Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

[Voronwë the Faithful]

So far as I am aware, there are no specific allegations that Hunka committed war crimes, only that he served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as the First Ukrainian Division or the Galicia Division, and that members of that division were responsible for killing Jews and Poles. Indeed, to the best that I am able to determine, they may have been responsible for killing or rounding up some of my family that lived in Ukraine during the war. However, unless there are specific allegations against Hunka, I see no reason why he should be extradited.

[Sunsilver]

Voronwë, it smells like a political maneuver to me. But uprooting an 98 year old man whose lived here most of his life isn't going to make them look good

[Frelga]

I doubt anyone in Poland would shed a tear for his comfortable Canadian life.

[Alatar]

Thats hardly the point though. He was in the army. It was his job to kill the enemy. Just as US, UK and other Allies killed Japanese and Germans. Those aren't necessarily War Crimes. I note nobody talks about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as War Crimes.

[Frelga]

20230929_131238.jpg (146.1 KiB) Viewed 4028 times

I guess he's not getting extradited. I am guessing South America = Argentina.

[Sunsilver]

Alatar, depending on which unit of the Waffen SS he was with, he may have taken part in some horrible atrocities. Some of the units were the army's 'cleanup crews'. They stayed behind the advancing army to round up and shoot the Jews and other undesirables.

Still, I can't help but feel sorry for him.

[N.E. Brigand]

He would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Some of Germany's most effective soldiers were members of the Waffen SS, and not all of them were even members of the Nazi party. Certainly, there is a good chance that Hunka did engage in war crimes, but it is also possible that he did not. The fact that he refers to "friends in South America" proves nothing.

[Jude]

As long as he gets a fair trial, I don’t feel the least bit sorry for him.

[N.E. Brigand]

Was the nature of his military service known to Canada when he emigrated to that country? I remember the case of John Demjanjuk, who lived less than ten miles from me. Israel tried him for being the notorious Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible." (He was convicted, but that was overturned. He probably wasn't even at that particular camp, but he was later convicted in Germany for his work as a guard at the Sobribor camp.) How was it that he was extradited from the U.S. to Israel in the first place? He lied on his visa application.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I thought of Demjanjuk's case as well. But again, unlike him, there is no specific allegations that I know of that Hunka was involved in the type of activities that Demjanjuk was involved with.

Jude, what do you think he should be tried for?

[Jude]

Maybe my phrasing was unclear. If there is sufficient evidence that he committed war crimes, and if he's convicted in a fair trial, he should spend the rest of his life in prison, and if there is no evidence, or if he's acquitted in a fair trial, he should be left alone.

The point I was trying to make is that he shouldn't get any special treatment because of his advanced age.

[RoseMorninStar]

Thats hardly the point though. He was in the army. It was his job to kill the enemy. Just as US, UK and other Allies killed Japanese and Germans. Those aren't necessarily War Crimes. I note nobody talks about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as War Crimes.

I cannot begin to adequately address this topic because all war/acts of violence are horrific and in no way do I wish to defend any atrocious violence but I didn't want your post to pass without some sort of acknowledgement. As such, I'm not sure what to say, while the two situations are not comparable and there will always be some who chomp at the bit to engage in violence, it does illustrate, at in at least some (many? most?) cases, the helplessness of the average person thrust into war/situations they would not ordinarily condone and acts they would not choose to commit. In the current conflict I would imagine there are many Russians who would not wish to go to war/kill, and there are many Ukrainians who wish they were not forced to kill in defense. It's a sorry commentary on the human condition and the desire for power, control, and dominance. It's the cost of maintaining a way of life. There aren't any winners.

[Sunsilver]

I remember seeing pictures at the start of the Ukraine invasion, where civilians were blocking tanks by standing in front of them and refusing to move. The Russian soldiers did not try to run them down.

You can be a soldier and not become a monster. But all too often, war forces soldiers to do things they normally would not do.

The Waffen SS was originally an all volunteer unit, and you had to be of pure Aryan descent. Towards the end of the war, they were taking just about anybody who wasn't a cripple. They also conscripted men for the unit. However:

The Waffen-SS were involved in numerous atrocities.[13] Due to its involvement in the Holocaust, the Porajmos and numerous war crimes and crimes against the civilian population, it was declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1946. Therefore Waffen-SS members, with the exception of conscripts, who comprised about one third of the membership, were denied many of the rights afforded to military veterans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffen-SS ... 0in%201946.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Maybe my phrasing was unclear. If there is sufficient evidence that he committed war crimes, and if he's convicted in a fair trial, he should spend the rest of his life in prison, and if there is no evidence, or if he's acquitted in a fair trial, he should be left alone.

The point I was trying to make is that he shouldn't get any special treatment because of his advanced age.

Gotcha!

[Frelga]

[Sunsilver]

Okay, have found out Hunka was a member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). And it's quite possible he's guilty of war crimes:

Formed in 1943, it was mainly employed in the repression of Soviet, Polish[5] and Yugoslav guerrilla partisans.[6] The division took part in the Huta Pieniacka,[7] Pidkamin[8] and Palikrowy[8] massacres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waff ... _Galician)

The e-friend who posted this info on his FB page also posted this very excellent reminder:

Why we teach history
Why we study history
So we don’t accidentally clap for Nazis
The end

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Sunny, I posted that information earlier in this thread. The fact that he was a member of a division that dis commit war crimes does not mean that he personally did so. I still have yet to see any suggestion that there is any evidence that he did so. That does not mean that he did not, and I certainly think it was a mistake to celebrate him in the parliament but unless evidence emerges that he actually did commit war crimes he should not be automatically considered a war criminal.

[Sunsilver]

Right. But apparently a lot of people are assuming he's guilty, and so much hate is being directed at him, he's thinking he'll have to leave the country (which you know already...)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This article is interesting; though of course I do not how accurate the claims are.

Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi

This history is complicated because fighting against the USSR at the time didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi, just someone who had an excruciating choice over which of these two terror regimes to resist. However, the idea that foreign volunteers and conscripts were being allocated to the Waffen-SS rather than the Wehrmacht on administrative rather than ideological grounds is a hard sell for audiences conditioned to believe the SS’s primary task was genocide. And simple narratives like “everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes” are more pervasive because they’re much simpler to grasp.
...
According to Russia’s ambassador in Canada, Hunka’s unit “committed multiple war crimes, including mass murder, against the Russian people, ethnic Russians. This is a proven fact.” But whenever a Russian official calls something a “proven fact,” it should set off alarms. And sure enough, here too the facts were invented out of thin air. Repeated exhaustive investigations — including by not only the Nuremberg trials but also the British, Canadian and even Soviet authorities — led to the conclusion that no war crimes or atrocities had been committed by this particular unit.
...
The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center registered its outrage, noting that Hunka’s unit’s “crimes against humanity during the Holocaust are well-documented” — a statement that doesn’t seem to have any more substance than the accusation by Russia.

In fact, during previous investigations of the same group carried out by a Canadian Commission of Inquiry, Simon Wiesenthal himself was found to have made broad accusations that were found to be “nearly totally useless” and “put the Canadian government to a considerable amount of purposeless work.”

The result of all this is that otherwise intelligent people are now trying to outdo each other in a chorus of evidence-free condemnation.