@justinling Great article shedding some light on the very real complexities of the choices people in the nations that were caught between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had to face. Shkandrij's book also seems interesting.
Going into a bit more detail about why Polish poliicians might be angry enough to demand deportation could have been a good addition. Ukrainian nationalist movements were responsible for massacres targeting ethnic Poles estimated to have resulted in more than 100,000 dead in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.
I would also be a little wary of making the conclusion that a good balance was achieved post-war with prosecuting war criminals, many got away with everything they had done because they were so many of them and limited appetite for investigation once the war was over and done with for various reasons.
@73ms It's a fair point. I certainly yadda yadda yadda'd over much of the Soviet era, because the repression of the USSR basically forbade any proper accountability for the crimes committed in Eastern Europe. All we could really control for was our own immigration policies, the Nuremberg courts, and how we worked with these countries when they became independent.
But you're right, I could have written a whole other piece on those questions.
This is the nuance that was completely lost amongst the over amped quest for clicks.
I appreciate the balance that @justinling strikes in this piece. There are clear lines, but history is complicated and war is hell.
The compromise we settled on long ago...: For those who fought with the SS in Eastern Ukraine and the Baltics, we looked for evidence of war crimes and, finding none, we accepted that war is hell. We let these men go about their lives, without ever forgetting that history. ...
Rota’s decision to put Hunka in that gallery upset that fragile compromise.
And is that what you think you've done in this piece, which appears to treat a very politically compromised Canadian commission on the subject - conducted almost 40 yrs ago, & widely denounced at the time by advocates for justice for Holocaust victims - as somehow being "the final word" on the matter ?
Compare & Constrast
"At the time critics labelled the commission’s report as a whitewash. The decades since have further reinforced that view as additional information about the 14th SS Division Galicia’s war crimes have emerged."
By David Pugliese Over the years some Ukrainian Canadians have staunchly defended the 14th SS Division Galicia. They have falsely claimed that Ukrainians who served in the division were conscripted, when in reality 80,000 volunteered and 13,000 were selected. Other apologists argue that the divisio
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