In late September, members of the Canadian House of Commons were thrust into the international spotlight for something seemingly mundane—offering a standing ovation to 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian Yaroslav Hunka, touted by the assembly’s speaker as a war hero who fought against invading Russian forces in World War II. But as commentators soon pointed out, Hunka’s fight against the Russians during the war was as a Nazi collaborator and member of the Waffen-SS 1st Galician Division.
The moment was intended to honor Ukrainian resistance, linking past and present. Instead, it highlighted the deep and enduring shame of postwar North American Nazi immigration and our tendency toward selective historical amnesia in confronting it. And it isn’t only Canada where this has been an issue.
Canada and the United States allowed and even encouraged the immigration of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators in the years following the war. If the public remembers this history, it is likely through the frame of fictional “Nazi hunting” narratives, like those featured in the Indiana Jones movies or the Amazon Prime show Hunters. Or perhaps we take note when a former Nazi makes the news, as in the case of former Cleveland resident and concentration camp guard Ivan “John” Demjanjuk.
But these narratives obscure the more typical stories of Nazis in North America, especially in the U.S. Our popular memory has downplayed the welcome offered to Nazi immigrants after the war, which is how Americans, like Canadians, have repeatedly blithely celebrated men from units accused of contributing to atrocities.
The most well-known instance of Nazi collaborators immigrating to the U.S. was through Operation Paperclip, in which some 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers were employed by the U.S. government and given residence and citizenship in the ensuing years. German scientist and pioneer of space flight Wernher Von Braun was notably recruited through this program. His contributions to the U.S. space program have been celebrated; Huntsville, Ala., has both a day (Feb. 24) and a 9,000-seat arena named after him. Yet the work that earned him the reputation that enabled his immigration to the U.S. was indefensible. Von Braun contributed to the use of brutal and enslaved labor in the Mittelwerk rocket engineering complex during his time as a Nazi.
Various CIA operations also made use of former collaborators from the Soviet bloc, some of whom the CIA actively assisted throughout the immigration process to bypass screening restrictions. These policies were undertaken explicitly for the purpose of Cold War technological competition and intelligence gathering. Defeating the Soviet Union—a U.S. ally during the war—now involved embracing those who had recently fought for their most abhorrent enemy.