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Michael 0. Logusz. Galicia Division: The Waffen-SS 14th Grenadier Division, 1943-1945. Atglen, Penn.: Schiffer Publishing, 1997. 558 pp. u.s. $35.00 cloth.
Public records may never definitively settle the current debate over what exactly the soldiers of the Waffen-SS Galicia (Galizien) Division did during their relatively brief appearance under German command in the closing months of the Second World War. Documents do show that parts of the division-which grew out of negotiations between the SS and some (not all) Ukrainian nationalist groups-were deployed in the Ordnungspolizei and in anti-partisan actions before the division as a whole suffered large losses in July 1944 at Brody in northeastern Galicia. That fall, some men fought briefly with the Waffen-SS Wiking Division, after which the Galicia Division served in Slovakia, southeast Austria, and northern Slovenia until various other German-led military groups absorbed it in the spring of 1945.
Just recently, in November 1998, the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association announced that Canada's Minister of Justice found the existing documentary evidence insufficient to warrant court proceedings against any division members suspected of war crimes. With a reaction that reflected the debate's tendency to frame guilt and innocence in absolute terms, the division's defenders hailed the minister's decision as a vindication. Now it would seem constructive for historians to explore the motives behind those actions that are already documented, and to analyze the conditions that gave rise to such motives. Such an analysis would begin with a look at the increasingly violent and exclusionary practices that characterized the world in which the soldiers of the division had matured. One could trace the development of this atmosphere at least back to the First World War. However, with the exception of some...