Why Canada's Deputy Prime Minister Freeland Is Silent on the Nazi Yaroslav Hunka

Sept. 28, 2023, (EIRNS)—In the matter of the Ukrainian Nazi Waffen-SS soldier Yaroslav Hunka being celebrated last week in Canada’s Parliament, and the mystery as to how he came to the attention of the Parliament as the man to be celebrated for the visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Chrystia Freeland, a deputy prime minister of Canada, has curiously kept silent. However, she knows Canada’s Ukrainian population better than any other politician, and she’s closer to Zelenskyy, their guest, than any other in Ottawa. Further, and little realized, it was her Ukrainian grandfather, working for the Nazis, who had his own role in recruiting Hunka in 1943 to join the Nazis’ Ukrainian Waffen-SS Division. He was the editor of the Krakivski Visti (Krakow News) that put out the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) call in 1943 for Ukrainians to join the Waffen-SS division; Hunka writes that he joined based upon that UCC instruction.

Freeland, an activist Canadian MP who joined the Maidan demonstration in January 2014, says of her grandfather, né Mykhailo Khomiak (who anglicized his name to Michael Chomiak when he emigrated to Canada), that he knew the Russians were coming in 1939, so he left so that he could work for a democratic Ukraine. She doesn’t mention that left to go for the Nazi headquarters in Krakow, where he was hired to run the Krakivski Visti (Krakow News), the unofficial public voice for the UCC. He worked for Nazi propagandist Emil Gassner, who reported to the infamous Nazi Governor-General in Poland Hans Frank, later executed at Nuremberg for his war crimes.

Freeland’s defender, Lubomyr Luciuk, explains that “Minister Freeland is being pilloried over the unproven wartime misconduct of her grandfather, an editor at Krakivski Visti.” And Luciuk testifies: “Years ago, another journalist told me the paper’s editors had no affinity for Nazi aims but used their positions to sustain the Ukrainian resistance.” One might assume that Luciuk had done more than take another’s word for the intentions of Chomiak, that he had looked at what Chomiak was actually doing for the Nazis, before pronouncing that there was no proof for the “wartime misconduct.” Let’s see what the clever Chomiak did, supposedly to fool the Nazis, in his newspaper:

June 18, 1941, four days before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, he published “The Jewish Problem in Ukraine,” where one learns that Jews turn Ukrainians into alcoholics, they “blessed the Verkhovina highlanders with syphilis and made them their slaves.” It “prophesied” that “the Jews will be crushed like a bunch of parasitic worms.” The mass liquidations of Ukrainian Jews began 12 days later.

June 22, 1941, the day of the invasion, he published “At This Significant Hour,” by Volodymyr Kubijovych, the head of the Ukrainian Central Committee:

“The 22nd of June, 1941, is a day of tremendous import, in that it marks a long-awaited turning point in our history. On orders from the Führer of the Great German People, his armed forces set off toward the East, headed for that kingdom of darkness and Jewish-Bolshevik degeneration.”

July 15, 1941: While the mass killings are spreading through Ukraine, the article “All Juda” explained that

“the postwar [World War I] depression was the result of the plans and intrigues of the Jews. Even though the guilt of the Yids had been proven and made clear to one and all, no one could think of any radical way of removing that inherent cause of the past catastrophic fiascoes once and for all. Quite recently, Chancellor Adolf Hitler outlined a clear program of action in regard to the Jewish problem.... This war will signify a catastrophic downfall of the All-Juda as the destroyer of the world system.”

July 27, 1941: He published “The Bloody Stain of the All-Juda”: “A lethal blow has been dealt the world’s Jewry. The ‘knights of Jerusalem’ with their hooked noses and lop ears ... are receiving their just rewards today. The destiny of the Jews in the Ukraine and the whole of Europe has been revised once and for all.”

Nov. 6, 1941: After four months of mass killings: “There is not a single one left in Kiev today, while there were 350,000 under the Bolsheviks.” The Jews “got their comeuppance.”

Chomiak also published from the series by Julian Tarnovych’s “Out of Satan’s Claws,” in which Jews were regularly termed “Yid mob,” “bastards,” “rotten scum,” “bacillus,” “riffraff—that nest of crawling kikes” and “a pile of writhing worms.” There is no lack of evidence of Chomiak’s role in inciting blind racial hatred. It is not clear whether Luciuk knows what he would find, or whether he even bothered to look.

In 1944, as the Soviet army approached, Gassner took Chomiak to Vienna to keep publishing. Chomiak left with the retreating Nazi army in 1945, surrendering to the Americans in Bavaria. He was placed with his family in a special U.S. military intelligence facility, and in May 1948, the Chomiaks moved to Canada. He became the editor of the Edmonton Catholic paper. His daughter was Chrystia Freeland’s mother.

Freeland, when her grandfather’s past is brought up, simply screams “Russian disinformation!” Her grandfather’s sins don’t have to be carried by her, but her present lies and cover-ups make for a hidden life that easily infects public service with an irrational Russophobia. Otherwise, it is also the case that Yaroslav Hunka would admire, amongst all Canadian politicians, Freeland—Canada’s highest-level and staunchest defender of a Ukraine being used to throw itself up against Russia, then and now.