this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
20 points (66.7% liked)

Canada

7203 readers
397 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Communities


🍁 Meta


πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories


πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities


πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


πŸ’» Universities


πŸ’΅ Finance / Shopping


πŸ—£οΈ Politics


🍁 Social and Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TemporaryBoyfriend@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Uh, how has he not been tried as a war criminal? Damn.

[–] ValueSubtracted@startrek.website 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The answer (which I do not necessarily endorse) is that the Canadian government decided this particular division was not guilty, back in 1986:

The Galicia Division (14. Waffen grenadier division der SS [gal. #1]) should not be indicted as a group. The members of Galicia Division were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada. Charges of war crimes of Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this Commission. Further, in the absence of evidence of participation or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So if he was found not guilty isn't there no issue here?

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A reminder "not guilty" isn't "innocent", especially when there's fog of war involved. The dude was still in the Waffen SS.

[–] ValueSubtracted@startrek.website 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, as far as I know, he was never personally investigated, but the division was, and they didn't find any conclusive evidence.

Either way, surely they could have found someone who didn't fight the Allies during WWII to make an appearance?

[–] Oldmandan@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah. This is a major gaffe. I've seen the odd post villanizing this dude in particular, which I'm not sure is called for. (I don't know it's not, but I'm hesitant to yell at a 90 year old over what uniform they wore when they were younger than I am now.) Regardless of who the dude is or was though, it's a bad look, and they do deserve to be called out on the eminently stupid oversight to not to the bare minimum of research before choosing someone to bring in.