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HOW CANADA EMERGED AS A HAVEN FOR UKRAINIAN NAZI COLLABORATORS

ROGER JORDAN
29 JULY 2019

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Earlier this month, Canada hosted the third Ukraine Reform Conference, a
gathering of diplomats and officials from over 100 countries aimed at bringing
Kiev even more directly under the geopolitical and economic domination of the
western imperialist powers.

After meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the conference
sidelines, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed “to stand with Ukraine
against Russian interference and aggression,” and to support it in the struggle
to end Russia’s “illegal annexation” of Crimea.

Trudeau’s portrayal of Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine and Eastern Europe
turns reality on its head. It conceals the fact that Canada played a major
supporting role in the US-orchestrated, fascist-spearheaded February 2014 coup
that chased Ukraine's elected president from power and brought a far-right,
pro-western regime to power in Kiev; and that the 2014 coup was the continuation
of a longstanding US-led, Canadian-backed drive to expand NATO to Russia's
borders and harness Ukraine to the West.

Moreover, Canadian imperialism has been playing a leading role in the subsequent
US-NATO war drive against Russia. This includes supporting Washington's
withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia; taking
command and providing the bulk of the troops for one of NATO's four new “forward
deployed” battalions in Poland and the three Baltic states; and deploying 200
Canadian Armed Forces personnel to Ukraine since 2015 to help prepare its army
and National Guard to, in Trudeau's words, “liberate” Ukrainian territory.

But Canada’s intimate alliance with far-right Ukrainian nationalists did not
begin in 2014, or even Dec. 1991, when Canada became the first western country
to recognize Ukraine as a sovereign state. In the decades following World War
II, Canada became a haven for far-right Ukrainian nationalists, many of whom had
collaborated with the Nazis both in their drive to find “lebensraum” (living
space) through the conquest of the Soviet Union and their genocidal “final
solution to the Jewish problem.”

Under conditions of the postwar US-led military-strategic offensive against the
Soviet Union—what euphemistically came to be known as the Cold War—these
ultra-reactionary political forces came to be seen as useful allies due to their
virulent anticommunism and hostility to anything and anyone associated with the
Soviet Union.

In the immediate postwar period, Canada’s then Liberal government, working in
close cahoots with US and British intelligence, opened Canada's doors to
Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. These included members of the infamous 14th
Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, also known as the Galicia Division.

Among the beneficiaries of this policy was Mikhail Chomiak, the grandfather of
current Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland. Chomiak served as editor of
a pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist newspaper during the war, Krakivs ’ ki Visti,
which used publishing equipment commandeered by the Nazis from a Jewish
newspaper they had shut down. Chomiak emigrated to northern Alberta after
fleeing to Vienna in late 1944 in the face of the advancing Red Army (see:
Canadian media denounces exposure of foreign minister’s grandfather as Nazi
collaborator).

The scale of the influx of Nazi collaborators only became public knowledge in
the 1980s. A comprehensive study carried out by Alti Rodal on behalf of the
federal government-appointed Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in
Canada uncovered records proving that US intelligence agents in Europe had
funneled Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe through the Canadian immigration
system using false papers. Rodal revealed that large numbers of identically
typed applications were received by Canada's immigration department from one
address in West Germany. On closer inspection, this address turned out to be a
US military base.

The Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney established the
Deschênes Commission in 1985, in response to a mounting public outcry over
exposures of Nazis and Nazi accomplices who had found a safe haven in Canada and
tasked the inquiry with identifying Nazi war criminals residing in Canada.

Around the same time, the Simon Wiesenthal Center estimated that upwards of
2,000 Nazis and Nazi collaborators emigrated to Canada in the years after the
war. A quarter-century later, in 2011, it would give Canada an “F minus” in its
annual report ranking countries on their efforts to prosecute war criminals.
This placed Canada on a par with Ukraine and the former Baltic republics, i.e.
countries where the right-wing, nationalist regimes that have emerged since the
Stalinist bureaucracy's dissolution of the Soviet Union openly venerate the
ultranationalists who aligned with the Nazis when they invaded the USSR.

