Thread by @AamerAnwar

🧵1/8 Canada’s Parliament along with Trudeau & Zelensky gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian because he fought against the Russians in WW2, but he’d served in the Nazi’s Ukrainian 14th Waffen, aka SS Galincha. implicated in the mass murder of Jews & others

🧵2/8 Formed in 1943, SS Galichina was recruited from Galicia region in Ukraine. The unit was armed & trained by the Nazis commanded by German officers. In 1944, the division was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler, who spoke of the soldiers’ “willingness to slaughter Poles.”

🧵3/8 Three months earlier, SS Galichina subunits perpetrated what is known as the Huta Pieniacka massacre, burning 500 to 1,000 Polish villagers alive. The town was razed to the ground and most of its inhabitants were murdered, including many young children.

🧵4/8 During the Nuremberg Trials, the Waffen-SS was declared a criminal organisation responsible for mass atrocities including “persecution & extermination of the Jews, brutalities & killings in concentration camps, administration of the slave labour & murder of prisoners.”

🧵5/8 After the war, thousands of SS Galichina veterans were allowed to resettle in the West, around 2,000 of them in Canada. By then, the unit was universally known as the First Ukrainian Division.

🧵6/8 A blog by an association of its veterans, called “Combatant News” in Ukrainian, includes an autobiographical entry by a Yaroslav Hunka that says he volunteered to join the division in 1943 and several photographs of him during the war..

🧵7/8 The captions say the pictures show Hunka during SS artillery training in Munich in December 1943 and in Neuhammer (now Świętoszów), Poland, the site of Himmler’s visit

🧵8/8 In posts to the blog dated 2011 & 2010, Hunka describes 1941 to 1943 as the happiest years of his life- shamefully the Speaker of the Canadian Parliament described him as a hero & said “we thank him for all his service.”🙈🇨🇦