ГУЛаг Палестины

within the German military.

(5) Finally, given that Canada's Deschenes Commission on War Criminals failed to identify even a

single member of the Galicia Division as calling for further investigation; and given that not a

single member of the Division has ever been convicted of any crime, or even tried for any crime;

and, most importantly, given that nobody has ever specified any crime of which the Galicia

Division as a whole, or any member of the Galicia Division, might have been guilty - given all

this, it would have been instructive of Mr. Safer to inform 60 Minutes viewers whether the

Waffen SS divisions of The Netherlands, Belgium, and France have proven to be as free from blame

as has the Ukrainian Galicia Division.

Why Did Himmler Want a Waffen SS?

If the Wehrmacht was the combat arm of the German forces, and Himmler's SS was dedicated to

running the concentration camps, then why were there combat units within the SS? Why weren't

non-German combat units such as the Galicia Division considered to be part of the Wehrmacht

rather than part of the SS? The suspicion in the mind of the impartial observer might readily

be that any unit that was considered part of the SS may in fact have performed some duties that

were uniquely SS, and thus was more likely to be guilty of war crimes than a Wehrmacht unit.

Israeli historian Leni Yahil provides an answer - the war effort had taken center stage; Himmler

wanted to remain on center stage; and it is for that reason that Himmler defined certain combat

units as falling within the SS:

The very fact that Himmler and his executors became the central force

directing the implacable war against the Jews accorded them, and primarily

Himmler as their leader, a crucial position in the hierarchy of Nazi rule

wherever it extended. Hitler's hatred of the Jews and the importance he

ascribed to solving the Jewish problem according to his concept were among the

factors that ensured Himmler's status as the man who carried out the fuhrer's

program.

It might have been assumed that in wartime, when stress is necessarily laid

on the military struggle, the influence of the SS would have declined, since it

no longer held the center stage. If Hitler had lost interest in Himmler's

activities, the latter's own political career would have come to an end. He

forestalled the danger in two ways: one was by associating the SS with the war

effort through the establishment of the armed or Waffen SS while being careful

to prevent the army's influence over these corps from overriding his own.

(Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945, Oxford, New

York, 1990, p. 145)

The Nightingale Unit

60 Minutes also mentioned the Nightingale Unit, otherwise known as the Nachtigall Unit. The

Nachtigall Unit was eventually merged with the Ukrainian Roland Unit, some 600 Ukrainian

soldiers in all. These two units were formed on German territory prior to the outbreak of World

War II by Ukrainians who had either not fallen within the Soviet zone of occupation, or who had

escaped from it, and who anticipated German assistance in liberating Ukraine from Soviet rule.

These units too, however, fail to support the picture of Ukrainians "marching off to fight for

Hitler."

Specifically, shortly after the entry of the Germans into Lviv, Stepan Bandera, "(supported by

members of the Nachtigall Unit) decided - without consulting the Germans - to proclaim on 30

June 1941, the establishment of a Ukrainian state in recently conquered Lviv. ... Within days

of the proclamation, Bandera and his associates were arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated"

(Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 1994, pp. 463-464). Refusing to rescind the proclamation,

Bandera spent July 1941 to September 1944 in German prisons and concentration camps. (Stepan

Bandera is mentioned at this point because he was supported by the Nachtigall Unit; Bandera was

not a member of the Nachtigall Unit.) "Because of their opposition to German policies in

Ukraine, the units were recalled from the front and interned. ... Toward the end of 1942, the

battalion was disbanded because of the soldiers' refusal to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler"

(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 2, p. 1088). "The battalion was disarmed and

demobilized, and its officers were arrested in January 1943. Shukhevych, however, managed to

escape and join the UPA" (Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, Volume 4, p. 680). Roman Shukhevych who had

been the highest-ranking Ukrainian officer of the Nachtigall unit went on to became

commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a partisan group opposing all foreign

occupation, and which during the Nazi occupation was directed primarily against the Nazis.

Ukrainians in the Nachtigall and Roland Units, then, were also not Ukrainians marching off to

fight for Hitler, but rather they were Ukrainians calculating that an alliance with German

forces would promote their national interests, they were Ukrainians whose willingness to fight

for Hitler or to promote Nazi interests proved to be close to non-existent, and they were

Ukrainians who fell out with their Nazi sponsors in the early stages of the war.

It must be noted also that unlike the Galicia Division, the Nachtigall and Roland Units were not

part of the SS, and so that Mr. Safer was in error when he stated that "Roman Shukhevych ... was