“SLANDER QUAKES EVERYTHING AND WOBBLES THE GLOBE”
By Alik Gomelsky
Studying the events concerning the Waffen SS “Galician” Division and the scandal surrounding Yaroslav Hunka, who visited the Canadian Parliament on 22 September 2023, I could not get the haunting essence of these lines out of my mind:
«Calumny is a little breeze, a gentle zephyr,
which faintly, subtly, lightly and sweetly commences to whisper.
Softly-softly, here and there, sottovoce and sibilant it glides,
it goes rambling. Into the ears of the people it penetrates slyly
and their heads and brains it stuns and it swells.
From mouths re-emerging, the noise in a crescendo gathers force little by little,
runs its course from place to place, like the thunder of a tempest
that from the depths of the forest comes whistling, muttering, freezing everyone in horror.
Finally, with crack and crash it spreads afield, its force redoubled,
and produces an explosion like the outburst of a cannon—
an earthquake, a whirlwind, a general uproar, which makes the air resound.
And the poor slandered wretch, vilified, trampled down, sunk beneath the public lash,
mercifully falls dead.».1
In the role of the intriguer Don Basilio, Russian President Putin performed this popular aria on the stage of the Valdai Discussion Club in the fall of 2023. In accordance with well-tried propagandistic techniques, Russia’s leader—an officer of the Soviet equivalent of the Gestapo—deftly filled his short speech with lies, disinformation, innuendos, and pathetic accusations:
- «Everyone applauded this Nazi…who personally, with his own hands, killed [members of] the Jewish population of Ukraine»
- «The German fascists created this “Galicia” division primarily to exterminate the civilian population»
- «And when the President of Ukraine applauds a man who personally exterminated Jews, does he want to say that the Holocaust did not happen?».2
Here, Putin was referring to the presence of a former soldier of the Waffen-SS “Galician” Division, Yaroslav Hunka, at a ceremonial session of the Canadian Parliament in honour of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit. This scandal was born despite repeated and thorough investigations of the Galicia Division by Canadian and international legal commissions. Hunka himself was never found by any investigation to be a war criminal.
Shortly before President Putin’s aria in Valdai, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest3 to investigate war crimes that he had committed. Thus, the whole world has been listening to false accusations made against an innocent person, from the lips of a person who has been accused of committing particularly serious war crimes.
Statements like the ones Putin made in Valdai are curated to sow discord between Ukrainians and Jews. They are masterfully designed to create severe turbulence that slows down progress around the globe. Russian propagandists led by Putin create the impression that they are supposedly protecting the memory of Jewish victims, but in fact they are deliberately leading to the opposite—instilling doubts about the veracity of the horrors of the Shoah and fueling aggressive anti-Semitism in the world.
To eliminate the possibility of insinuation and elementary confusion, it is important to call everything by its proper name. We should say either the “14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS ‘Galician’” or, for brevity, the Galicia(n) Division (Halytska Diviziia or Diviziia Halychyna), and we must not confuse it with the SS police regiments numbered from 4 to 8. Although those police units were also called Galician, they had nothing to do with the Waffen division itself—which included three infantry regiments, numbered 29, 30, and 31.
Studying the materials of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the report of the Deschênes Commission in Canada, it becomes clear to any researcher that the Galician Division was established exclusively as a front-line unit toward the end of the Second World War. Even the terms for its creation stated that this formation would not be involved on the Western Front and would not engage in repressions against the civilian population. Furthermore, as an exception to the common practice in both the SS and Waffen-SS, the Galician Division had military chaplains. Contrary to the claims of some historians, the division’s training followed typical army standards: combat tactics, operating light and heavy weaponry, anti-tank defense, communications, and combat engineering. These skills were fully useful to the division’s soldiers in the July 1944 Battle of Brody, where they defended against units of the Red Army. The Soviet advantage was enormous—4 times the human resources, 5.5 times the artillery, and 6.5 times the armoured vehicles…
The Galician Division was practically formed from Autumn 1943 to Spring 1944, when the Jewry of Galicia had already been essentially destroyed by the Nazis; Jews who miraculously survived this massacre either hid with the righteous or joined the partisan movement—including, naturally, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Therefore, the Galician Division had nothing to do directly with the Shoah (Holocaust). It is important to realize that the USSR and its successor, Putin’s Russia, played and continues to play the “Jewish-Ukrainian card” on the issue of the division.