WAR CRIMINALS IN CANADA

A significant number of those who made their way to Canada were members of the
Nazi SS’s Galicia Division, which was made up of Ukrainian nationalist
volunteers who fought on the side of the Wehrmacht against the Red Army during
the Nazis’ war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. This preplanned
onslaught—launched in June 1941 when a 3 million-strong force comprised of
German troops, their Axis allies and fascist volunteers invaded the Soviet
Union—led to the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens and the Holocaust.

In waging war, suppressing the population, and pursuing the annihilation of the
Jews, across Eastern Europe and above all in the USSR, Hitler’s Wehrmacht and SS
shock troops relied on the loyal collaboration of ultraright-wing, anti-Semitic
forces. Among the Ukrainian nationalists, in both occupied Poland and the USSR,
the Nazis found eager collaborators. The Galicia Division was formed in 1943 out
of a faction of the Stepan Bandera-led Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists
Bandera (OUN-B) and fought with the Nazis against the Red Army throughout 1944.



Massacres perpetrated by the division against Polish and Jewish civilians have
been well documented, including at Huta Pieniacka, Podkamien, and Palikrowy. At
Podkamien, 100 Polish civilians were massacred in a hilltop monastery, and at
least a further 500 in surrounding villages as the Red Army approached the
German-occupied area in March 1944.

Members of the Galicia Division were initially prohibited from entering Canada
due to their membership in the SS. But in 1950, Britain made an appeal to the
Commonwealth for volunteers to accept a total of 9,000 division members who were
at that time residing in the UK after being disarmed by British troops at the
war’s end.

When Canada’s External Affairs Department, prompted by complaints from the
Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), raised concerns about the division's ties to the
Nazis and role in Nazi atrocities, the British government insisted that it had
carried out background checks. “While in Italy these men were screened by Soviet
and British missions and neither then nor subsequently has any evidence been
brought to light which would suggest that any of them fought against the Western
Allies or engaged in crimes against humanity,” claimed the British Foreign
Office. “Their behaviour since they came to this country,” added London, “has
been good and they have never indicated in any way that they are infected with
any trace of Nazi ideology.”

With this letter serving as political cover, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent
and his cabinet declared that Galicia Division members would be permitted to
immigrate to Canada unless it could be proved that they had personally committed
atrocities against civilian populations based on “race, religion or national
origins.” Simply having been a Galicia Division member would not be considered a
valid reason to prevent entry, even though after the war all Waffen-SS members
had been deemed complicit in war crimes.

The immigration of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals continued for more than a
decade after the war and was a significant factor in Canada's emergence during
the Cold War as a political-ideological centre of far-right Ukrainian
nationalism.

Speaking to a CBS “60 Minutes” programme in 1997, Canadian historian Irving
Abella, who is currently Professor for Canadian Jewish history at York
University, bluntly summed up the political climate of the time. “One way of
getting into postwar Canada,” he said “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved
that you were an anti-Communist.”

Ottawa carried out this policy in close collaboration with US authorities, who
similarly permitted ex-Nazis to settle in the US and recruited hundreds to act
as spies against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-allied regimes in Eastern
Europe. According to investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, up to 1,000 former
Nazis were made use of by the CIA in Europe, within the US itself, the Middle
East, and in Latin America.

The open-door policy towards Nazi collaborators stood in stark contrast to the
cold shoulder given by Canada to Jews desperately fleeing persecution. Abella
coauthored a well-known book, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe,
which was published in 1983 just prior to the establishment of the Deschênes
Commission. Abella and Harold Troper detailed how Canada accepted a mere 5,000
Jewish refugees between 1936 and 1945. Most infamously, Canada was among the
countries to refuse to provide asylum to the 900 Jewish refugees on the ship the
MS St Louis, which sailed from Hamburg for the Americas in April 1939. Canada’s
refusal to accept any of the refugees forced the St. Louis to return to Europe,
where over 200 of its passengers later died in the Holocaust.

EXONERATION OF THE GALICIA DIVISION

Due to the continued high-level protection members of the Galicia Division
enjoyed from the government and other establishment circles, the Deschênes
commission granted the Brotherhood of Veterans of the First Division of the
Ukrainian National Army (Galicia Division) special intervener status in its
hearings. This meant it was able to cross-examine testimony from witnesses, as
well as make use of the standard right to submit legal documents and provide its
own testimony.

