On Sept. 26, University of Alberta VP Verna Yiu announced that a $30,000 endowment for the school’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) in the name of Yaroslav Hunka, the Waffen-SS veteran who earned international infamy after he received two standing ovations in Canadian Parliament, would be returned to his family.

CIUS co-founder Peter Savaryn, who served as U of A’s chancellor from 1982 to 1986, was himself a veteran of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS—the same division as Hunka, which was also known as the Galicia Division and recast as the First Ukrainian Division after the war.

In the Ukrainian language version of Peter Savaryn’s memoirs he expresses pride in his Waffen-SS past; that pride was omitted from his biography in the English language Encyclopedia of Ukraine. After being resettled here Savaryn attained significant political influence in Alberta: he was president of Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta and vice-president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, and received the Order of Canada upon his retirement from U of A in 1987.

In 1996, the Toronto-based Canadian Foundation for Ukrainian Studies established the $10,000 Peter and Olya Savaryn Award, half of which was funded by Savaryn himself, “to support a range of scholarly and educational projects at CIUS,” according to the foundation.

The “Support CIUS” page on the CIUS website, where endowments are listed, has been down since the Hunka endowment was returned, but is still available via Internet Archive.

By examining this list and old issues of the annual CIUS newsletter, with assistance from concerned scholars and the University of Alberta Students’ Union (UASU), the Progress Report was able to identify an additional $1,424,700 in endowments and donations dedicated to 11 Waffen-SS veterans and one member of the Nazi-collaborationist Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The Alberta government under Premier Don Getty contributed the bulk of funds for two of these endowments in 1986.

U of A political scientist Laurie Adkin penned a letter to administration, noting that “there were much earlier revelations that should have caused the university to investigate the CIUS’s funding and activities.”

Adkin cited scholarship by colleagues John-Paul Himka, Karyn Ball and David Marples, as well as U of A alumnus Per Anders Rudling, into the “obfuscation of the history of the Holocaust” by Ukrainian nationalist organizations, who in turn attempted to delegitimize their work.