If no one told you before your visit, and you didn’t have the internet, you would not know the Kehlsteinhaus in southeast Germany was once Hitler’s house. There’s nothing to evoke the memory-myths of war.

You’d notice, however, that it’s very odd. You get there through a long and atmospheric tunnel followed by ascent in a garish, golden, Trump-esque lift. The architecture and interior design are strange, resembling no known style. The fireplace—made of extraordinary red marble—looks as though it’s been attacked by itinerant prospectors determined to scrabble up some gems, so chipped and nicked is the mantel. The firebox’s back wall is decorated with what my father used to call “Nazi bas-relief”—something now rare, but identifiable enough for most people to distinguish it from Soviet socialist-realism, Italian futurism, and Art Deco.

The date in the middle helps, too: 1938.

Known outside Germany as the Eagle’s Nest, the Kehlsteinhaus only hosted Hitler 14 times, thanks to his hatred of heights, thin mountain air, and that over-the-top lift. Its post-war survival was the exception: Every other Nazi building on the Obersalzberg has been destroyed. The famous No 617 Squadron RAF (“The Dambusters”) started the job on 25 April 1945. What they didn’t finish, the Free State of Bavaria did during the 1950s. (Of course, it wasn’t that the Dambusters didn’t want to flatten the Kehlsteinhaus along with everything else. They just missed it. In an era before guided munitions, even the Dambusters missed.)

Postwar German governments of all hues were desperate to ensure the entire mountain didn’t become some sort of weird Nazi shrine. In the years immediately after 1945, souvenir hunters and scavengers picked over the bombed ruins, hoping to find things like low-number Nazi Party membership pins, discarded military regalia, and objets d’art. These—along with items Allied troops had looted during and in the immediate aftermath of Germany’s unconditional surrender—soon turned up on black markets once dedicated to stolen antiquities.

However, even blowing up the remains of the Berghof (which Hitler adored and used extensively, probably because it wasn’t two thousand meters up) and his favourite nearby chalet didn’t stop the tourists and prospectors. Bits of red marble from the Kehlsteinhaus fireplace—hammered off by American troops in 1945—surfaced all over the world, like pieces of the One True Cross in Europe before the Reformation. Bavaria’s government had been stymied.

Cue a change in approach.

The Eagle’s Nest was not only protected—American troops caught damaging the fireplace finished up on a charge—it was untouched, left as Martin Bormann and Gerdy Troost designed and intended. It’s a restaurant now, with spectacular mountain views and a resident population of Alpine Choughs: small, bold corvids with blackbird-yellow beaks and a large repertoire of expert aerial stunts (they perform for snacks). External guides lead (discreet) unofficial tours devoted to its Nazi past, of course, and a series of understated period images on the wall along the sun terrace outline its history.

One photo shows Der Führer on a sun-lounger, looking for all the world like the German tourists in various famous British beer adverts. It’s here you learn that Hitler hated the golden lift—it’s so bright that photography is difficult—because he thought it dangerous. He told everyone who would listen that the mechanism on top was vulnerable to a lightning strike. He was right about this: Bormann concealed two direct hits that took place during construction.

While Hitler’s lift may look like a bling Tardis—consistent with the trope that dictators don’t stint themselves, even if they prefer golden loos these days—the rest of the Eagle’s Nest is in good, if somewhat peculiar taste, precisely because its style and motifs have no heirs. In an alternative universe somewhere, the Allies joined forces with Hitler’s Germany against the USSR and design students the world over make jokes about “Nazi home décor” instead of “Soviet monstrosities.”

And still, the tourists come, most of them not for the views. While not a Nazi shrine, the Eagle’s Nest remains a piece of dark heritage both unpalatable and difficult to handle.

The Bavarian government’s travails with managing its past are, I think, illustrative of something wider. It’s hard to remember the Second World War well. War is rarely pure and never simple. WWII was no exception. Germany’s bumbling and stingy response in Ukraine’s hour of need has roots in a paralysing national guilt and a failure of historical memory.

The retconning of our collective WWII memories … is now so pervasive that anyone who fought tyranny for whatever reason can be recast as a hero.

Archaeologist-cum-historian Neil Oliver’s claim that we are the children and grandchildren of “damaged generations” resonates here. No one is “over” 1914 to 1945. In some respects, that demented and sanguinary period was a second Thirty Years’ War. “To think we are beyond those years, those consequences, is a mistake,” Oliver suggests, and he worries—because the last veterans of the twentieth century’s first conflict are gone and those from the second endangered—that “now and forever the Somme and Passchendaele are myths like Thermopylae, or Carthage.”

Meanwhile, if you’re British or Australian or American—or Canadian, for that matter—WWII can look like what my dad used to call (with heavy irony) “the good war.” My dad was a Royal Navy veteran. Protecting merchant shipping destined for the UK as it made its way across the Atlantic—as he did—was an unalloyed good.

I mention Canada because failure of memory is also what led the Speaker of its House of Commons—likely with PM Justin Trudeau’s knowledge, despite repeated denials—to invite a Waffen-SS veteran to the House and hail him a war hero.

Stated baldly, it seems impossible—flatly bonkers. When people first told me, I didn’t believe them. No government is daft enough to do that, I thought, especially not Woke Canada’s. Hailed as someone who “fought against Russia,” 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka was treated to a bipartisan standing ovation along with plaudits from visiting Ukrainian President Zelenskyy.

Hunka is a Ukrainian veteran of the 14th Waffen-SS Division “Galician.” Comprised almost entirely of volunteer Ukrainians, it was officered by an ethnic minority known as Volksdeutsche—men of mixed Ukrainian and German ancestry who spoke both languages.

