VANDALISM SPARKS MONUMENT SCRUTINY
Graffiti on a memorial in an Ontario cemetery to those who served in a Nazi SS division is now being investigated as vandalism instead of as a hate-motivated crime, but the region’s police chief is questioning why the monument exists in the first place.
Someone painted “Nazi war monument” on a stone cenotaph commemorating those who served with the 14th SS Division in the Second World War. The monument is located in the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery in the Toronto suburb of Oakville.
The division, made up of Ukrainians who pledged allegiance to Hitler, was part of the Nazi’s Waffen SS organization. Some members of the division have been accused of killing Polish women and children as well as Jews during the Second World War.
Halton Regional Police think the graffiti was spray painted on the cenotaph sometime around June 21. Police originally stated they were investigating the incident as a “hate-motivated” crime but they declined to release images of the graffiti so as to stop “further spreading” of the message.
But after researchers pointed out on social media that the monument honours the 14th Waffen SS and the Ottawa Citizen published an article Friday detailing the history of the controversial unit, Halton Regional Police issued a clarification.
“The initial information collected by investigators indicated that the graffiti may have been hate-motivated, targeting the identifiable group of Ukrainians in general, or Ukrainian members of this cultural centre,” the police said in a statement. “At no time did the Halton Regional Police Service consider that the identifiable group targeted by the graffiti was Nazis.”
Halton Regional Police Chief Stephen Tanner went further on Twitter, questioning the reason for the monument. “The most unfortunate part of all this is that any such monument would exist in the first place,” he tweeted.
Police are now examining the incident as a case of vandalism, said Det. Sgt. Barrett Gabriel.
The cenotaph carries the crest of the 14th Waffen SS division. The division, also known as the Galizien Division, was formed in 1943 when Nazi Germany needed to shore up its forces as allied troops, including those from the U.S., Canada, Britain and Russia, started to gain the upper hand and turn the tide of the war. In May 1944, SS leader Heinrich Himmler addressed the division with a speech that was greeted by cheers. “Your homeland has become more beautiful since you have lost — on our initiative, I must say — the residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name — namely the Jews,” Himmler said. “I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles, I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”
Bernie Farber, of the Canadian Anti-hate Network, welcomed Tanner’s statement. “Given the chief’s endorsement, perhaps this can be the beginning of a review of all such monuments in Canada that glorify those who served the Nazis and those who served in Nazi SS units,” Farber said.
There are several such monuments throughout Canada to those who collaborated or helped the Nazis with a number of them being erected in the 1980s, Professor Per Rudling of Lund University in Sweden writes in a newly released book. “Beyond the Ukrainian diaspora, these monuments went largely unnoticed,” he writes in the book Public Memory in the Context of Transnational Migration and Displacement.
Rudling said it is time that Canadians have an open discussion about such monuments and what they represent.
The monument to the 14th SS Division was also in the headlines in 2017 when the Russian Embassy in Ottawa posted images on its Twitter account pointing out the “Nazi monuments” in Canada.
To some in Canada’s Ukrainian community, the SS members were heroes who fought against the Russians, who previously occupied their country.
In response to the 2017 furor over the monument, Ihor Michalchyshyn, executive director of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, rejected outright any suggestions Ukrainians collaborated with Nazi Germany during the war. “I think that the premise of calling them Nazi collaborators is slanderous,” he told the National Post at the time.
There are allegations members of the 14th SS Division took part in killing hundreds of Polish civilians in 1944 in the village of Huta Pieniacka. Some Ukrainians dispute that the SS division took part in the killings or they argue that only small elements from the unit — and under Nazi command — were involved.
In 2017, a Polish judge issued an arrest warrant for then 98-year-old Michael Karkoc, a 14th SS Division deputy company commander, for war crimes. Karkoc, living in the U.S., died before he could be tried in court. He had been accused of coordinating the massacre of 44 civilians, including women and children, in the Polish village of Chłaniów in 1944.