User:Questor 606/sandbox

'''KGB OPERATION PAYBACK Starting in the late 1970s the Soviet-era KGB launched “Operation Payback”. This disinformation campaign was designed to inflame tensions between the Ukrainian, Baltic, and Jewish diasporas. This KGB campaign was rooted in the false narrative that labels members Galicia (Halychyna) Division as ‘Nazis’ and ‘war criminals’. This claim leverages the fact that the Galicia Division was constituted in 1943 under the Waffen SS. The SS appellation added to the Galicia Division’s name simply meant that it reported to the Waffen SS, which was the combat branch of the Nazi Party's paramilitary Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation. For the record, the Galicia Division was formed to fight a rear-guard action against the advancing Soviet armies as the Wehrmacht retreated from the Eastern Front in 1943. The campaign’s level of success can be measured in the fact that it provoked the creation of the “Office of Special Investigations” (OSI) in the USA and the “Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals”, headed by Mr. Justice Jules Deschênes, in Canada. It should be noted that Germans perceived Ukrainians to be Slavic “Untermenschen” (sub human) and therefore not Aryan. By definition they could not be NAZIs. In truth, members of the Galicia Division were neither Nazis nor war criminals. In fact, at the end of the war in Europe, members of the Galicia Division were demobilized and interned near Rimini, Italy. There they were screened by the British, Americans, Canadians, and even the Soviets for evidence of wartime criminality. No such evidence was ever found. Moreover, in 1985–86 the Deschênes Commission concluded that … at the end of the war in Europe, charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia Division were not substantiated nor were they substantiated when these charges were again reviewed by this commission.