The truth is the enemy of Vladimir Putin's lies about Ukraine

Four decades ago, Ottawa decided that the truth about the wartime activities of hundreds of people who had emigrated to Canada was too dangerous to share with Canadians.

Justice Jules Deschênes, who headed the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, wrote in 1986 that the second part of his report – which contained the names of hundreds of alleged Nazi war criminals – was “destined for confidentiality.”

The federal government was as good as Mr. Deschênes’s word. For nearly 40 years, Ottawa has steadfastly refused to release the names of people who fought with Nazi Germany during the Second World War and then came to Canada in the postwar period. That group includes hundreds of men who were part of the Waffen SS Galicia division.

Canadian officials took the view – one not shared by other Allied countries, or by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg – that membership in the Waffen SS was in itself not a war crime. Even if one were to accept that contention, the fact remains that every man in the Galicia division fought for Adolf Hitler and his genocidal regime bent on enslaving Europe.

By the time Ukrainian volunteers began signing up with the Galicia division in 1943, the Holocaust was in full swing. The Germans' genocidal effort had begun earlier, including mass shootings in Ukraine starting in 1941 after Nazi armed forces invaded the Soviet Union. It would be impossible that those Ukrainian volunteers had failed to noticed that their Jewish neighbours had disappeared.

They knew who they were fighting with, and what they were fighting for.

The excuse for silence evolved over the years. In the 1980s, there were worries about due process for those named, and about creating social divisions. There were also concerns about the effect on the families of anyone named in the second part of the Deschênes report.

And now comes the latest excuse: Releasing the details about the 80-year-old wartime activities of the members of the Galicia Division could threaten Canada’s national interests in 2024.

The Globe and Mail was among three organizations that filed an access to information request for the second, confidential Deschênes report.

Library and Archives Canada denied those requests in their entirety, after consulting with a number of government ministries, including the departments of Justice and Global Affairs. The upshot: the publication of the names of alleged war criminals from the Eastern Front during the Second World War would bolster current Russian propaganda efforts in that country’s attack on Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s regime has tried to justify its unprovoked aggression by claiming that it wants to “denazify” Ukraine. It’s a ludicrous assertion, made all the more ridiculous by the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. Nevertheless, Mr. Putin is willing to tell that grotesque lie.

Given that shamelessness, what makes Canada’s federal government think that keeping the Deschênes report’s secret under wraps is somehow a deterrent to Russia?

In reality, it was the air of secrecy around the Deschênes report and the historical amnesia it encouraged that last year handed Mr. Putin an enormous propaganda victory: Canadian politicians giving a standing ovation to a Waffen-SS veteran of the Galicia division, Yaroslav Hunka, after Mr. Zelensky’s speech to the House of Commons in September, 2023.

Then-Speaker Anthony Rota had invited Mr. Hunka, who lived in his riding, and praised him for “fighting for Ukraine independence against the Russians” during the Second World War, calling him “a Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero.” (Mr. Rota became a former Speaker days later.)

If Canada had made the right choice in 1986, and made public those hundreds of names, the role of the Galicia division in the Nazi war effort could have been properly examined. Ottawa’s role in allowing Galicia division veterans into Canada (going so far as to issue a special waiver from the federal cabinet) could also have been more closely scrutinized. In that scenario, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have believed the fiction – the lie – that members of the Galicia division were heroes worth applauding.

Truth and transparency, not secrecy, are the way to defeat a lie. That was true in 1945, true in 1986 and just as true today.