SS Brigadefuehrer Kurt Meyer was the only German ever tried by Canada as a war Criminal for the atrocities he committed against Canadian prisoners in Normandy 1944.
by David Pugliese
SEVENTY-EIGHT YEARS AGO this June, one of the worst war crimes in this country’s history played out near the beaches of Normandy, France.
Canadian troops had already made their way ashore during D-Day and were in pitched battles with 12th SS Panzer Division. That Waffen SS armoured unit was made up of Nazi fanatics led by SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer.
Meyer already had a reputation for brutality; the previous unit he led in Russia had murdered women and children, burning some alive in a church while executing others by gunfire.
Over the course of 10 days at Normandy, Meyer’s men murdered some 156 Canadian prisoners of war.
In some cases the Canadians were gunned down as they surrendered with their hands in the air. In other cases, like that of Private Lorne Brown, they were bayoneted to death.
Private William Nichol was shot in the right leg after which one of Meyer’s Waffen SS officers bashed his skull in with a rifle.
Corporal Thomas Davidson was executed and then the Germans dragged his body into the road so vehicles could crush it. The Waffen SS took another murdered Canadian and desecrated his corpse. Among those killed were medics wearing Red Cross insignia. Another was a military chaplain.
At the Ardenne Abbey the Waffen SS beat six Canadians to death while shooting another four in the head. Meyer was convicted of war crimes for the massacre and sentenced to death but that punishment was never carried out. Faced with the need to have the new West German government support the fledgling NATO and its efforts against the Soviets during the Cold War, the Canadian government agreed to release Meyer in September 1954.
Today, few Canadians remember the sacrifices of Private Lorne Brown, Private William Nichol or Corporal Thomas Davidson.
Incredibly, however, their killers are now described in heroic and laudatory terms. U.S. and Canadian military re-enactors dress as Waffen SS soldiers, complete with the Death’s Head insignias on their uniforms. On eBay one can purchase a Kurt Meyer action figure.
Canada’s journalists are largely ignorant of the murderous role the Waffen SS played during the Second World War. For instance, in a Dec. 23, 2017 article about the controversy over Canadian monuments to the Ukrainian SS regiment Galicia, National Post journalist Marie-Danielle Smith wrote: “The Waffen-SS was the military arm of the Nazi secret police that fought battles at the front lines but did not administer concentration camps.”
In April, Esprit de Corps received similar comments in a letter from Charlotte Bell, a lawyer who had been with the Canadian government’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Unit. Bell was objecting to an October 2020 Esprit article which outlined how members of Ukraine’s Waffen SS were brought to Canada despite their role in fighting for Hitler and the Third Reich.
“As you know, the Galicia Division was a fighting unit,” Bell wrote. “It was part of the Waffen-SS (Armed SS) and not a part of the Allgemeine-SS (General SS). The Allgemeine-SS dealt mainly with police and “racial” matters. The Waffen SS fought soldiers of the opposing army.”
Bell’s claim that the Waffen SS was an organization that “fought soldiers of the opposing army” is absolutely false, and arguably, extremely offensive to the memory of the Canadian soldiers brutally murdered at Normandy.
How has it come to the point where some Canadians believe the Waffen SS were somehow honorable soldiers?
After all, the war crimes of the Waffen SS are well documented. The massacre of the Canadian soldiers by 12th SS Panzer Division has been well publicized over the decades.
As the United States Holocaust Museum clearly points out on its website, the Waffen SS was “heavily involved in the commission of the Holocaust through their participation in mass shootings, anti-partisan warfare, and in supplying guards for Nazi concentration camps.”
It is estimated that about one third of those who made up the notorious Nazi Einsatzgruppen murder squads, responsible for the killings of 1.4 million Jews and others, had come from the ranks of the Waffen SS.
In addition, other Waffen SS units directly took part in the murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians as well as unarmed soldiers in other actions. Such incidents are too numerous to mention but here are several examples: the SS Cavalry Brigade, a unit of the Waffen-SS, murdered 14,178 Jews during its operations in July, 1941 in Russia;. units from the Waffen SS participated in the extermination of Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, killing 7,000 and rounding up another 50,000 to be gassed; the Waffen SS unit, Das Reich, murdered 642 French civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944. And the list goes on.
When it comes to the Ukrainian SS (14th SS Galicia), which Bell defended in her letter, there are also allegations of war crimes. In 2003 a Polish government commission into Nazi war crimes concluded the 14th SS Galicia was responsible for the massacre of women and children in the village of Huta Pieniacka. Ukraine’s government also agreed with this conclusion, although the two government commissions disagreed on the numbers of civilians murdered by SS Galicia. The Ukrainian investigation estimated around 500 people were killed. The Polish commission put the number of those murdered by SS Galicia at 700 to 1,500.
So how did the reputation of the Waffen SS get sanitized to the point that today many think of this fanatical Nazi organization as a military force that only “fought other soldiers?”
This deception is the result of one of the most effective propaganda campaigns of the post-war era, headed in part by none other than Kurt Meyer, the same SS officer found responsible for the murder of Canadian soldiers.
At the heart of this historical revisionism was the HIAG, a SS lobby group formed in the 1950s of high-ranking Waffen SS officers including Meyer and Sepp Dietrich, another die-hard Nazi convicted of war crimes for the murder of U.S. soldiers.
Cover of the magazine Der Freiwillige (The Volunteer), convicted of war crimes for the murder of U.S. soldiers. a publication circulated among SS veterans following WW2. It was a primary source for historical revisionism of the Waffen SS.