The information presented is also confirmed by the statements of eminent Jewish and non-Jewish scholars. For example, Henry Abramson, dean of Lander College in New York and a specialist in Ukrainian-Jewish history, noted in an October 2023 interview: “The Galicia Division, however, is an exception to the rule”4 I completely agree with Professor Abramson. Despite the fact that the SS was recognized as a criminal organization at the Nuremberg trials, those who did not commit war crimes were not recognized as criminals.5
The leaders of the VAAD (the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine) noted that based on the research and publications of many Ukrainian and especially Jewish historians, we see much more clearly the incredibly complex history of our peoples. Having gone through a long historical journey, they now jointly resist the aggression of imperialist Russia, which has violated all conceivable legal and human norms and today threatens the entire democratic world with the outbreak of a new world war.
Let us turn to the story of accusations of Galician Division involvement in the Shoah—in particular, to the previously mentioned Deschênes Commission. A declassified 1985 document from the KGB archives at the Security Service of Ukraine states that American authorities were pressured into creating a special investigative unit (OSI) under the Department of Justice, based on materials that the USSR transferred to the West in various ways. These materials included the brochure Lest We Forget, created by two American communists, one of Ukrainian and one of Jewish origin, based on falsified information provided to them by the KGB. Proof of this is a declassified memo from the head of the KGB in Ukraine, Fedorchuk, to the head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Shcherbytsky, dated December 1973:
«In order to incite discord between Zionists and Ukrainian nationalists, the brochure ‘Lest We Forget’ was published in the USA… One of the leaders of the progressive Ukrainian organization ‘League of American Ukrainians,’ who recently visited Ukraine, was able to claim that he had access to the materials used in the brochure, and he acted as the ‘author’ and publisher of the brochure».
Note that the word “author” in the original KGB document is in quotation marks.
Along with this brochure and other similar materials, several propaganda film documentaries were created in the USSR. The KGB document from 1985 also sheds light on the fact that, along with the United States, Canada was also subjected to propaganda attacks from the USSR. As a result, the Canadian government was forced to create the Deschênes Commission (Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada). The KGB noted that it introduced into the influential Canadian newspaper Toronto Star a piece titled “We Accuse” about the allegedly punitive activities of the Waffen-SS Galician Division. The Soviets were very happy because of their misinformation activities, Ukrainians in the West were forced to direct their efforts and material resources to defending themselves against false accusations rather than fighting the USSR.
The naivety of the West was and still is in its doubting whether the Soviet Union is capable and cynical enough to create and spread such lies in the world. We have evidence that the USSR was very much capable and, moreover, proficient and successful in these measures.
The manuscript of the unpublished book “Labyrinths of the KGB”, authored by the Soviet Zionist and Gulag prisoner Avraham Shifrin6, contains completely unique and stunning evidence that the NKVD and the KGB were actively fabricating cases against former Soviet citizens who were in the British and American occupation zones. Shifrin noted that the only sin of these fugitives was their work during the Nazi occupation as dancers, musicians, accountants, drivers, and cleaners in various organizations. To Shifrin’s reasonable question: “Where are the murderers who helped the Nazis?” NKVD workers claimed that initially, after the re-occupation of the territories by the Red Army, everyone was executed without due process or trial.
After the war, the rest of the fugitives were gradually taken back to the USSR. This was usually done by security forces under the guise of members of commissions for the repatriation of USSR citizens. They organized either direct abduction and forced deportation to the USSR, or demanded the extradition of fugitives by fabricating various criminal cases against them. Presenting such falsified cases, the Soviet Union demanded that the Allies deport nonexistent murderers, rapists, and robbers.
Shifrin, a military lawyer and criminal investigator of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was well aware of these activities of the Soviet authorities. Immediately after the end of the Second World war, as well as during the war, the USSR seized from Germany entire warehouses of paper, typewriters, ink, pencils, and other office supplies, including, of course, stamps and all kinds of blank forms. All of this was carefully stored in Moscow for future use. Shifrin personally witnessed such materials being transported from Minsk, Vilnius, and Kaunas. The archives of the Gestapo and other Nazi institutions were carefully removed even from small towns like Gumbinnen (now Gusev, Russia), not to mention the magistrate’s office in Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). Shifrin's testimony about this was also confirmed by the KGB officer Nikolai Khokhlov,7 who fled to the West in 1954.
