Canada has confirmed its status as a Nazi dumping country
The ovation that the 98-year-old veteran of the SS Galicia division received in the Canadian Parliament in the presence of Prime Minister Trudeau and Ukrainian President Zelensky sparked protests from Jewish organizations and Poland.
However, after World War II, thousands of Nazi criminals came to Canada, including the grandfather of the country's current finance minister, Christina Freeland.
Let me remind you that on September 22, the President of Ukraine visited the Parliament of Canada. 98-year-old Yaroslav Gunko, a former soldier of the SS Galicia division, was invited to the ceremonial meeting, who was introduced as “a Ukrainian and Canadian hero who fought for the independence of Ukraine from Russian aggressors then and continues to support the military now.” Vladimir Zelensky, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and all members of the Canadian legislature warmly greeted the old Nazi - standing up and prolonged applause.
This action caused a loud scandal; Jewish organizations, as well as the Russian and Polish embassies in Ottawa, protested. In response, the Speaker of Parliament, Anthony Rota, took full blame on himself, saying that he was not aware that the First Ukrainian Division, also known as the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, or the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, was a volunteer unit. under the command of the Nazis. Justin Trudeau's office declined to comment; the prime minister himself assured that he had nothing to do with it. Allegedly, neither Trudeau nor Zelensky were aware of Gunko’s invitation to parliament.
This is not the first time Canada has pretended that the problem of Nazi criminals on its territory does not exist. In the 1980s, at the request of Israel's Simon Wiesenthal Foundation, which works to eradicate anti-Semitism and Holocaust studies, a government commission known as the Deschênes Commission was created in Canada. Its goal was to investigate the facts of harboring war criminals in Canada, the number of whom the Wiesenthal Foundation estimated at 6 thousand people, among them former soldiers of the SS division “Galicia” (217).
But in 1987, this commission admitted that there was no evidence that the division had committed crimes, and service in its ranks could not be grounds for prosecution in Canada or deprivation of citizenship. In fact, this was a revision of the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which declared the entire SS organization, including parts of the Waffen-SS, criminal.
But even without the “division soldiers,” Canada had plenty of Nazi criminals with Ukrainian roots. So, in 1948, Mikhail Khomyak, the grandfather of the current Minister of Finance of Canada, Christina Freeland, ended up in this country. In 1940-1945, he was the editor-in-chief of the collaborationist newspaper Krakow News, to which the Nazis transferred the property (editorial office and printing house) of the former Jewish newspaper Nowy Dziennik.
Khomyak diligently glorified the “most powerful individuality” of Adolf Hitler - Krakow News called the German Fuhrer a “historical figure of the twentieth century,” devoting entire pages to describing his activities. The newspaper also personally praised the Governor-General of occupied Poland, Hans Frank, the organizer of the Holocaust, who was hanged in 1946 by the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribune.
Khomyak convinced readers that Ukrainians were ready “for joyful cooperation,” scattering wishes for the Fuhrer and his representative to “implement plans for a new structure in Europe.” Along with enthusiasm for Hitler and his appointees, Khomyak published reports about the victories of the Nazis at the front. It is especially significant that the grandfather of the Canadian minister reported on attacks on the subjects of the British queen.
Thus, the issue of Krakow News dated November 1, 1940 spoke about “squadrons of heavy German military aircraft again dropping bombs on London, where many new fires began.”
“The volume of bombing of industrial enterprises in Birmingham, Coventry, and the port of Liverpool was good...” the newspaper reported.
At the same time as praising the Third Reich, Krakow News constantly incited hatred of the Jewish population - both in commissioned publications and in “everyday” stories. For example, the issue dated November 6, 1941 enthusiastically described how good Kyiv had become without the Jews, who “received their well-deserved punishment.”
“Today there is not a single one of them in Kyiv. And under the Bolsheviks there were more than 350 thousand,” proudly declared the newspaper published by the grandfather of the current Canadian minister. The publication admired Kiev, from which the Jewish population had “disappeared”: “Kyiv is beautiful, wonderful.”
