Details: Between 1950 AND 1955, thousands of veterans from the notorious German-led, Ukrainian 14th Waffen-SS Division emigrated to North America with the full consent of the respective governments despite immigration regulations in force at the tme that forbade entry to all who served in any branch of the SS. The Jewish community fought a brief, but futile, battle to persuade those governments to deny them entry, denouncing them as war criminals, but Division supporters insisted the young men who had volunteered to serve were exceptional soldiers who had obeyed the international rules of war. An acrimonious dispute, that rages to the present day,ensued.  At issue was the nature of the Division and its war record. Were they “pure soldiers” as many of their supporters contended, or, were they, to use Daniel Goldhagen’s phrase, among Hitler’s Willing executioners? Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion traces the 14th Waffen-SS division’s fortunes from formation in April 1943 to its surrender to the British in May 1946, their subsequent stay as prisioners-of-war in Italy, and their eventual transfer as agricultural workers in Britain.  In 1950 they began their immigration to Canada and the United States. Along the way they were recruited by the British as anti-Soviet spies and by the CIA as political assassins. In spelling out the Division’s history, the author attempts to shed light on its true nature..

A Sociologist turned journalist and community activist, Sol Littman was born in Toronto, Canada, and educated in the sociology departments of the University of Toronto, State College of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He has served as a teaching fellow in the Sociology and Anthropology Departments of the State College of Washington and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has lectured at numerous American universities on diverse subjects related to racism, civil rights and Holocaust denial. Currently, he is serving as a visiting scholar in the Judaic Studies Department of the University of Arizona. He has also presented a full-semester credit course on the Holocaust for the university's History Department.

In 1955, Littman joined the staff of the Anti-Defamation League. For the next thirteen years he was deeply involved in research on American radical-right organizations such as the John Birch Society and neo-Nazi groups such as the American Nazi Party. His exposure of racial and ethnic housing discrimination in the Grosse Pointes of Detroit and his analysis of white-collar anti-Jewish discrimination in the auto industry were actively pursued by the ADL.

In 1968, Littman returned to Canada to head B'nai Brith Canada's newly formed League of Human Rights. Among the many projects undertaken by the League, the most notable was the attack on social discrimination which prompted Toronto's Granite Club to abandon its discriminatory membership practices.

In 1971, he turned to journalism. For two years he designed and edited the newly revised Canadian Jewish News, wrote a bi-weekly column on the arts for The Toronto Star and wrote articles for Canada's major magazines.

In 1973, he joined the staff of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a news documentary maker, producing features on such varied subjects as cancer treatment centers, juvenile homes, comic-book conferences and computer art. His 1974 investigations of Canadian prisons were broadcast nationally and won him a news broadcasting award.

In 1976, he joined the editorial staff of the Toronto Star writing numerous editorials on prisons, law and justice, native rights, education financing and immigration. In 1981 he took early retirement to devote himself to writing books.

In 1982, Lester Orpen and Dennys published his book War Criminal on Trial, an account of the arrest and trial of Helmut Rauca, charged by the West German government with the murder of 10,500 people in Kovno, Lithuania. War Criminal on Trial is also a careful reconstruction of destruction of the Kovno Jewish population and the attempts of the Jewish leadership to delay the Endlosung. Because of the consistent demand of Kovno survivors and their families for copies of the book, Key Porter Books published a second edition in 1998. The second edition includes a new chapter detailing Canada's reluctance to prosecute the three thousand war criminals who found shelter in Canada.

A second book, Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion was published by Black Rose Books in 2003, Pure Soldiers is the history of a German-recruited Ukrainian Waffen-SS division that committed numerous wartime atrocities. As many as two thousand of its veterans were permitted to immigrate to Ukrainian, Romanian, French, British, Slovak, Polish, American and Canadian archives.

For fourteen years, until his retirement in 1999, Littman served as Canadian Representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In that capacity he played a key role in persuading the Canadian government to appoint a Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada. Although Littman remains critical of many of Justice Deschênes conclusions, he is grateful that the Inquiry led to the amendment of Canada's Criminal Code to allow the prosecution of war crimes committed beyond Canada's borders. He has also presented the Justice Department with several lists of Nazi War Criminals who found refuge in Canada.

Littman has also spent considerable time in Europe and Israel writing articles on Swedish prisons, Italian museums and Arab-Israeli relationships. His next book, titled Traitor, Torturer, Christian Gentleman is an account of the French war criminal le comte de Bernonville and some of his Quebec associates. It will include an analysis of the work of the Canadian Justice Department's Special Unit on War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity as well as a comparison with the USA's Office of Special Investigations.

Littman is currently domiciled in Tucson, Arizona where for the past ten years he has been serving as a Visiting Scholar with the University of Arizona's Judaic Studies Center, giving occasional lectures on the Holocaust, Jewish Writers in Europe and America and Stalin's murder of Jewish writers in the Soviet Union.

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