The condemnation of 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka as a former member of the Waffen SS after he was honoured in Canada’s Parliament has been excessive. The person who exposed him in that capacity, Lev Golinkin, is a Nazi hunter whose criterion for the asseveration of capital crimes for a suspect of Nazi crimes is service in any capacity in a para-military or police unit that has reasonably been found guilty of the commission of such crimes.
That the Waffen SS committed terrible crimes is not at issue; all units of the Nazi SS may reasonably be assumed to have been complicit in many activities which undoubtedly constitute among the most heinous crimes in all of history. They were directly involved in the rounding up and inhuman transportation of many millions of unoffending people to perish in circumstances of unimaginable barbarity in the Nazi death camps. Approximately 12 million people died in those camps, about half of them Jews, and virtually all of them innocent of any significant wrongdoing.
From very shortly after the end of World War II, there has been active and legitimate disagreement over how best to conduct what was at first called the denazification of Germany. In general, the Allied powers of occupation—the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France, who governed every square inch of Germany from 1945 until 1949—applied a standard of proof of individual guilt, especially where people were on trial for their lives, rather than membership in an organization that was proved to be guilty of acts of murder, even mass murder. Lev Golinkin does not subscribe to that standard and is a partisan of the view that anyone who belonged to any organization that committed such crimes was automatically guilty of them. It seems that it was by that concept of collective guilt by which Mr. Hunka has been condemned.
I understand that there are some allegations specifically against him personally, and these must be taken seriously, but they must not be prejudged. As a practical matter, it is not appropriate to try a man of his advanced age on the basis of allegations made by people who are now deceased. As far as what has come into the public domain, there is no reason to doubt that the offence of Mr. Hunka was to accept to serve in the Waffen SS, and nothing has come to light to overturn his claim that his motive was to fight for the independence of Ukraine—a cause that the Nazis, for their own wicked purposes, pandered to in order to drum up volunteers to support them in their barbarous invasion of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet oppression of the Ukraine, especially mass liquidations of the kulaks (small farmers) and millions of Ukrainians by Stalin in the 1930s, is well documented, and Mr. Hunka and many other Ukrainians had every right to aspire to, and fight for, the independence of their country. It hardly needs over-emphasis that this is a cause now being heroically pursued with the strong tangible encouragement of the government of Canada and the entire Western Alliance. If Mr. Hunka had remained in Ukraine, he would certainly have been murdered by the returning Soviets, thus he cannot be blamed for fleeing to the West.
The fact of having fought in what was a criminal organization that committed horrible crimes does not in itself justify the odium in which the Golinkin accusations have placed Mr. Hunka. A similar issue raising many of the same questions arose when President Ronald Reagan visited the military cemetery at Bitburg, Germany, on May 5, 1985. When it came to light that 48 members of the SS were buried there along with approximately 2,000 ostensibly non-political soldiers of the German army, President Reagan was widely urged not to proceed with his plan to give a speech at that cemetery. But the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, strongly urged him not to cancel the engagement. President Reagan visited the Bergen-Belsen death camp before proceeding on to Bitburg, and he gave his address as scheduled.
“To the survivors of the Holocaust, your terrible suffering has made you ever vigilant against evil,” Mr. Reagan said.
“Many of you are worried that reconciliation means forgetting. I promise you we will never forget and we say with the victims of the Holocaust: ‘Never again.’ The war against one man’s totalitarian dictatorship was not like other wars; the evil of Nazism turned all values upside down. Nevertheless, we can mourn the German war dead today as human beings crushed by a vicious ideology. Of the 2,000 men buried in the cemetery, how many were fanatical followers of the dictator and willfully carried out his cruel orders? We do not know. Many, however, we know from the dates on their tombstones were only teenagers at the time. There were thousands of such soldiers to whom Nazism meant no more than a brutal end to a short life.”
“We do not believe in collective guilt,” the president continued. “Only God can look into the human heart, and all these men have now met their supreme judge, and they have been judged by Him as we shall all be judged. Our duty today is to mourn the human wreckage of totalitarianism and today in Bitburg cemetery we commemorated the potential good in humanity that was consumed more than 40 years ago. ... Too often in the past each war only planted the seeds of the next. We celebrate today the reconciliation between our two nations that has liberated us from that cycle of destruction. Look at what together we have accomplished. We who were enemies are now friends; we who were bitter adversaries are now the strongest of allies.”
Elie Wiesel, perhaps the leading Jewish advocate of both the punishment of Nazi genocidists and of collaborators and reconciliation among all the civilizations disrupted in World War II, who had opposed Reagan’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery, commented: “As we all know, President Reagan is a great speaker and that was a very fine speech. But I still wish he had not made it.”
Those who were not directly affected by the Holocaust may not be able to imagine themselves in the place of those who were. No one who was not a victim or relative or friend of victims of the monstrous crimes committed against the Jews and all who were singled out for liquidation by the Nazis, can judge these matters with the moral authority and awful familiarity with such soul-destroying evil as those who were. No matter how knowledgeable anyone may be of those atrocities, it is hard to impute them to the descendants of the civilization of Goethe and Beethoven.
No one can begrudge those closest to the Holocaust victims their desire for the collective punishment of anyone tainted by association with that wickedness and evil. But on the facts that are known in this case, it has not been just to invite Yaroslav Hunka to Parliament for the visit of the president of the country where he once lived, and for which he fought and risked his life, albeit in an army devoted to evil ambitions, and then suddenly to demonize him as a war criminal with no due process whatever, 80 years after the events. The great majority of those years were spent as an exemplary resident and citizen of this country.
Mr. Hunka should not have been invited, should not have accepted the invitation, should not have been demonized as he has been, and the Speaker of the House should not have felt it necessary to resign. The prime minister’s apology was fully adequate to the circumstances, and this should be the end of it.