I am pleased that the Government of Canada and the Minister of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship, Mark Miller, have announced the release of a new version of the report by Alti Rodal. This full version, released pursuant to a request made under the Access to Information Act, declassifies and discloses information that was not previously available.
Alti Rodal was a member of the Deschênes Commission in the mid-1980s, and I fully agree with her authoritative conclusions as a history expert:
“However, it has not been established that members of the Galician Waffen-SS were also used as concentration camp guards […] In summary: While the allegations regarding commission of war crimes by the Division as a unit may call for further exploration, substantive evidence to support these allegations has to date not come forward. A more pointed if difficult avenue of investigation would focus on the background of individual members of the Division prior to their joining the Division”8.
Such an investigation into the personal affairs of the division’s military personnel was subsequently carried out by the Commission.
I also agree with the opinion of Mrs. Rodal that the acts of those who committed war crimes should be thoroughly investigated, and that the perpetrators must be deprived of Canadian citizenship and punished regardless of how long ago these crimes were committed. Just one proviso—the law must punish real criminals, not imaginary ones or those who are unfairly accused.
Alti Rodal raised a crucial point that most often escapes the attention of historians and political scientists. In her report, she states:
“The Allies did not recognize Ukrainians as a separate national group until the summer of 1947. According to a British directive of 29 December 1945, persons coming from the Ukraine were to be classed as citizens of the country in which they had their residence on September 1, 1939, and under the terms of the Yalta Agreement all persons who had lived on Soviet territory as of September 1, 1939 were to be returned to the USSR”.9
Despite completely unfounded accusations of bias and negligence, the Deschênes Commission did amazing work. The main conclusion of the commission was:
The Galician Division should not be condemned as a group; belonging to the Galician Division in itself cannot be grounds for initiating legal proceedings.
The summary documents also noted that the Commission repeatedly tried to obtain any incriminating evidence on the division’s military personnel that were allegedly in the possession of Simon Wiesenthal. To this end, the commission held several oral and written negotiations with Wiesenthal himself and his lawyer, Martin Mendelsohn, but to no avail. Neither telephone calls nor letters, nor Wiesenthal’s in-person meeting with the Commission’s legal counsel in New York on 1 November 1985 or subsequent direct contacts brought any positive results other than promises. Thus it became obvious that the list of 217 Galician Division military personnel provided by Wiesenthal “was nearly totally useless and put the Canadian government, through the RCMP and this Commission, to a considerable amount of purposeless work”. 10
Is it this archival information that Swedish historian Per Anders Rudling and American historian Jared McBride call for Canada to issue in their article “By opening up the archives, Canada can finally address its past with Nazi war criminals,” published in the Globe and Mail on 27 January 2024? Apparently, their appeal to the quality of American justice and the number of those deprived of citizenship and deported from the United States for some reason does not include a description of the shame of the U.S. legal system in the cases of Fedorenko and Demjanjuk. It seems to me that McBride and Rudling should carefully study the case of Demjanjuk v. Petrovsky (Autumn 1993) before attacking the Canadian justice system with similar accusations.
Indeed, the OSI seems a dubious authority, if not worse, about which a court in Ohio stated:
“The OSI attorneys acted with reckless disregard for their duty to the court and their discovery obligations in failing to disclose at least three sets of documents in their possession before the proceedings against Demjanjuk ever reached trial”.11
The Ohio court’s verdict was stunning:
“Thus, we hold that the OSI attorneys acted with reckless disregard for the truth and for the government's obligation to take no steps that prevent an adversary from presenting his case fully and fairly.This was fraud on the court in the circumstances of this case where, by recklessly assuming Demjanjuk's guilt, they failed to observe their obligation to produce exculpatory materials requested by Demjanjuk”. 12
In another dubious coincidence, Wiesenthal’s attorney Mendelsohn served as a prosecutor and chief of the Special Litigation Unit of the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the US Department of Justice, and was also Deputy Director for Litigation of the OSI.
As of 1 February 2024, all documents of the Deschênes Commission were declassified and published, with the exception of personal data of the persons whose cases were considered. This was confirmed by an official statement from the Government of Canada:
“While additional information that is no longer sensitive due to the passage of time can now be released, some information still remains protected in accordance with the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act”.13
In sum, as clearly stated in an official open letter by Professor Paul Robert Magocsi, Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto:
“There is simply no proof that the Galicia Division engaged in war crimes connected with the Holocaust of Jews or ethnic cleansing directed against Poles. It is not in the interests of Canada for politicians and the media to distort the historical past and besmirch the reputation of an individual in order to gain some ostensible advantage in the Canadian political arena”.
