Chrystia Freeland's Dark Nazi Past

It's simply not possible that she didn't know who she was clapping for. Because her family members served directly under the same Ukrainian Nazi division.

The world watched on weeks ago, stunned as the entirety of Canada’s parliament, including Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, delivered a grandiose standing ovation to First Ukrainian Division World War II (WWII) veteran Yaroslav Hunka, along with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was in attendance at the event as the guest of honour. The grave error was evidently first discovered by Ivan Katchanovksi, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa. “These are photos of SS Galicia Division veteran who was given standing ovation by Canadian parliament, Prime Minister of Canada and president of Ukraine. He published these photos of himself in in this division during training in Germany,” he messaged. That was the first public indication that something was amiss. A shame, because it should have been caught before it happened, but now the moment will unfortunately live on in Canadian history in infamy.

The scandal quickly gathered momentum from there, eventually culminating in the resignation of House Speaker Anthony Rota after a rushed convening of party leaders, who had been tasked with introducing the unusual guest seated in the gallery during Zelenskyy’s historic visit. Rota had described Hunka to an enraptured audience in his speech as a “veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians,” further adding that he was “a Ukrainian hero.” Hunka, a 98-year-old who is still active in the Ukranian community, received a thunderous round of applause from all in attendance in return. Imagine the shock when it was realized that the soldier had fought in the First Ukrainian Division, or the First Galicia Division - also priorly known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel (SS) of the Nazi party.

It was one of many foreign units formed under the broader umbrella of the elite Waffen-SS during WWII, separate from the German forces but still loyal to the Nazi party, having sworn allegiance to Adolf Hitler. The First Ukrainian Division was crafted in part by Heinrich Himmler, largely acknowledged as being a chief architect of the Holocaust. “Your homeland has become more beautiful since you have lost - on our initiative, I must say - the residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name - namely the Jews,” said Himmler to his Ukrainian troops in a 1944 speech. “I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles, I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.” And, tragically, they did.

Waffen-SS troops, the combat units of the paramilitary SS organization, were credited as being a main force in the extermination of Jewish descendants, in addition to carrying out mass executions of Poles and Slovaks. Nuremberg trials later deemed that simply belonging to an SS unit was a criminal act in and of itself, so horrific were the crimes.

Canada curiously received an outsized proportion of First Ukrainian Division soldiers following the end of the war – in part because it was not a signatory of the Nuremberg Charter. While official Canadian immigration policy was to reject the applications of former SS members, the Canadian Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes conducted its own tribunals in 1986, and decided to honor a cabinet-level exemption extended to the Ukrainian unit in 1950, concluding that “Charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia Division have never been substantiated.” This spectacular foreign policy failure understandably resulted in Canada becoming a safe haven for war criminals, and an influx of Galician war veterans with questionable histories. The leniency would come back to haunt them, as former SS-Waffen members who were accepted into Canada under these compassionate grounds would be held responsible for bombing a Ukrainian temple in Toronto in a horrific Thanksgiving attack in 1950.

The decision to extend exemptions to the First Galicia Division was controversial and fiercely opposed at the time, particularly by Jewish groups, but the soldiers were given a pass, painted by sympathizers as nothing more than loyal separatists dedicated to fighting the Soviets. They therefore were not to be thought of as “true” Nazi collaborators, or that was the argument anyways, but instead as proud Ukrainian nationalists, despite their avid widespread participation on a volunteer basis in the Holocaust.

Indeed, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland ironically referred to them as heroic “freedom fighters” in her early writing years, as noted by journalist Richard Saunders in an article describing his demoralizing battle against domestic Nazism. “Apparently, I spread the Russian virus by exposing how Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s journalism career began with jobs for publications promoting the WWII Ukrainian Waffen SS Galicia as heroic ‘freedom fighters,’” he quipped at the time. The manipulation of truth into baseless accusations which may be dismissed under the broad banner of “Russian disinformation” is a troubling, recurring theme that will be revisited later.

A footnote in a book authored by one Dr. Myroslav Shkandrij, titled ‘In The Maelstrom: The Waffen-SS “Galicia” Division and Its Legacy’ vigorously defends Freeland, and Shkandrij stresses in it that he feels the statements against Freeland made by author Richard Saunders in the military magazine ‘Espirit de Corps,’ were “malicious” and “defamatory” in intent. He also assumes the position in his writings that the Galicia Division veterans volunteered under the assumption that it was the only way they could possibly defeat Russian Bolshevism and achieve true independence. This apologetic behaviour, characteristic of Nazi-sympathizers, makes complete sense when you fully understand the background, and that Shkandrij is Chrystia Freeland’s uncle by marriage. Which brings us to our next oddity.

The stunning display of seeing an “actual Nazi” – a term that was trending for days on social media – embraced and celebrated in unison in the House of Commons, seemingly without little thought or question to his background, remains shocking to the public, parliamentarians, advocacy groups, and our allies alike, even prompting extradition calls from a senior Polish government official. It has also brought to the forefront old concerns regarding the Government of Canada’s longstanding relationships with fascist Ukrainian separatists that fought against the Russians during WWII – that of course meaning they were then also fighting against the allied forces, including Canada. One could almost feel bad for Speaker Rota, as a flicker of hesitation was seen during his speech in retrospect, presumably at the moment he realized that if Hulka was fighting the Russians, he wasn’t fighting for us.

