OTTAWA – Several Jewish advocacy organizations condemned members of Parliament on Sunday for giving a standing ovation to a man who fought for a Nazi unit during the Second World War.

During Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Ottawa on Friday, MPs honoured 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka in the House of Commons.

Hunka was invited by Speaker Anthony Rota, who introduced him as a war hero who fought for the First Ukrainian Division.

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The First Ukrainian Division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division or the SS 14th Waffen Division, a voluntary unit that was under the command of the Nazis.

The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies issued a statement Sunday saying the division “was responsible for the mass murder of innocent civilians with a level of brutality and malice that is unimaginable.”

Why is this being downvoted? He was literally part of the SS. He was in a Ukrainian division that voluntarily worked with the Nazis. On the one hand, it's understandable that you might get confused by the name because if you're not aware of the connection then it sounds innocent. On the other hand, did no one do any screening of the event to ensure they wouldn't be calling on a former member of the SS to be honored?

Do they not do any research at all before these kinds of events? This is incredibly badly judged.

Whoops....

It's 1943. You are an Ukrainian lad in an area that your country lost in another senseless conflict, the Polish-Soviet war. You are eighteen years old, with limited knowledge of the world around you. The only thing you are certain of is that you hate the Polish, because they've been oppressing you in the area you've called your land since birth. A second class citizen in your own home. The elderly spoke of times when it sucked marginally less. The Empire, long gone in another great conflict. And then the Russians came and got their filthy hands on whatever the Polish did not. Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The Polish got subjugated by the Nazi Reich, and just two years prior they've occupied the area you live in. You've seen their tanks roll in. Their planes fly overhead. Their troops marching in unison. From your point of view it was liberation. Things were sucking marginally less in East Galicia again.

However the rest of your country was still under Soviet rule. And the grip on it getting ever stronger. Stalin and his Communists want to absorb it completely into their machine as the bread basket of their empire. Food for the whole nation! For everyone, but your motherland. Or so you've heard. The elders tell of the great famine a decade ago.

The news papers warn of the evil that is the communists on every headline. You can't help but feel some sense of urgence to do something about it. You are full of energy and rage! You've been slighted! Your people have been slighted!! And suddenly... there it is. The opportunity you've been waiting for: "AUFRUF." reads the paper. A call for Galicia's Ukrainian youth to take up arms against the Bolsheviks...