You can tell who’s consuming shallow right wing propaganda. The Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 1940s of course included Nazis. Think about it from a Ukrainian’s perspective in 1941, who was seen as the greatest mass murderer of the time? Stalin. Who was seen as preventing you from gaining national sovereignty? The USSR. If you survived the horrific Holodomor, you would’ve seen 5 million fellow countrymen starved to death on purpose by Stalin.
So At the time, of course Nazis were seen by nationalists as the ticket for Ukrainians to overthrow the murderous soviet regime and gain national sovereignty. Like the Revolutionary war, Americans didn’t turn down French support because they too had a king. The enemy at hand was George III and British dominance over the colonies.
Obviously, the Nazis didn’t care about Ukrainian independence. So that ooor nation suffered twice, both from Nazi domination and then Soviet retribution. And now they’re suffering again by Putin’s invasion. And to rub salt in the wound, right wing Americans are supporting Putin!
Yeah, I gotta call bullsh*t on this. A whole lot of factual inaccuracies here. Let's start with geography. The 14th Waffen SS division was properly called 1st Galician. That should immediately give you a clue to where it was raised. Galicia was
not part of the USSR before the war and Hunka himself was not born in the USSR. He was born in Poland, to which Galicia belonged between 1920 and 1939. The Ukrainians were discriminated against in Poland to some degree, but never physically, nor was there a famine in Poland in the 1930s. Hunka himself is not a Holodomor survivor, nor is he likely to have known anyone who was. He also wouldn't have heard of the famine as any news of it was suppressed within Soviet Union so that their own people didn't know about it, let alone people in another country. The SS division was raised among the Greek Catholics in what was formerly Poland, and not in Greek Orthodox parts of Ukraine that had been under USSR and that had been hit by the famine. Note that Bandera was also from Galicia, as were most members of his OUN.
The Germans didn't start creating Waffen SS units among non-Germanic people until they were on the defensive and had no means of conscripting more Germans. The first foreign Waffen SS division created under this plan was a Bosnian one in 1943. The Galician one was next and it was formed at the end of April 1943. Hunka is unlikely to have joined before the second half of the year because the recruitment didn't start until June. I should also take a moment to point out that this was a voluntary division. They were not conscripted or forced. Summer of 1943 is a long, long way from 1941. Sure, in June 1941, you might have reasonably believed that Nazis would help you throw off the Soviet yoke, but when the independence of Ukraine was proclaimed on June 30th in Lviv(again, in Galicia), the Germans reacted by having Gestapo arrest most of the leaders of OUN and send them to camps.
By the second half of 1943, it was pretty obvious what the Nazis were all about. Galicia is a big area and the western part is predominantly Polish. The eastern part, where Hunka himself was from, was majority Ukrainian. Majority, but not predominantly. A third of the population was either Jewish or Polish. By 1943, it would've been impossible to not notice that the Jewish tenth of the population had either been herded into ghettos, sent to extermination camps, or already slaughtered, and the the Polish quarter was persecuted, occasionally randomly killed, and at times sent to the Reich to work as slave labour. It also would've been impossible to notice that the Germans have also been committing all manner of atrocities against the Ukrainian population, and that they had absolutely no interest in any kind of self-government, let alone independence for Ukraine.
Hunka also claims that he joined the SS(so not some local Ukrainian unit that collaborated with the Nazis, but the actual Waffen SS) because he heeded the call of the Ukrainian National Committee to fight for a free Ukraine. The UNC was formed in March 1945(!). Now, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say he got some minor details wrong. The UNC was formed as a result of a merger of several Ukrainian nationalist organizations, of which OUN was by far the largest. Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists
did call for Ukrainians to work alongside Germany to defeat USSR, but as I noted above, that was in June 1941. As mentioned, the Nazis suppressed the organization within weeks, but not before OUN participated in the pogrom of Jews in Lviv. The underground remnants of the OUN would go on to for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in 1942, and while they made some half-hearted attempts to portray themselves as fighting all external enemies including the Nazis, they mostly focused on perpetrating atrocities against Poles and Jews. In fact, their stated aim was to prevent Galicia and other parts of western Ukraine from returning to Poland after the end of the war.
Once the Galician 14th Waffen SS division was formed and properly trained and able to fight, it was 1944 already and the Soviet forces had retaken most of Ukraine. The Galician division was not sent to fight against the approaching Soviets but rather used to suppress Polish partisan uprisings. I shouldn't have to tell you that war crimes were committed against Polish peasantry during this and that entire villages were burned. The division then withdrew with the Germans and were then sent to Slovakia to quash the uprising there, before finally ending up in northern Slovenia where their task, once more, was to terrorize the local populace into stopping their resistance. They were incredibly lucky to find themselves in Austria in May 1945, where they surrendered to the Western Allies. They were sent to a POW camp in Italy and ended up eventually dispersing around the world. They were not repatriated to Poland or the USSR, despite the requests by those countries.
So, no, Hunka did not suffer through Holodomor, did not witness unspeakable horrors being done to his countrymen, did not volunteer to join the Waffen SS because he thought he was defending Ukraine, and he did not fight against the Red Army. He was an 18-year old adult who joined the SS despite knowing very well what they were about and what they had spent the last few years doing. It's not a grey area at all.
www.newsweek.com
