The Guardian Newspaper and Editing Out Neo-Nazi Ukraine Story

[David Guyatt]

And if would've been remiss of me not to mention the foregoing facts about the SS Galician Division, it would be even more remiss now mentioning that over 8,500 men of that SS Division were brought to the UK and to safety in 1947. Many then went on to Canada. I believe others went to Oz and Sth. Africa, but that is not stated in the below Guardian article (yes, the Guardian).

Yard reopens inquiry into former Nazi soldiers still alive in Britain

· Labour MP insists search sends important message
· Researcher believes police hunt is 10 years too late

Ian Cobain
Saturday 4 February 2006 00.12 GMT

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Scotland Yard has relaunched its search for war criminals almost seven years after its specialist Nazi-hunting unit was disbanded, the Guardian has learned. An eight-strong team from the anti-terrorist branch has been examining the backgrounds of British residents suspected of committing atrocities during the second world war.The team is focusing on former members of a division of the Waffen SS which was recruited by the Nazis in the Ukraine and brought to Britain en masse to provide farm labour after the war. Home Office officials believe several hundred former members of the unit may still be living in the UK. The Guardian has identified and located more than a dozen survivors of the Galizien division. Most still live in small clusters in the East Midlands, Yorkshire and East Anglia, a short distance from the PoW camps where they arrived almost six decades ago.
The new inquiry has been shrouded in secrecy since it was quietly resumed last year, and the Yard has even attempted to deny that it is under way again. Two senior officers have been assigned to lead the team of two detective sergeants, two detective constables and two civilian researchers. A Yard spokesman confirmed that they are scouring old war crimes files and "liaising with other government departments, including the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, to establish the best way forward".
It is unclear whether statements have been taken from the former members of the unit, the 14th Waffen SS Galizien division. Scotland Yard is also declining to say whether any witnesses have been located in Poland, Slovakia or the Ukraine, the countries where the Galizien division operated, and where some members stand accused of participating in the massacre of Jewish and non-Jewish civilians.
Police are understood to be attempting to identify members of the Galizien division who attended a training centre for concentration camp guards as well as examining the war records of other surviving members. With the youngest former members of the unit now in their 80s, however, and with the memories of surviving witnesses fading fast, the chances of any successful prosecutions appear slim. The decision to relaunch the hunt is thought to reflect a renewed appetite for war crimes investigations at the Home Office, and comes after continuing calls for action from a number of backbench MPs.
Investigation
However, it is unclear how much enthusiasm there is at Scotland Yard for an investigation that could divert detectives from anti-terrorist duties at a time of mounting security concerns.
The Yard's specialist war crimes unit was disbanded in May 1999 after investigations costing an estimated £6.5m resulted in just one conviction. Anthony Sawoniuk, a retired railway ticket inspector from south London, was jailed for life earlier that year after being convicted of two specimen charges concerning the murder of 18 Jews. He died in Norwich prison last November, aged 84.
Andrew Dismore, Labour MP for Hendon, who has been pressing for action against surviving war criminals, said the Yard deserves extra funding for the inquiry. "Making sure old war criminals can never sleep easy in their beds sends an important message to the would-be war criminals of tomorrow," he said.
Trial
But Professor David Cesarani, who was the principal researcher for the group of MPs which campaigned successfully for the introduction of the War Crimes Act 15 years ago, believes that men who could have been prosecuted at that time are now highly unlikely to face trial. "This has come 10 years too late," he said. "The Home Office should be asking whether this is going to do more harm than good, and whether embarking on a judicial process, which will take years to come to fruition, is the best way to proceed. Regretfully, it may be that an inquiry by government historians will now be the best way to investigate what these people did, how they came to be here and why they have not been prosecuted before."
