Is it in the interests of Canadian justice to prosecute the Ukrainian collaborators while at the same time granting immunity to the Jewish collaborators? Are the Jewish collaborators to be forgiven because they served their German masters under duress? If so, then why should Ukrainians not be accorded the same understanding? - They served under a comparable duress. The Ukrainian populace was treated by the Germans with the utmost severity and cruelty. More importantly, the bulk of the Ukrainian camp guards were conscripted from Soviet prisoners of war who had no motivation to remain loyal to the Soviets by whom they had been brutalized, who knew nothing of any future Holocaust, and whose only option was to remain in the German POW camps and perish. If collaboration with the Germans is exculpated by the defense of escape from a holocaust, then these Ukrainian POWs must receive full exculpation, as they were being exterminated in the German POW camps by the millions:
Confident of victory and anxious to eliminate "surplus" Slavs, Nazi authorities herded the prisoners into open-air camps encircled by barbed wire and allowed them to die of exposure, disease, and hunger. Often they simply executed their captives. Consequently, by the end of the war, of the 5.8 million Soviet prisoners who had fallen into German hands, about 3.3 million had perished. About 1.3 million of these fatalities occurred in Ukraine.
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