We all need to remember the tragic pages of the past, so that these dramas are never repeated. So that the next gnome, trying on the cap of Monomakh14 and the moustache of dead tyrants, is not drawn to the destruction of peaceful cities and the implementation of genocide. To do this, it is necessary to thoroughly understand the events of the past that affect both those living today and the descendants of those who only recently left this world. We all need to study history without clichés, prejudices, or myths. This knowledge is also necessary in order to convict real criminals—not slandered and arbitrarily designated ones, as was recently done with the Canadian citizen Yaroslav Hunka.
Aria of Don Basilio “La calunnia,” Act I, Scene II of the Rossini opera Il Barbiere di Siviglia, libretto by Cesare Sterbini; English version sourced from https://www.opera-arias.com/rossini/il-barbiere-di-siviglia/la-calunnia-e-un-venticello/. The article’s title is itself an English translation of a line from a poetic (not literal) Ukrainian version of the libretto attributed to Maksym Rylsky (1895–1964; https://musicinukrainian.wordpress.com/2019/12/15/rylsky-vocal-translator). This English translation of the original article has been emendated by Ksenia Maryniak.
"Путин на заседании клуба "Валдай": Мир будущего - это мир коллективных, а не единоличных решений". 05.10.2023 https://rg.ru/2023/10/05/vladimir-putin-vystupil-pered-uchastnikami-kluba-valdaj-zhit-po-pravu-a-ne-po-chim-to-pravilam.html
"Situation in Ukraine: ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova”
Abramson, Henry, interviewed by Mark Connolly, “The role of Ukrainians who fought in a division…,” CBC Edmonton AM, 4 October 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/1.6986541 (quote is at 4:15).
International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg). Judgement of 1 October 1946. https://www.legal-tools.org/doc/45f18e/pdf.
Avraam Shifrin is a veteran of the Second World War (at the end of which he held the title of officer in the Red Army at only 22 with a rank of Capitan and with an injury that rendered him with a medium level disability), a senior criminal investigator, legal adviser to the Ministry of Armaments of the USSR, and an American-Israeli spy who had access to top-secret documents signed by Stalin. Avraam Shifrin was also a prisoner of Gulag for 10 years, a Zionist, writer, publicist, human rights defender, translator, Israeli public and a political figure, an expert on the Soviet penitentiary system, according to the Soviet press he was the «number 1 enemy of the USSR».
Nikolai Khokhlov (7 June 1922, Nizhnii Novgorod–17 September 2007, San Bernardino, California) was an American psychologist of Russian origin; in the past, a Soviet intelligence officer (captain) who refused to carry out the assassination assigned to him of one of the leaders of the People's Labor Union (NTS), Georgy Okolovich and fled to the West. After receiving his doctorate from Duke University (North Carolina), Khokhlov taught undergraduate and graduate psychology at California State University, San Bernardino, from 1968 to 1992. He retired in 1993 with the rank of professor emeritus. In 1957 Nikolai Khokhlov was poisoned, presumably with a radioactive isotope (thallium or polonium), but survived after spending several weeks in hospital. This case is often called the first radiological attack by the KGB, similar to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. According to Khokhlov, this was not the only attempt at poisoning by agents of the Fifth Directorate of the All-Soviet KGB: in Paris, in the spring of 1958 they tried to poison him again, and later radioactive thallium was added to his coffee during a journalist conference in Frankfurt.
Rodal, Alti, “Nazi War Criminals in Canada: the Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present,” 379, https://recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/home/record?app=fonandcol&IdNumber=6043354 (pdf p. 398).
Ibid., 380 (pdf p. 399).
Deschenes, Jules, Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 257–58.
776 F.2d 571. United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit. John DEMJANJUK, Petitioner-Appellant, v. Joseph PETROVSKY, et al., Respondents-Appellees. No. 85-3435. Argued July 8, 1985. Decided Oct. 31, 1985.
Ibid.
Allusion to a poem called “Three Steps Forward and Three Back” by Yuri Mulin, from the book by Avraam Shifrin Poetry in the Concentration Camps (Israel, 1978).
A Jewish perspective on the history and legacy of the Galicia Division