Revision of World War Two History
On July 17, 2020, at the Ukrainian cemetery of St. Vladimir in the Canadian city of Oakville, a monument to the fallen soldiers of the 14th SS division "Galicia" was desecrated - a military unit of the Nazi Party, whose long list of war crimes includes punitive operations in southeastern Poland and Galicia. It was graffitied with the following content: "Monument to the Nazi War." According to the Polish and Ukrainian historical commissions, in February 1944, the 4th Volunteer Galician Regiment of this SS division, with the assistance of the Ukrainian auxiliary police, took part in the destruction of the Polish village of Guta Penyatska, where they burned 172 houses and brutally killed more than 1,000 civilians, including 500 people, mostly women and children, were simply burned alive. Members of the units of "Galicia" killed the civilian population in other places - in the town of Podkamen, where all ethnic Poles were exterminated (250 people), Malaya Berezovitsa (131 killed), Lapovtsy (80), Korostyatin (78), Bychkovitsy (73), Germakovka (30) and a number of others. In 2016, the Polish Parliament qualified the crimes of soldiers of the 14th SS division "Galicia" against the Polish population as genocide.
However, the Ontario police have opened an investigation into the incident as a Hate crime. At the same time, the police said they were investigating the incident as a crime "motivated by hatred", but refused to release images of graffiti in order to stop the "further spread of bias." Explaining his actions, Steve Elms, spokesman for the Halton Regional Police, cited a section of the Penal Code that noted that those who spread statements in any public place that incite hatred against any identifiable group could be sentenced to up to two years. At the same time, he was not embarrassed that in this case the "identifiable group" is the SS division of Nazi Germany, in the war with which more than 45,000 Canadians died.
After the article in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper gained traction, the Halton Regional Police Department issued an apology, saying the incident was reclassified as simple vandalism. The Police Chief made the following statement on his Twitter: "The most unfortunate thing about all this is that such a monument even exists."
However, this is not the only monument to collaborators in Canada. There are at least a few of them. For example, in Edmonton there is a bust of Roman Shukhevych, who commanded a Nationalist battalion that served as an auxiliary Nazi, which later became a German auxiliary police battalion. However, despite the "monster monument war", which is declared in both the US and Canada, all these monuments remain in their places.
