UK: GOOD STUFf: King Charles accepted award from Nazi veteran

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Exclusive: Charles received honorary degree from Ukrainian Nazi veteran when he was Prince of Wales in 1983.

28 May 2024

A photograph has been discovered of the then Prince Charles receiving an award from a former member of the Waffen-SS.

Charles was given an honorary law degree during a ceremony at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada in 1983.

In his acceptance speech, Charles praised those who had “sacrificed their lives 40 years ago” in the fight against Adolf Hitler.

Yet the award was conferred on him by a Nazi collaborator – the university’s chancellor Peter Savaryn.

Originally from Ukraine, he served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS – the so-called Galicia division – during World War Two.

Savaryn was among thousands of Waffen-SS Galicia men who escaped to the West after 1945, often with British assistance.

He included a photo of himself on stage with Charles in his Ukrainian-language autobiography From Ternopil to Alberta published in 2007, a decade before his death.

Princess Diana was also pictured with Savaryn several times, with one photo still hosted on the University of Alberta’s website.

The admiration was mutual. Savaryn himself received a Royal honour, the Order of Canada, in 1987.

Governor General Mary Simon, the British monarchy’s representative in Canada, apologised for that last year.

She stated: “Historical appointments to the Order of Canada reflect a specific moment in time, and would have been based on limited information sources available at that time.”

However Simon did not mention in her apology that Savaryn had awarded Charles an honorary degree in 1983.

Savaryn’s memoirs also include a photograph of him with one of Simon’s predecessor’s, Governor General Ray Hnatshyn.

He received an honorary degree from the University of Alberta in 1994 in similar fashion to Charles.

This pattern of Savaryn and the British monarchy exchanging honours was omitted from Governor General Simon’s apology.

A spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace told Declassified: “During a Royal Visit in 1983, His Majesty received an honorary degree from the University of Alberta, a highly respected Canadian institution.

“As is customary, the University’s Chancellor bestowed the honour. As all normal vetting procedures had been followed by his hosts it was recommended that The King accepted the honour at the time.”

Britain’s Foreign Office, which organises Royal trips abroad, could have known about Savaryn’s Nazi past as it helped resettle Waffen-SS veterans in the UK and Canada, recording many of their names on a secret list.

The department declined to comment about its knowledge of Savaryn’s past.

The revelation that Charles received a degree from Savaryn will cause intense discomfort for the Royal family, which has previously been accused of being too close to the Nazis.

In the 1930s, Charles’ disgraced great-uncle, King Edward VIII, went to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler and his grandmother was filmed giving a Nazi salute.

Cruelty and pillage
Savaryn rarely spoke publicly about his wartime experiences, but admitted in an interview to joining the Galicia division in 1944 after much of the unit was encircled and destroyed during the Soviet liberation of Ukraine.

Rather than fighting to free Ukraine from Soviet rule, the Galicia division retreated deeper into German-occupied Europe. Savaryn confessed to hunting down partisans during Slovakia’s uprising against the Nazis in 1944.

According to the Military Historical Institute of Slovakia, “If we compare them to regular Wehrmacht units, the way they behaved, the cruelty and the pillage by the Galicia Division was much worse. The Galician Division was the most cruel, the worst of all.”

Savaryn then fought with the Galicia division in Yugoslavia against Tito’s communist partisans before his unit was withdrawn by the Nazis to protect Austria’s capital, Vienna, from the Soviets.

“They sent us to Austria to defend the German Reich, and again there was a lot of action,” Savaryn said.

He added that in Austria his unit was cut off from the rest of the division while holding its line of retreat. Rather than surrender to the Soviets he instead crossed the Alps into Bavaria, southern Germany, with 1,500 other Waffen-SS men and surrendered to American troops.

He spent a year as a prisoner of war before being released into a displaced persons camp near Stuttgart.

There Savaryn met his wife-to-be who had family in Alberta’s Peace River Country. When the option to emigrate to Canada came, he took it, obscuring his Waffen-SS past.

“I did not say anything about my service at all,” Savaryn recalled in the interview. “I said ‘I want to go to Canada’ and they said ‘well we need some farmers, we need some woodworkers,’ so I agreed to go to cut lumber.”

Savaryn arrived in Canada in 1949 alongside thousands of other Galicia division volunteers and headed west, eventually enrolling in the University of Alberta.

MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence agency, helped many Waffen-SS veterans migrate to Canada, according to the historian Stephen Dorril.

Watch Hunter Pauli discuss his story with Declassified

British protection
The British government began lying to protect the Waffen-SS Galicia Division before the Second World War was even over.

At the Potsdam Conference in occupied Germany in July 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill personally deflected a Soviet inquiry into the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator unit, members of which were then detained in a British prisoners of war camp, by referring to them as “a Polish division”.

In 1992, professor David Cesarani of the University of London’s Holocaust Research Centre published a book, Justice Delayed, detailing how Britain spirited the Galicia division out of prisoner of war camps into the UK early in the Cold War.

The operation was led by the Foreign Office, then overseen by staunch anti-communist foreign secretary Ernest Bevin in the Labour government.

Facing extradition to the Soviet Union – and likely severe prosecution for collaborating with the Nazis – Bevin and his colleagues successfully lobbied to reclassify the captured SS soldiers from POWs to “Displaced Persons” (DPs).

This civilian refugee status allowed their importation into Britain as much-needed labour under the European Voluntary Workers system.

According to Cesarani, EVW programmes “were turned into a chute down which to eject ‘politically embarrassing elements’”. Despite official protests from other segments of the British government, “the political impetus built up relentlessly, crushing all opposition”.

Complaints about the import of an entire Nazi division of Waffen-SS soldiers into Britain made it to the House of Commons, where Jewish MPs vocally opposed the Foreign Office’s plan.

“Is my Right Hon. Friend aware that members of this Division were exceptionally brutal, that they murdered hundreds of people in cold blood? Will he take all steps necessary to see that none of those who come into this country took part in any of these sadistic and vicious incidents?” Labour MP Barnett Janner, a leading member of the Jewish community in Britain, told parliament in 1947.

Source: https://www.declassifieduk.org/king-charles-accepted-award-from-nazi-veteran-peter-savaryn/