Wow! 4 posts about Hunka! Was he an SS general to warrant such attention? Yeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhhhh, no:
Hunka is 98. In 2000 he was 75 ... In 1945 he was 20 ... IOW, he was a private or corporal, not someone with command authority.
This division was formed with the ideal of some sort of independence for Ukraine, not Hitler's master race ideal. Ukrainian nationalism was a cause well before Hitler was born. Both the Czars and Stalin fanned the flames of this ideal. Speaking of Stalin ...
Ever heard of the Holodomor? It was a famine engineered by Stalin in which 5 or 10 million Ukrainians were starved to death. Why in Hades would Ukrainians owe any loyalty to Stalin?
The First Ukrainian Division was partly wiped out in the Brody Pocket (Eastern Front). The SS reconstituted the division using
forced conscripts. That Hunka survived the war suggests that he was not in the Brody Pocket, but was one of the conscripts.
As the war was grinding to a close, the division was fighting in Austria. In March 1945 it became part of the independent Ukrainian National Army. The division surrendered in Austria to US and British forces. Several thousand emigrated to the UK and Canada (had they been sent to Stalin they would have died in the Gulags, if they even got that far).
Ukraine was in an ugly position in WW2. It had been conquered/grafted onto the Russian Empire, mostly during the 18th Century (Crimea, ca. 1800). In their "wisdom", the Czars had worked to suppress the Ukrainian language and culture (as did Soviet leaders throughout the 20th Century). After Lenin and Stalin solidified their empire (failing to conquer Poland in that process), Stalin made starving (by confiscating food) Ukraine part of his collectivization and anti-Kulak efforts.
That was the context in Ukraine when Hitler invaded the USSR. It may seem bizarre to us,
in hindsight, but at first Hitler was viewed by many Ukrainians as a liberator. They had no experience with and little knowledge of Hitler's Master Race garbage. They learned they were wrong, the hard way. Hitler viewed Slavs as inferiors, and Ukrainians were/are Slavic. A split came about between those who realized that Stalin was the Devil they would have in the future and those who thought some degree of Ukrainian independence could be eked out of the fight between Hitler and Stalin. History proved the former correct, as to who would win and Stalin's character.
Isn't it "funny" how an outrage becomes a fauxrage if you bother to do a little Math and a little more research? The war on the Eastern Front was very different from the West. To Ukrainians, the Germans became enslavers who replaced their previous enslaver Stalin. And the defeat of the Germans meant further slavery under Stalin.
Fast-forwarding into the 21st Century, the Nazis are a thing of two or three generations ago. Russian oppression, OTOH, continued until 1991, and then in 2014, the Russians invaded Crimea. Russian oppression made a partial comeback, and in 2022 Putin decided to just reconquer Ukraine. The insignia that have some Westerners making silly accusations of neo-Nazism are simply Ukrainian mockery of the Russians who want to enslave them.
