the Auschwitz concentration camps sits surrounded by the names of other Nazi extermination camps at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. (Simon Nakonechny/CBC)