The Nazi War Criminals commission also refused Soviet offers to gather testimony
in the USSR, on the purported grounds that Moscow had refused to allow Canadian
officials to interrogate witnesses in accordance with Canadian rules of
evidence.

Outrageously, the Deschênes commission exonerated the Galicia Division of any
wrongdoing in its December 1986 final report. Its most important findings in
this connection read: “The Galicia Division (14 Waffengrenadierdivision der SS
[gal. Nr. 1]) should not be indicted as a group,” and “Charges of war crimes
against members of the Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in
1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or
before this Commission.”

The commission also summarily dismissed the charge that hundreds, if not
thousands, of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals had immigrated to Canada,
declaring these figures to be “grossly exaggerated.”



Another Ukrainian nationalist outfit given special representation rights before
the Deschênes commission was the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which has
since renamed itself the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. In 1950, the UCC had
successfully campaigned for the lifting of the ban on Galicia Division veterans
entering the country.

The UCC continues to uphold the legacy of the Galicia Division. On Remembrance
Day in 2010, the organisation saluted Ukrainian veterans of the Waffen SS as
fighters for “freedom of their ancestral Ukrainian homeland.” The press release
came from Paul Grod, the current head of the UCC. Grod has accompanied both
Trudeau and his predecessor, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on
their trips to the Ukraine.

THE CASE OF VLADIMIR KATRIUK

Nobody should believe that the Canadian ruling elite’s defence of pro-Nazi war
criminals is a thing of the past.

In 2015, Vladimir Katriuk, a Ukrainian and member of the SS during World War II,
died in Quebec at the age of 93. His personal fate exemplifies how the Canadian
state actively connived to ensure Nazi war criminals escaped justice.

Katriuk, who came to Canada under a false name in 1951, was accused of war
crimes, the most documented of which was his participation in a the Khatyn
massacre, carried out in what is now Belarus, in early 1943. In the last years
of Katriuk’s life, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre placed his name near the top of
its list of the ten most-wanted war criminals.

Katriuk’s case first came to prominence in 1999, when a federal court ruled that
he had gained Canadian citizenship on false pretenses, because he had neglected
to inform Canadian immigration officials about his Nazi past. After a lengthy
period of deliberation, the Conservative government decided in 2007 that it
would not revoke Katriuk’s citizenship and claimed there was insufficient
evidence for him to be charged with war crimes.

Katriuk, who later joined the SS, was identified by multiple sources as being a
machine gunner at the Khatyn massacre, which occurred on 22 March 1943. A total
of 149 villagers were either burnt alive or shot by members of Battalion 118, a
volunteer auxiliary police battalion of which Katriuk was a member, with the
support of a Waffen SS unit. Evidence of his participation in other lesser known
crimes has also been documented, as mentioned in a 2012 article by Swedish
academic Per Anders Rudling.

Even in the last weeks of his life, when a Russian extradition request was
submitted for the Ukrainian-born Katriuk, a spokeswoman for the Conservative
government justified Canada’s refusal to allow Katriuk’s extradition to face
trial on the basis of the political situation in Russia and its alleged
“aggression” against Ukraine. “While I cannot comment on any specific
extradition request, to be clear, we will never accept or recognize the Russian
annexation of Crimea or the illegal occupation of any sovereign Ukrainian
territory,” a spokeswoman for then Justice Minister Peter McKay declared.

Nothing has changed under Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Anxious to cover up the
ultraright-wing character of the forces Ottawa and Washington have allied with
in their drive to harness Ukraine to western imperialism and these forces’ ties
to the Ukrainian nationalist collaborators with the Nazis, Foreign Minister
Freeland has denounced the revelations of her grandfather's ties to the Nazis as
Russian-orchestrated “disinformation.”

When Trudeau visited Ukraine in 2016, he was accompanied by a strong UCC
delegation and members of the Army SOS group, set up to procure military
equipment for the pro-Kiev volunteer militias, which are drawn overwhelmingly
from far-right, fascistic groups.

This author also recommends:

Canadian media denounces exposure of foreign minister’s grandfather as Nazi
collaborator
[18 March 2017]


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