Hitler's Ukrainian SS division was created from the merger of many different units, including the Nightingale battalion, said to have participated in the massacre of thousands of Jews in Lvov, Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Self Defence Legion, accused of murdering villagers in eastern Poland. Some Galizien troops are said to have played a part in the bloody suppression of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, while others are alleged to have murdered a number of British and American airmen who were being sheltered by partisans in Slovakia. Its soldiers were Ukrainian nationalists, who later insisted that they had no love for Germanyor the Nazis, but joined the German army to take up arms against the Russians, and against communism. Those who survive in Britain today deny any involvement in war crimes.
Few people noticed when they arrived in Britain in May 1947: one Labour MP, Barnett Janner, complained bitterly in the Commons that members of the Galizien division "murdered hundreds of people in cold blood", while a solitary letter in the London Evening News, signed with the correspondent's concentration camp number, 3399, complained that he or she had witnessed first-hand the "brutal, uncouth and bloodthirsty" behaviour of Ukrainian guards. Most newspapers devoted just one paragraph to reporting the division's arrival, however. The men were dispersed among PoW camps. Over the next three years just eight "undesirables" were deported to Germany, while some emigrated to Canada, the US or Argentina.
Parachuted
A handful are now known to have been recruited by MI6 and parachuted back into the Ukraine, where they were betrayed by the double agent Kim Philby. Most remained in the UK, however, and were granted civilian status. Many married, started families and, by the 1990s, those who survived were British subjects.
Among the survivors of the Galizien division identified by the Guardian is Mykola Lehkyj, 84, who says he volunteered to fight for the Germans after they overran his home town of Rohatyn, in western Ukraine, in 1941. Although both his brothers served in the Red Army, Mr Lehkyj, then aged 19, volunteered to join the Ukrainian unit that the invaders were raising. "We hated the Germans, but we wanted to fight the Russians more than anything," he said. "The Germans allowed us to make a Ukrainian army in German uniforms. Our aim was to join this Ukrainian army and create a Ukrainian nation."
After training in Germany, he fought with the rest of the Galizien division at Brody, where it suffered heavy losses. "We couldn't hold them. But fighting against the Russians was a pleasure, to be honest with you, because I was fighting on my own land."
Mr Lehkyj was then sent to Slovakia, where he fought partisans, and ended the war as a corporal. He remains proud of his service - "I have nothing to hide" - but denies that he took part in, or witnessed, any war crimes. "The Russians tried to blame us for everything. They say we killed children and women - it isn't true."
After being shipped to Scotland he was sent to a prison camp near Braintree, Essex, to work on farms, and has remained in the region ever since. Today he lives in Ipswich with Helen, the Englishwoman he married in 1953. They have four children, one of whom served in the RAF, and six grandchildren.
"I love this country," he said. "It gave me life. I call it Merry England: this is a country that will help any bugger."
Backstory
Labour shortages in post-war Britain were so severe that few questions were asked when Hitler's Ukrainian soldiers were shipped here. With large sections of the British population still in the armed forces, most farms depended on German prisoners of war, despite forced labour being prohibited by the Geneva convention
The 8,528 officers and men of the 14th Waffen SS Galizien division had been languishing for two years at a prisoner of war camp near Rimini, on Italy's Adriatic coast.
Attempts to identify war criminals among them were promised by the Foreign Office, but they had had so much time to prepare cover stories that Fitzroy Maclean, a war hero and Tory MP who had been handed the task, complained that it was hopeless. He warned Whitehall: "We only have their own word for it that they have not committed atrocities or war crimes."
All concerns about the unit's war record were brushed aside during a series of cabinet meetings in March 1947. Foreign Office minister Hector McNeil reported that "United States opinion was sensitive" about continuing use of Germans as farm labourers.
Mr McNeil conjured up a deft solution: to meet the demand for labour by using displaced Ukrainians in place of the German prisoners. When Home Office officials complained that immigration rules were being waived to bring suspected war criminals into the country, they were told that the prime minister, Clement Attlee, had "decreed" that it must happen.

It's amazing how editors seem to forget what they wrote earlier isn't it.

And I don't think those men of the SS Galicia were brought to the UK to work on farms or in factories, as the Guardian implies - but doesn't actually say. They were brought to the UK to fight on the side of the godly against the Soviet Union, I believe. And the Guardian won't say that either. Even today, almost 70 years later.