While Chrystia Freeland’s familial ties to the Nazi party have been well-documented in many articles, but most notably by journalist David Pugliese, another writer mentioned by Shkandrij in his defense of Freeland, and Robert Fife, it seems they were not documented fully. The Chomiak-Freeland connection was vehemently denied by Chrystia, who naturally suggested the claims were part of a Russian disinformation campaign. “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper,” blasted one Globe and Mail headline. And it wasn’t disinformation at all. It was true. Whether he could be considered a “collaborator” or an “actual Nazi” per se for working at the publication is up for debate. But her connections to Nazis don’t end there.

A post on social media surfaced several days after the Nazi scandal first broke, by Moss Robeson, a writer based in New York, claiming that the author of the aforementioned book, Dr. Myroslav Shkandrij, was Chrystia Freeland’s uncle. Brief online searches revealed this little-known fact proved to be correct. Another post stated that “Minister of Foreign Affairs @cafreeland is in #Raddison riding tonight to help honour her uncle Dr. Myroslav Shkandrij w/ #OsvitaFoundation.” Freeland is pictured in the message, and an additional one shows her uncle Shkandrij at the same event with members of the Osvita Foundation, being celebrated at a dinner as a guest of honour.

Obituary notices for Halyna Chomiak-Freeland, Chrystia Freeland’s mother, also detail that Halyna’s sister (therefore Chrystia’s aunt) was Natalka Chomiak, who then married a Myroslav Shkandrij, making him the now-Deputy PM’s uncle. Fact check on Shkandrij being a part of Freeland’s family: true.

The interesting part is yet to come, however. Robeson claimed that Shkandrij’s father himself was a veteran of the Ukrainian Galicia Division, the very same one which created an international uproar and prompted outrage and condemnation after being honoured in Canadian parliament. “Listening to Chrystia Freeland's uncle Myroslav Shkandrij lecture Canadian Banderites on "The Myth - The Legend - The Reality" of the "Galicia Division" (Ukrainian Waffen-SS), which his father enlisted in,” it reads. That is, that Chrystia Freeland’s uncle’s father (who could loosely be referred to as relative by marriage, but not blood), was an SS soldier as well. An actual Nazi.

University of Manitoba archives hold limited records of the Shkandrij lineage. A Myroslav Shkandrij is listed as being born in 1950, fathered by Borys Shkandrij in England after he was released from a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Italy in 1949. Myroslav’s biography, given on the University of Manitoba’s website, details that Dr. Shkandrij was born on March 17, 1950, in England. No mention is made of his relation to Freeland. He holds the title of being a distinguished Professor Emeritus for the Department of German and Slavic studies, as an expert scholar in his field and the author of several books and many papers. And it would appear, according to the same files, that his father was for a time a POW for serving in the Ukrainian Division Galicia, giving further credence to the online posts claiming such.

The clue to cementing the ties come from Myroslav’s own writings. “My father volunteered for the [Galicia] Division and was sent for officer training before he joined the force in Slovakia in late 1944. While in a British internment camp in Rimini he began publishing poetry under the pseudonym Bohdan Bora. My mother Olga (née Poloziuk) was from a part of the Donetsk oblast that is presently under Russian occupation. As a teenager she was sent as an Ostarbeiter (slave labourer) to work on a German farm for two years. My parents married in the UK in 1949. The Division is a contentious topic that has been the subject of polemics for several decades. Debates have taken place over what motivated individuals to join the Waffen-SS, war crimes they may have committed, their relationship to the Holocaust, and their release from POW camps in 1949.”

Bohdan Bora, the pseudonym used by Myroslav’s father to write Ukrainian poetry while serving time in a POW camp, is listed as being the pen name for Borys Shkandrij on the rare book sites that still sell his works. The same Borys that, according again to the University of Manitoba documents, volunteered for the Ukrainian Galicia Division. The archives confirm Myroslav’s preface: that his father had married Olga (née Poloziuk) before joining the Waffen-SS and training in Germany; afterwards being held in POW camps in Rimini until 1949 before passing away in Leeds, England. Another son, Myroslav’s sibling, Oleh is mentioned, but there is no note of what became of him. And this is the side of Freeland’s family that we never knew about. A side with “actual” Nazis.

Even if we, for argument’s sake, take the statements of the Liberal MPs now facing heavy fire at face value, and operate on the assumption that none of them possess even the most basic, rudimentary knowledge of WWII; that they were indeed ignorant of who they welcomed into the House of Commons, of who they clapped and cheered for – is it really reasonable to deduct, based on this, that Chrystia Freeland wasn’t aware? That Freeland, the ultimate Ukrainian nationalist, revered for her supposed brainpower and vast swaths of Slavic knowledge, recognized for her historical understanding of Ukraine, didn’t know what the hell was going on? After all - her family member by marriage served in the same Ukrainian Waffen-SS Division. The one that committed unspeakable acts.

She must have known. It’s impossible that she didn’t. Yet, she still beamed and clapped away.