Contentious Ukrainian Second World War unit examined

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/06/2023 (861 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In April 1943 in German-occupied Ukraine, the Nazis created a Ukrainian-manned military unit named the “14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (Galician no.1).”

History generally knows it by its shorthand, the “Galician Division.”

According to University of Manitoba professor emeritus of Slavic studies Myroslav Shkandrij, “in all about twenty-five thousand Ukrainians served in the Division. Its strength was around twelve thousand at any given time with another three thousand in the reserve regiment or undergoing training.”

Its role during the Second World War has been a hot-button issue down to today. Its legacy has surfaced yet again in Vladimir’s Putin’s big lie that Ukraine’s current government (led by a Jewish president) is a Nazi regime.

Shkandrij has authored a scholarly analysis of a complex and conflicted historical issue. He frames the conflict this way: “Opposing perspectives have clashed. Victims of German aggression have naturally seen the force as complicit in Nazi criminality, specifically in the victimization of Jewish and Polish civilians, while the counter-perspective has cast the soldiers as patriots and pragmatists who grasped arms from the Germans because they wanted to fight Stalin. Both views have sometimes calcified into tropes or memes.”

When the Galician Division was created, Ukraine had only recently been the victim of the Holodomor, the 1932-33 famine caused by the Soviet Union’s forced collectivization of agriculture. It killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people. Many historians believe the famine was engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a nascent Ukrainian independence movement.

Shkandrij adheres to the academic protocol of citing in parentheses after a statement or adopted fact the author, year of publication and page number of sources. The scrupulous historical accuracy and sourcing slows, and sometimes jams up, the narrative flow and narrows the book’s audience.

Most Canadians, if they’ve heard of the Galician Division at all, likely learned of its existence via the 1986 report of the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, usually referred to as the Deschênes Commission, that investigated whether, and to what extent, war criminals entered Canada after the Second World War.

The then-Soviet Union’s official position was that any individual who’d served in the Waffen-SS was a war criminal — and therefore all Ukrainians who’d served in the Galician Division were war criminals. The Deschênes Commission disagreed.

Shkandrij cites the Commission: “Membership alone in the Waffen SS does not, in itself, amount to a crime under international law, it must be membership as qualified by the Tribunal in Nuremberg. It implies either knowledge or participation.”

Shkandrij sifts through a massive historical record of documents and accounts, buttressed by postwar personal testimonies of individual soldiers and officers, and concludes “that the primary motivation for signing up in 1943 had been to fight Stalin, Russia and Bolshevism, and to create a military formation that would struggle for Ukraine’s independence.”

While his research is commendably meticulous, his book tilts toward an audience of historians and scholars. A less formal recounting of events — and less concurrent attributions of sources, plus a touch or two of storytelling — would have made a good and important book a more accessible one.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.