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Last month, the Canadian Parliament hailed Nazi SS trooper Yaroslav Hunka as a “Ukrainian hero” and a “Canadian hero.” This grotesque ceremony had been enabled by the Canadian government many years before.
As “60 Minutes” explained in 1997, after World War II, Canada welcomed thousands of Nazis into Canada, including war criminals. Canada also welcomed officers of Hitler’s military, and I was to encounter one of them.
In 1963, after a move from Windsor, Ontario, I enrolled Essex District High School. The new principal was Wolfgang Egon Franke, who had been a Kapitanleutnant in the Kriegsmarine, Hitler’s navy. That was a concern for many Canadian families, particularly ours.
In 1941, my father Kenneth Billingsley was only 17 when he lied about his age to join the Canadian Army. When turned out, he signed on with the Merchant Navy and served for the duration, in constant danger from German U-boats. Now his son would have to take orders from a former Kriegsmarine officer, who looked the part.
The ramrod-stiff Franke was straight from central casting and I could picture him saying “ve vant zuh names. You haf zem, yes?” The Kapitanleutnat issued students with a “Code of Manners” that banned blue jeans and urged girls to shun makeup. The principal was fond of quoting Goethe but didn’t talk much about his own past. The details are a bit sketchy.
Wolfgang Franke was born on April 14, 1915 in Horstmar, near Dortmund. He graduated high school in 1934 and after teacher’s college joined the Kriegsmarine, which schooled him in radio and communications. No word when Wolfgang joined up, or what service he rendered during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, when Hitler and Stalin were allies. No word of what Wolfgang was doing on November 9-10 1938, when Kristallnacht went down.
No word if Franke was ever a member of the National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers Party, also known as the NSDAP or Nazi party. It is certainly possible, and not something a former German military officer living in Canada would want to advertise. As it happens, Kriegsmarine Admiral Karl Dönitz was a devoted Nazi and Hitler’s designated successor.
According to the Globe and Mail, Franke “served in the Navy and by the end of the war was a Lieutenant Commander, in charge of radio communications in Trieste, Italy.” After the war, Franke “survived four years of hardship in a concentration camp in former communist Yugoslavia.” Just to clarify, “the Navy” was Hitler’s Kriegsmarine, and “the war” was World War II. The “concentration camps,” as other accounts noted, was a “prisoner of war camp.”
Wolfgang Franke came to Canada in 1951 but no word of any screening for wartime service that took the lives of Allied soldiers and sailors, particularly Canadians. Franke graduated from the Universities of Toronto and Ottawa, got the principal’s job at Essex High School, and moved on to college presidencies in Sarnia, Ontario, and Prince George, British Columbia. The veteran of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine died in 2007 at the age of 92, a good life in the nation he once sought to defeat.
Like many students, I never accepted Wolfgang Franke as a leader, and to this day I believe he should have stayed in Deutschland. A qualified Canadian would have been a better choice to teach the children of Canadian WWII veterans. At the time I had no clue that service to Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist regime proved no bar to advancement in Canada.
During the 1980s, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney set up the Deschênes Commission to probe Nazi war criminals living in Canada. Trouble is, the key part of the commission’s report remain off-limits to the public.
Peter Savaryn, another veteran of the Nazis’ Waffen-SS Galicia Division, became chancellor of the University of Alberta. Savaryn’s SS comrade Yaroslav Hunka gets hailed as a Canadian hero. That atrocity prompts this writer to name a few men who might qualify as heroes.
My grandfather, Lorne Henry Billingsley, served for the duration in World War I and was one of the first victims of German poison gas attack. In the Merchant Navy, my father helped keep the troops supplied, and without this service the Allies don’t win. My uncle James Richard Billingsley fought with Canada’s Eighth Reconnaissance Regiment and was wounded twice, once by a Nazi sniper.
After the Hunka affair, Uncle Jim would have had some colorful words for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and one of them would have been “resign.” Fellow soldiers in the Eighth Reconnaissance would have done likewise.
On April 12, 1945, they liberated the Westerbork transit camp in Holland, where the Nazis shipped Dutch Jews to Auschwitz and Sobibor. The 876 inmates who remained were glad to see the Canadians. If anybody thought they were heroes it would be hard to blame them.
Meanwhile, Canada has yet to be de-Nazified and German Nazism has a successor in Islamic Nazism, now killing Jews in Israel and around the world. A Hamas-Canadian Bund seems to be siding with the invaders, who target civilians of all ages. Those who oppose the invaders might heed the words of my grandfather’s fellow soldier, John McCrae:
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from falling hands we throw
The torch, be yours to hold it high.
He was a typical German and a typical NAZI ..but it’s clear he also had the qualities that mage Germany a great nation
A picture of…somebody? Author’s father joined army at age 17 in 1941, then later served in World War I??
The article is incoherent. I stopped reading halfway through.
When I read it his father was turned away from enlistment in 1941 when he was underage and served on merchant ships instead, it was his grandfather who had served in WW I. perhaps that was a correction after your comment. You can read the second half now.
