Like I said in the other thread, good story. Can't write fiction any better. What spurred this was the commentary from Trudeau about the Nazi. I was wondering who the man was so I looked up his unit:
14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) - Wikipedia
Some surprising info in that wiki - I never heard of the
Deschênes Commission but they diced that unit up carefully. As I suspected, there are shades of grey here that are not tolerated in today's hypersensitive environment. I know it wasn't Canada that did this, but we used actual card carry
real criminal Nazis whenever the hell we wanted to. At the time it was a means to an end.
But back to young Hunka. I have no idea. I recently read
Stuka Pilot by Hans Rudel. Autobiographical accounts tend to be self serving and often prove to be less than fully accurate but are valuable as contemporary sources. Rudel sure didn't invent that. Rudel was a real goose stepping Nazi - met with and was lavishly awarded praise by Hitler and Goering. His accounts of meeting with them are damned interesting - wish I could've been a German speaking fly on the wall. This man was a veteran of intese combat for many years under great physical hardship. He sounds like he was an arrogant ***hole and his postwar conduct confirmed it. But did he participate in war crimes as we understand them - no not really. So where would he fit into the current picture? Well, he didn't fit into he old one that well, but there's more shades of grey. If you want to vilify the man as a Nazi what treatment would be reserved for
Adolf Galland or
Saburō Sakai ? See my wandering point in there?
My family is from southeast Wisconsin, very rural. Sturtevant (small town) and my aunt's old house are straight out of Norman Rockwell, I remember many trips there as a kid. There are still tiny Quonset huts being used a block from that house that were used to house Axis POWs during the war. I think there were more of them at the time than citizens - they were brought here and were made to do agricultural work. Well treated. I seem to remember her and my uncle speaking very favorably about them overall, some stayed and made their lives here. Not all of them, but the majority of them. They had direct experience dealing with them as human beings not arbitrary labels.
Unfortunately in 2023 arbitrary labels make great media bytes in our easily offended instant communication society. Not defending Nazis, simply saying we need to look more carefully at some things. When they locate a 90-somethng camp guard or the like, I say hang the bastard. Just make sure first.