We’ve all become familiar with the idea that Ukraine isn’t “part of Russia” since February 24 last year. However, that situation has obtained for at least decades and probably centuries. In the (roughly) half of the country west of the river Dnipro, Ukrainian nationalism has historically been fervid. By contrast, the (roughly) half east of the Dnipro has always been closer to Russia culturally and linguistically. When (in the 1990s) I researched and wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper—with its “West Ukraine during the Holodomor/WWII” setting—I admit to seeing partition in the country’s future.

Putin’s maladministration and incompetence in the bits of Ukraine Russia conquered in 2014 coupled with more recent atrocities have driven the eastern half of the country closer to the western half, such that I think it’s safe to say Ukraine’s ethnogenesis is now complete. This means it enjoys a right to self-determination as conceived of by nineteenth-century classical liberals.

That said, how do you explain Yaroslav Hunka and others like him?

After Canada’s blunder, the world Googled the 14th Galician, but only a modicum of digging will reveal all sorts of Ukrainian collaboration in some of the worst bits of Hitler’s genocidal scheming. Search “Trawniki Men” or “Operation Reinhard” if you dare—and don’t say I didn’t warn you.

That said, the primary reason for Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany—as Hunka has admitted himself in various pieces written for his veterans’ association [in Ukrainian]—was to kill Russians. And, consistent with the country’s (then) linguistic and cultural divisions, most collaborators came from religiously-and-linguistically-distinct West Ukraine. Those Ukrainians East of the Dnipro (and, of course, all Ukrainian Jews including Zelenskyy’s family) fought for the USSR. Various Nazi leaders had a moan about this, too. They thought the whole country would be like the Western half and complained of “passivity” in eastern cities like Donetsk and Kharkiv.

The view I formed when I wrote my first novel was that there were good reasons for Ukrainians to fight against Russian and Communist imperialism (and more generally against Marxism, which is toxic, genocidal nonsense). The problem, of course, was how those reasons led Ukrainian nationalists into widespread and destructive Nazi collaboration. Nazism was similar toxic, genocidal nonsense.

Right and good are not the same thing. It’s possible to do bad things in a good cause. It’s possible to do good things in a bad cause.

Canada’s blunder thus has roots in the complexities and exigencies of warfare: the Western Allies had to make common cause with the USSR, a great empire with a government as murderous and deranged as the one seated in Berlin.

Russia and various “captive nations” (including Ukraine) were ruled over by a savage tyranny that killed more of its own citizens during the 1930s than Nazi Germany managed under cover of war. Meanwhile, Stalin carved up Poland with Hitler in 1939—an arrangement historian Roger Moorhouse called The Devils’ Alliance in his book about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. If you were Polish and fighting against Russians in 1939–40, you probably were a war hero.

The Nazis also strung Ukrainians along, promising the country’s leadership that Germany would support Ukrainian independence. Hitler, of course, did no such thing: he viewed Ukrainians as racially inferior Slavs fit only for servitude. Germany didn’t even bring Stalin’s monstrous forced collectivisation—a significant contributor to Ukraine’s Holodomor in 1931–33—to an end. It was only when Himmler’s underlings persuaded him that West Ukrainians were Aryans that Nazi policy towards Ukraine started to shift, and then only in ways that made it easier for Germany to use Ukrainian recruits as cannon fodder and Ukrainian civilians as slave labour.

Later, as Stalin’s armies raped and murdered their way across Eastern Europe in 1944–45, Soviet troops were shadowed everywhere by battalions of secret policemen ready to shoot local dissidents, not to mention terrified peasant boys who fled the front line.

If the war was a crusade against barbarism—a “good war”—it’s hard to explain the UK forging a jewel-covered ceremonial longsword as a wartime present to Joseph Stalin, or Churchill’s observation that, “if Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” The Soviet alliance is only intelligible and defensible in the context of a war both for national survival and in the national interest. It’s less acceptable if we conceive of the conflict as a grand battle of good versus evil.

Unfortunately, the retconning of our collective WWII memories—that is, repurposing the war’s events to tell a simple tale of victory over fascism in the name of liberalism and human rights—is now so pervasive that anyone who fought tyranny for whatever reason can be recast as a hero.

And that, I think, is behind the standing ovation Yaroslav Hunka got in Ottawa.

Historical events of WWII’s magnitude are not univocal. They don’t just say one thing. Bavaria is still struggling with this reality, while Canada’s embarrassment is borne of an ahistorical and politicised folk memory of that great conflict. This, of course, is coupled with the belief that Ukraine’s cause in its current war of necessity against Russia is always and everywhere “a good war.” The Wokery with which Canada is particularly afflicted also likes making morality plays of the past. The past—in Yaroslav Hunka’s person—refused to cooperate.

“Wait, Hitler’s house is a tourist spot?” a stunned interlocutor asked me on Twitter after I shared pictures of the Eagle’s Nest’s gaudy lift, to which the only reasonable response was “sort of.” Bavaria has been dealing with the awkward reality of housing Hitler’s home since 1945, showing understandable inconsistency. Canada came the closest it’s possible to come (in 2023) to inviting Hitler home for supper.

I’ve written twice for Law & Liberty on why I think Ukraine is on the side of right in this conflict. However, right and good are not the same thing. It’s possible to do bad things in a good cause. It’s possible to do good things in a bad cause. It’s possible to resist tyranny for bad reasons and in a bad cause.

And there are no “good wars,” only bad and less bad ones.