They weren’t an army division. They were actually a criminal organization.

Of course, there’s much more to the SS division’s sordid past than that. The 14th Waffen Grenadier Division murdered many, many Jews and Polish civilians. For this, they were applauded by Heinrich Himmler, who was the leader of the Nazi Party and the architect of the Holocaust.

In a speech, Himmler said of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division: “Your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost — on our initiative, I must say — those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name, namely the Jews … 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.”

Which they were. Which they did. For their homeland, which was Ukraine.

One such atrocity took place at the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka. According to those who were there, civilians were locked in barns, which were then set on fire. Those who tried to escape were killed.

On another occasion in the spring of 1944, 2,000 women and children had sought refuge in a monastery in the Polish village of Pidkamin, which is now part of Ukraine. The SS Grenadiers captured it and murdered hundreds.

Canada’s Deschenes Commission later concluded that it was unfair to call everyone in the 14th Division a war criminal. But the fact is that the commission never travelled to Europe to interview its victims.

The Nuremberg prosecutors who did found that the Grenadiers were led by men who had participated in the mass murder of Jews and civilians. And were indeed homicidal maniacs.

As Esprit de Corps magazine concluded: “Over the decades, as Holocaust historians publish more details about the atrocities of those who served in the SS Galicia Division, it has become clear to critics that the Deschenes commission was simply a whitewash of a military unit that subscribed to and served the ideology of Adolf Hitler and SS leader Heinrich Himmler.”

And one of them — one of the Nazis — was praised in the House of Commons this week. Our Church of Government defiled by the presence of a man who subscribed to the ideology of murder, Naziism.

The fact that he was there was bad enough. But this writer had a different question: What the hell was he doing in Canada in the first place?

The answer: He came here with 2,000 other Nazis. And the Canadian government welcomed them with open arms, too.

Flight Lt. Bohdan Panchuk was their sponsor. Writes historian and Postmedia journalist David Pugliese: “Panchuk was able to get members of the 14th Waffen SS Division Galicia into Canada by lying about their past.

Members of the unit had surrendered to Allied forces and were being held in a camp in Italy. In an attempt to hide the SS connection, the unit had changed its name in the last few days of the war to the First Division Ukrainian National Army. ”

To get them into Canada, Panchuk depicted them as anti-Soviet fighters. If Canadian officials had bothered to probe deeper, they would’ve found the truth. In fact, most of the men had SS tattoos under their left arms.

Ukrainians who lived in Canada knew who they were. They raised the alarm. But nobody listened to them. The 2,000 Nazis thereafter started to arrive throughout the 1950s and got to work whitewashing their past.

Which brings us to now. And the main question.

The main question is not how this Nazi came to be in the House of Commons. By now, we all know he was invited there by the moron who is the Speaker of the House of Commons, who the Liberals and Conservatives refused to fire.

No, the more important question is this: How did this Nazi get to Canada in the first place — and why is he still here?

Comments (57)

Comments (18)

You’re on the Internet.

You express opinions. You write a letter. You show up at a meeting.

If you’re Irish and Catholic, let’s say, you express sympathy for those who want to unite Ireland, and leave the United Kingdom.

Or, let’s say you’re Italian, and you’ve passionately expressed support on Facebook for any one of the many separatist movements that have been active in Italy for a long time.

Or, you’re of German ancestry, and you’ve written letters to the editor about making Bavaria or Saxony a separate country.

Or you’ve publicly expressed support for the Basques in France. Or the ones in Spain. Or any of the currently – current, not historic – active separatist movements in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia or Switzerland. (And that’s just Europe.)

That’s not an exhaustive list, of course. In just about every country in the world, there is a constituency who wants to break away and form their own homeland. Here in Canada, we’ve had people like that in Quebec and Western Canada for a long, long time. Some of them even have seats in our Parliament. They won them, fair and square.

We may not like it when nationalists express a desire to separate. It makes people pretty upset. (In this writer’s case, our family literally left our longtime home of Quebec to get away from separatist xenophobia and prejudice. We moved to Alberta, which welcomed us.)

That’s generally how we do it here in Canada: peacefully. Most of us don’t like the Bloc Québecois or the Parti Québecois or things like the Western Canada Concept. At all.

We oppose them with our words, as my former boss Jean Chretien successfully did for 40 years. Or we oppose them, too, with our actions – rallying against their referendum, or defeating them at the ballot box.

What we don’t do is kill them.

As someone did to Hardeep Singh Nijjar. He was a 45-year-old plumber, and he was active in his Sikh temple in Surrey BC. He was married and had two kids, and he drove a gray Ram 1500 pick up.

At around 8:30 p.m. on June 18 of this year, Nijjar was in his truck at the Sikh temple where he and his family worshipped. Two men wearing masks stepped up to his truck, and fired shots through the window, killing him. They then ran to a car, where a third man was waiting for them, and drove away.

Three months later, no one knows who killed Nijjar. No one has been caught.

His family and friends figure they know. As the indefatigable Stewart Bell has reported, local gang members had told Nijjar that Indian intelligence agencies had put a bounty on his head. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, too, reportedly told Nijjar that he was under threat from professional assassins.

He was scared, his family was scared. He’s been scared for a long time, in fact. Because Nijjar wanted a separate state for Sikh in India.

That’s why he came to Canada for the first time in 1997, as a refugee. He said he feared for his life, and that he had been detained and tortured at the police station in the city of Phillaur. Canadian officials didn’t believe him.

He got married to a Canadian. Canadian officials didn’t believe him about that, either. But he eventually got to stay here.

He never gave up on a separate Sikh state.  One time, Nijjar even went to Geneva to ask the UN Human Rights Council to accept that anti-Sikh violence was genocide. He wrote a letter asking for support to the United Nations in New York, too.

And then, just a few months after Nijjar did those things, India issued a warrant for his arrest. They said he was “mastermind/active member” of something called “Tiger Force.” Which was it? The “mastermind,” or just a “member?”

Didn’t matter. India kept after him. They issued another notice via Interpol. They put out a reward for him, because they wanted him captured. They wanted an end to his advocacy.

Three months ago, in a parking lot at a place of worship, they allegedly did. Canada’s government says they have information implicating India in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. India’s government, predictably, has denied it.

There’s been a lot of commentary about whether Justin Trudeau can be trusted. There’s been commentary about Nijjar being a bad guy. There’s been commentary about how inadvisable it is to pick a fight with a big country like India. And so on.

I don’t give a sweet damn. I don’t care if Hardeep Singh Nijjar agitated for Sikhs, or if he was dislikable, or what this will do to trade with India.

Ours is a country of laws. No one – no person, no country – is allowed to come here and murder one of our citizens, on Canadian soil, in cold blood. No one.

If we allow that to go unpunished, we cease to be a country of laws.

Oh, and this: any of you out there, writing letters to the editor about some separatist ambitions in your ancestral home lands?

You can become a target, too.

Comments (25)