[3] According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, —700 to 1,500 people, including around 1,000 Huta Pieniacka residents, plus people from surrounding villages who had sought refuge in the village, were killed, and the action was committed by the 4th SS Volunteer Galician Regiment and 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician).

[5] According to Polish witness accounts and scholarly publications, German Nazi policemen were accompanied by a paramilitary unit of Ukrainian nationalists under Włodzimierz Czerniawski's command, including members of the UPA and inhabitants of local villages who intended to seize property found in the households of the murdered.

[6] According to the Ukrainian investigation, the dead numbered 500, and the massacre was committed by Waffen-SS Galizien–affiliated soldiers under the initiative of SS Police regiments.

Huta Pieniacka was a village of about 1,000 ethnically Polish inhabitants in 200 houses, located in the Tarnopol Voivodeship, Poland (today Ternopil Oblast in Ukraine).

[3] According to Bogusława Marcinkowska, a prosecutor of the Branch Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation in Krakow,, the SS threw one infant against a wall and cut open the stomach of a pregnant woman.

All those who recollected the massacre (Emilia Bernacka, then 10; Filomena Franczukowska, then 20; Jozefa Orlowska, then 16; and Regina Wroblewska, then 6) claimed that the village was attacked by the Ukrainian troops, who murdered all Poles they managed to catch, including infants.

The mentioned persons survived because somebody managed to open the rear door of a village church in which the murderers were massacring the Polish civilians.

Filomena Franczukowska, who was 20 then and is the oldest still-living survivor of the massacre (as of April 2008) stated in the Gazeta Polska article that the Ukrainians came to the village at 4 am.

[10] The weekly publication of the Polish Home Army – the Biuletyn Ziemi Czerwienskiej (Land of Czerwien Bulletin) for March 26, 1944 (№ 12) [216, p. 8] stated that during the Battle at Pidkamin and Brody, Soviet forces took a couple of hundred soldiers of the SS Galizien division prisoner.

All were immediately shot in the Zbarazh castle on the basis that two weeks earlier they had apparently taken part in the killing of the Polish inhabitants of Huta Pienacka, and as a result could not be categorized as prisoners of war.

[citation needed] The Warsaw branch of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) started an investigation into the massacre in November 1992.

[11] After the massacre, some local AK commanders forbade Polish strongholds from sheltering Soviet partisans in order to minimize the risk of those self-defence posts' destruction.

As a result of actions by the parliamentarian Oleh Tyahnybok, a note of protest regarding the "illegal erection" of the monument was sent out and the Polish consul was declared a persona non-grata for "degrading the national dignity of the Ukrainian people".

[15] On 22 September 2023, Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of an SS division implicated in the massacre, was invited to the Parliament of Canada along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, where they both received standing ovations from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and most MPs.

[16][17][18] Following international criticism, including from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Speaker of the House of Commons Anthony Rota apologized on the 24th for inviting the veteran stating "I have subsequently become aware of more information which causes me to regret my decision [to honour Hunka].