That’s not what was written. Author’s grandfather in WW1. Author’s father joined early at 17, but was found out and rejoined the Merchant Marine. The Nazi in question was actually in both wars. That’s how I understood the Author.
His grandfather served in WWI. Some reading comprehension would help. If you stopped reading, why comment?
Never mind.
His grandfather served in WWI. Try reading slower.
Where’s the Outrage when will they denounce Cananda for sheltering the Enemy?
My father also spent 4 years in a Yugoslav concentration camp (Gawkowa). Grass and cats were often on the menu as there was no food from 1944 to 1948.
There are 2 sides to most stories.
Yaroslav Hunke did serve in an Axis army but he may not be a war criminal. He should have been vetted before he was allowed to visit Parliament.
Is what Canada did any different than Operation “Paper Clip” in America? We allowed (Nay! Encouraged) Nazis by the boat load to sneak through Mexico into the U.S. so that they could finally build workable V-2 rockets to use against the Commies. Through Mexico……Hmmmm…….it all sounds so familiar, doesn’t it.
Scientists versus military/SS.
There is a difference.
Don’t forget than von Braun was an SS officer and there are pictures of him in their uniform. Whether he did it willingly is another question but I read long ago that Himmler “encouraged” him to join the SS. These V-2 folks were brought here because they had THE rocket knowledge and experience we needed. Also remember that this was a very different world then. That being said, when the Canadian parliament wildly applauded the former Waffen SS soldier I was appalled at their display.
Thank you for this personal story. I apologize for the strange commenters that popped up here today.
This article shows how feckless governments can be. `How people can do bad things, very bad things, and then have a nice life among others who would never condone their prior behavior if they knew or were given a say about it.
Are governments ever really benign and honorable? IDK. But certainly the author’s family members were.
Reminds me of a teacher/principal I had in grades nine and ten. He was Hitler youth, arrogant, cruel, great musician and singer, and my best teacher by far. Germans have much to answer for but they have also provided the world with great works – leaves the dilemma, do we wreak revenge at our own loss?
As a general comment, the WWII German navy was not generally manned by die-hard Nazis. Donitz was not a fanatical Nazi either. Erich Raeder, the Navy’s leader until replaced by Donitz, was an old-school German who made efforts to keep the Nazi apparatus out of the Navy. This doesn’t any way excuse or lessen the immorality of the German cause nor say anything about this particular individual, merely noting as an historical fact that the Kreigmsarine was not the SS.
German submarine service were the most NAZI of any branch of the military except the SS
During WW II, French Canadians tended to be pro Nazi. Pierre Trudeau was a member of a pro Nazi group. One exception was Maurice (Rocket) Richard. He tried to enlist as an infantryman but was rejected twice. This was due to his many injuries while playing hockey. He was injured a lot. He was accepted as a machinist when he tried for a third time, but the war ended before he was called up.
Not PRO NAZI, pro Petain-ist and defeatist
In 70 years (or probably less—much less) they’ll be honoring Hamas murderers in Ottawa, and there will be schmucks like Dollops and Benastre Tarleton praising them for their humus.
It’s generally accepted that the Kriegsmarine had very little to do with the Holocaust.
That said, former enemies should certainly be subject to a higher level of scrutiny before moving in.
In National Socialist Germany, I don’t believe that you got to pick and chose whether or not you supported the regime. In the high school I went to, there was also a teacher who was in some branch of the German armed forced during WW 2. He rubbed some people the wrong way, but I don’t believe he promoted any “Nazi” beliefs, and to the best of my knowledge, he was a competent teacher (unlike others who were just there for money and could care less whether or not the students learned anything, and the ones who tried to indoctrinate us with socialism). Canada was built on the back of immigrants, and yes, after the war lots of people from Germany or other Axis nations came here to start a new life. The ones I knew tried to fit in, and weren’t out on the weekends at Hamas rallies or supporting Communist regimes.
All I got from the article was that he served in the German Navy in WW2 and was 4 years in a PoW camp. If he supported Hitler, if he was anti-Semetic, if he was a teacher before being drafted, there is not one mention. Oh yes, I got that this was a recollection of a schoolboy.
I was born before WW2 started and at about 6 or 7 we believed that a harmless cobbler in our street was a ‘German spy’ we looked at planes flying over and sagely told each other that it was “one of ours” Incidentally, we were bombed heavily in Belfast where I lived, and my father was away a lot of the time in the British Admiralty.
This article should never have been written, and written should never have been published. It was a hit piece on a man suspected by a schoolboy of being a Nazi.
I think the point of article is that, post 1945
as today, Canada has never been particularly good a policing it’s borders. Although they did do a stellar job, of keeping the Jews out of Canada.
during the war when Germans wanted to murder them.
What a story your principle was literal Nazi. The best I can say is, my first grade teacher Miss Hoffmann, was probably a psychopath, and a closet lesbian, who hated children.