Conduct Unbecoming: The Story of the Murder of Canadian Prisoners of War in Normandy

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Howard Margolian spent seven years as an investigator for the war crimes
section in Ottawa. In Conduct Unbecoming, he reveals and documents the
horrific tale of how 156 Canadian prisoners were bayoneted, shot, or
clubbed to death shortly after the Normandy landings in “the single
worst battlefield atrocity perpetrated against Canadians in the
country’s military history.” His important and engrossing book
“does not make for gentle reading.”

Margolian describes the background of the German 12th SS Panzer
Division “Hitler Youth” and their officers, as well as that of the
Canadians they would fatefully confront; he accounts for 156 murders,
but there may have been 178. Almost equally appalling is “the glaring
failure of Canadian justice” to investigate properly and prosecute
many of those believed to be guilty. Margolian has praise for Lieut.
Colonel Bruce Macdonald, “the man who almost single-handedly created
Canada’s war crimes prosecution program,” but the obsessive work of
one man was not enough. Only the infamous Kurt Meyer was tried; his
death sentence was commuted, and after a few years in a Canadian prison
he returned home to a hero’s welcome. Margolian names names, and
presents a convincing case against specific German soldiers and
officers. In several instances he makes it clear that there is no doubt
of guilt; even the Germans, he tells us, regarded one of the
perpetrators as a “homicidal thug.” Particularly infuriating is the
revelation that one man believed to have murdered a number of Canadians
lives today “with the generous pension he draws from the German
government to act as balm for his pangs of conscience, if he has any.”


Margolian more than fulfils his stated aims: to warn what can happen
when soldiers are dehumanized by political and racial indoctrination,
and to honor all-but-forgotten Canadian heroes, whose names he gives us
on a prefatory page. His exposé—and charges—are meticulously
documented; the 794 endnotes occupy more than one-quarter of the book.