Customer Reviews

Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion: The Ukrainian 14th Waffen-ss Division

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I received, unsolicited, a copy of this publication directly from the author Sol Littman.

Being an author of a book on the Galician Division myself and an authority on the subject I was naturally curious as to the content and immediately began to read it. Within the first couple of pages I had found a couple of small but irritating, easily verifiable factual errors which I noted. This pattern continued with ever increasing regularity so that by the end of the first chapter it was glaringly apparent that the author had left significant and occasionally unforgivable gaps in his research, thereby intentionally or otherwise perpetuating mistakes and a number of common misconceptions. This publication cannot therefore be considered to be a serious historical contribution. Instead it is little more than a reworked throwback to the products of former Soviet and to a lesser extent Polish propaganda specialists. In the main these are tendentious, careless in details and suffer from a lack of appreciation of the rules of evidence. Like its predecessors, the credibility of this publication is further undermined by frequent and often rabid accusations which do not bear up under close scrutiny. Anyone seriously wishing to acquaint themselves with the history of this unit would be well advised to look elsewhere.

Michael Melnyk

Littman is neither a historian nor a good writer, except of second rate fiction. He was denounced in Canada by the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals for introducing what were deemed to be "grossly exaggerated" accounts about "thousands" of war criminals in that country, which turned out to be utterly bogus. He never provides hard facts, only speculation...this is not worth reading or owning, I found it when doing a paper for my course on WW II, and am sorry I wasted time reading through it...there are many better books on the Division, such as the one To Battle by Melnyk or even the Heike memoirs.

Several US, Canadian and UK Commissions have dismissed any involvement by this Waffen SS Division in any "crimes against" humanity. Even the OSI does not bother these people anymore.

"Sol Littman is former Canadian Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, author of War Criminal on Trial, founding editor of The Canadian Jewish News, the First Director of B'nai Brith Canada's "League for Human Rights," and also served with the Anti-Defamation League in the United States."

Given the background of the editor one can hardly expect an objective account of the 14th division.

Mr. Sol Littman, engages in a rather crude attack against Ukrainians, by pretending to have written a "historical" account of the Ukrainian Division, which was organized by the Germans in WWII. The author is sympathetic to Soviet ideology, and feels that Ukrainian Division issue is an easy way to promote it. Ukrainians, as well as Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Croatians were automatically designated as anti-semitic, and anti-Soviet, and a tremendous effort was made to discredit and destroy those particular groups by the Soviet propaganda machine and its supporters, such as Mr. Littman.
It should be reminded, that the Ukrainian Division fought for Ukrainian independence, from the Soviet Union, and later on against Germany itself and Poland, as UPA partisans. Numerous Jews played a major role in the Red Army (created by Leon Trstsky himself), and particularly in the KGB shock trrops and its political and ideological enforcers.
The reprisals carried out by the Ukrainian Division and by the UPA did indeed take place, and were always in retaliation against collaborators, many of whom, were Jews.
Mr. Littman, of course, never speaks about the collaboration issue, which is inconvenient to his purpose.

Mr. Littman has made a career out of repeating tired Soviet-era lies. Yet again, he makes accusations without providing credible evidence.

Sol Littman first became known (or perhaps infamous) in Canada during the mid 1980's for his agitation on behalf of the Simon Weisenthal Center for the government to open an investigation on Ukrainian-Canadian war criminals.

The allegations of Ukrainian war crimes suspects in Canada caused a huge uproar between the country's Ukrainian and Jewish communities. Ukrainian-Canadians were angered that many of the allegations were unfounded or at least based on "evidence" collected by the USSR. Canadian Jews were upset by what they perceived as Holocaust denial and thinly veiled Antisemitism.

At any rate, diaspora "nationalist" Ukrainians already have a beef against Littman and certainly do not want any of the darker historical facts to get in the way of the "Brave Ruthenians Fighting Godless Russian Commies" mythology.

I found Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion to be well-researched, on par with other divisional histories such as Michael Logusz's "Galicia Division" (Schiffer Military History, 2000) and Carlos Jurado's "Breaking the Chains." Unlike those works, however, Littman covers:

1. The prominent role of Fascism & Antisemitism in Ukrainian nationalist ideology

2 Himmler's speech to the division mentioning Holocaust

3. Alleged war crimes of KG Beyersdorff

4. Confirmation of the existence of a 31st SD punitive detachment - a unit responsible for war crimes that was later integrated into the 14th SS

5. Division participation in the massacre at Zolochiv in July 1944.

6. The Schuma 201 Battalion's role in the execution of Jews at Pinsk and Luminets. This German-raised Ukrainian collaborationist unit was later integrated into the division.

All of this info will be (an already has been in the above reviews) vehemently denied, but I need to point out that Littman's research corresponds to what Ukrainian historians such as John-Paul Himka have also documented.

As the Cold War fades away, much material on WWII on the Eastern Front and the Holocaust is coming to light. Sol Littman has written an excellent, if troubling book, and it has earned condemnation because it illuminates one of the darker corners of Ukrainian and WWII history.

quite frankly, read this book and it is not worth the paper it is written on. Their are alot of historical inaccuracies, inuendos,racist and quite simply, pure fantasy. It would appear to this reader at least that this "literary effort" is purely an attempt to make money and should not be regarded as a scholarly endeavour.

This fellow has made a career out of circulating what Justice Jules Deschenes called "grossly exaggerated" accounts about alleged war criminals supposedly found in Canada and elsewhere. This paperback is more of the same stuff; it is the work not of a historian but of a lobbyist, and not a very convincing one at that. This "book" is aready adorning remainder bins, but it will be even better utilized for recycling....if you want to read about Ukraine in World War II there are many credible histories, including several about the Ukrainian Division, but this is not one of them...if Mr Littman had ANY evidence about the presence of a real war criminal in Canada why has he NEVER named a name, publicly, and then defended himself if his allegations proved specious (likely) and defamatory? Answer, because to be specific you have to have facts. This is not a "book" of facts, it is a screed. Not worth buying.

Littman's book is very objective and well-documented. I have read a number of works on Ukrainian nationalism, such as John A. Armstrong's _Ukrainian Nationalism_, another very objective work. Littman's book concentrates on the military collaboration with the Nazis, but is equally objective.

As recent events in Ukraine show, Ukraine is sharply divided. The pro-German nationalists were overwhelmingly from the West Ukraine, ruled by Poland until 1939. The old but authoritative work by Alexander Dallin, _German rule in Russia, 1941-1945_, also shows that the Uk. nationalists had little support in East Ukraine. This split is still very obvious.

One criticism I have of Littman's book is that it does not discuss the so-called "Volhynian Tragedy", a.k.a. Volhynian Massacres, at all. Ukrainian nationalist troops massacred between 60,000 (Ukrainian nationalist estimates) and 100,000 (Polish nationalist estimates) Polish civilians in German-occupied West Ukraine during the war. Polish nationalists were also very anti-Soviet and anti-communist, so there is no way these mass murders can be disguised as "fighting the USSR." Littman should have written about this. But there is little about it in English; most sources are in Polish, Russian, or Ukrainian.

It will NOT make Ukrainian Nationalists happy, of course, because they are committed to slighting, whitewashing, or ignoring the shameful past of the Ukrainian Nationalists. It is, therefore, a form of endorsement to see so many Uk. nationalists giving this very objective, well-documented book a grade of "1".