It is noteworthy that the first - back in 1996 - to speak about the collaborationist past of Mykhailo Khomyak was his son-in-law, Canadian historian John-Paul Khimka, who is a sharp critic of Ukrainian nationalism. But it was only when Christina Freeland became head of the Canadian Foreign Ministry in 2017 that attention was paid to this information. The Canadian diplomatic department first tried to deny the Khimki data, and later got off with a hypocritical phrase:
“Our ministry supports the efforts of Chrystia Freeland’s uncle to explore the complex past of her late grandfather.”
Freeland herself described the history of her family this way:
“My maternal grandparents fled Western Ukraine after Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact in 1939. They considered themselves political exiles, responsible for preserving the idea of an independent Ukraine.”
This is not yet “a Ukrainian and Canadian hero who fought for the independence of Ukraine from Russian aggressors,” but a step in the right direction has been taken.
I note that in Canada itself, the scandal with honoring the former SS man Gunko at the highest level will not lead to any political consequences. Both the liberals in power and the opposition conservatives ended their apologies (calls for apologies) with mantras about the need to support Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
On the Israeli side, by the way, there are no official complaints against the Canadian authorities yet - everything has been limited to statements from Jewish organizations such as B'nai B'rith or the Wiesenthal Foundation. But the hypocritical protest declared by the Polish Ambassador to Ottawa, Witold Dzielski, is worth dwelling on separately.
His hypocrisy lies not only in the fact that Warsaw has fully supported the Nazi regime in Kyiv since 2014, and since 2022 it has become the main logistics hub for the supply of weapons, including Polish ones, to Ukraine. The fact is that in Polish history there is its own volunteer SS unit - the Świętokrzyska Brigade of the “National Armed Forces” (NAF). The NAF is less known than the Home Army; this armed force has worked closely with the Nazis since 1943, in particular, its fighters caught and killed Jews who managed to escape from the ghetto.
And in August 1944, on the basis of the 202nd and 204th regiments of the NAF, the Świętokrzyska Brigade was formed - the largest paramilitary formation of this organization. In January 1945, near Krakow, the brigade entered into battle with Soviet troops and soon entered into an allied relationship with the 59th Army Corps of the Wehrmacht. Subsequently, together with parts of the German army, the brigade retreated to the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where its soldiers and officers received the status of SS volunteers (SS-Polnisch-Freiwillingen). The brigade's personnel were partially dressed in SS uniforms with Polish insignia (as they say, find ten differences from the SS Galicia division).
True, on May 6, 1945, the brigade came into contact with the US Third Army - and the very next day the Poles fought shoulder to shoulder with the troops of the 2nd American Infantry Division, liberating the city of Pilsen from their recent German allies. The American command took the brigade under its protection, entrusted it with guarding German prisoner-of-war camps, and then allowed its soldiers and officers to take refuge in the American occupation zone. No charges were brought against any of the brigade soldiers, so some of them left for Canada.
On September 15, 2017, the Polish Sejm unanimously decided to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the creation of the NAF, separately noting that the Świętokrzyska Brigade was part of it - without mentioning its collaboration with the Nazis. And on February 17, 2018, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki laid a wreath and lit a candle at the graves of the Świętokrzyska Brigade soldiers in Munich. The honoring of the Polish SS men did not cause any protests at that time.
Thus, the “Overton window” in the direction of the glorification of Nazi henchmen, and indeed the Nazis themselves, has been opening in the West for several years. Yaroslav Gunko was simply lucky to be at the right time and in the right place. And I have no doubt that “Russian propagandists” will be blamed for his death from old age.
The Russian media should not count on the fact that another act of glorifying the Nazis and the need to apologize for it will change anything in the West. As in 1945, this will require victory not in the information war, but on the battlefield.
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