In the Maelstrom: The Waffen-SS 'Galicia' Division and Its Legacy by Myroslav Shkandrij (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: In the Maelstrom: The Waffen-SS 'Galicia' Division and Its Legacy by Myroslav Shkandrij Kai Struve Shkandrij, Myroslav. In the Maelstrom: The Waffen-SS 'Galicia' Division and Its Legacy. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON, London and Chicago, IL, 2023. xxx + 424 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Glossary. Notes on political and military figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $140.00; $44.95: £120.00; £37.99. The Ukrainian Waffen-SS Division 'Galicia' has been at the centre of public debates since the 1980s, especially in Canada and the United Kingdom, over Nazi perpetrators and collaborators among post-war East European immigrants. But in the immediate post-war years, the division was already being referred to as proof of Ukrainian nationalist collaboration with Nazi Germany and Ukrainian participation in mass crimes during the German occupation. The division, set up in the second half of 1943 with Ukrainian volunteers and the support of some segments of Ukrainian society in the 'Galicia' district of the German-occupied General Government, had been mostly a combat unit in the German war against the Soviet Union. It was one of numerous non-German divisions subordinated to the Waffen-SS, the military arm of the SS, that the Germans raised as front-line combat units in the later phases of the war. The division fought its most important battle at Brody in July 1944 where it suffered a high number of casualties. At the end of the war it surrendered to British troops in Austria. Its members were interned in a British internment camp in Italy before they were brought to the UK in 1947. In 1950, the Canadian government allowed them to immigrate, which many took advantage of. The fact that the 'Galicia' division became a focus of debates about war criminals and German collaborators was not a consequence of actual crimes of the division, but rather of its designation as an SS unit and because of stereotypical depictions of Ukrainians as German collaborators. Such [End Page 581] allegations have been regularly repeated even though official investigations in Canada and the UK at the end of the 1980s concluded that the division had neither committed mass murders nor were there a large number of perpetrators among its former members. Myroslav Shkandrij's book starts from the two questions at the centre of the debates during the 1980s, namely the possible crimes of the division and the motives for its support among Ukrainian political actors and its members, most of whom had volunteered for service. Shkandrij clearly shows that the motive for volunteering was not sympathy for Nazi Germany, but the aim of establishing a Ukrainian armed force as a basis for Ukrainian state-building, or at least for protecting the Ukrainian population. Another motive among the volunteers was to avoid deportation to Germany as forced labour. The idea of creating a Ukrainian army had been the aim of various political factions since the beginning of the war. There had been some support for this also from the German side, but Hitler had initially rejected the idea, only agreeing to it after Germany's defeat at Stalingrad. Meanwhile, the Bandera wing of the 'Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists' (OUN) withdrew from the plans, instead creating the 'Ukrainian Insurgent Army' (UPA) at the end of 1942 which initiated the anti-German uprising in Volhynia in February 1943. The question of crimes is, as Shkandrij shows, complicated by the fact that, in addition to the actual division, the Germans set up units known as Galician SS Volunteer Regiments, which recruited personnel from the same group of volunteers. However, the regiments were, despite protests from the Ukrainian side, subordinated to the German Order Police before being integrated into the division in the second half of 1944. Most of the crimes that are discussed in relation to the division were committed by these units, most notably the involvement in the destruction of the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka and the murder of several hundred residents in February 1944. Generally, the book offers a balanced and nuanced account. Nevertheless, Shkandrij's engagement in countering overly negative notions of the division leads him in rare instances to rather uncritical treatment...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".