Canadian government ‘open door policy’ for Nazis

Trudeau government in Canada refuses to release the names of 900 Nazi war criminals, for fear it would damage NATO-Ukraine war on Russia, writes ‘The Defend Democracy’.

In defiance of the demands of historians, Holocaust survivors and public opinion, Canada’s Liberal government is suppressing an almost four-decade-old secret report that identified some 900 Nazi war criminals who had lived, or were then living, in Canada.

This outrageous decision is motivated by fear that the exposure of the identities of the Nazis and Nazi collaborators would damage the NATO-instigated war on Russia over Ukraine.

Supporters of the report’s suppression have justified it in the name of countering “Russian disinformation.” What a fraud!

It is the Canadian state that is burying the truth. It fears exposure of Canadian three-quarters-of-a-century-long alliance with the Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis in the commission of monstrous crimes, including the Holocaust, during their self-proclaimed “war of annihilation” against the Soviet Union.

This alliance continues — indeed, it is even more important today — with the Canadian state and ruling class closely collaborating with the political-ideological descendants of the Nazis’ Ukrainian accomplices in both Canada and Ukraine.

The Liberal government’s actions shed critical light on the predatory aims motivating Canadian support for the war and the fascistic character of the political forces it is employing to prosecute it. Ottawa has provided over $12 billion in support, including at least $4 billion in military aid, to the fascistic Zelensky regime in Kiev since Russia’s reactionary, US-NATO-provoked 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky’s government rules like a dictatorship, venerates far-right Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera — whose supporters, at his instructions, participated in the Holocaust — and has imprisoned socialist opponents of the imperialist-backed war that has already claimed the lives of half-a-million or more Ukrainians.

The decision not to release the names of the 900 persons identified in a secret annex to the final report of the government-appointed Deschenes Commission into War Criminals in Canada was taken after closed door “consultations with a discrete group of stakeholders” last summer and fall. These “stakeholders,” according to a government press release, included “officials from a range of departments” including Global Affairs Canada, which coordinates Canadian imperialism’s trade, foreign affairs and military interventions.

They also included the far-right Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) which has advocated for Nazi collaborators since 1946. Created with state support in 1940, the UCC promoted anti-communism and far-right Ukrainian nationalism during the Cold War. Over the past decade, it has played an even more prominent role, working hand-in-glove with Ottawa in politically preparing and rallying support for the Ukraine war.

The UCC fought tooth and nail in the 1980s to prevent the Deschenes Commission from investigating the presence of Nazi collaborators in Canada. The Canadian government rewarded them with an official role at the Commission, where they made every effort to stymie its proceedings.

The Commission released a sanitized Report in 1986, which amounted to a state cover-up. While the second part of the report, which was kept secret, identified 900 of the most infamous Nazis and Nazi collaborators, it denied that Canada had systematically provided safe haven for Nazi war criminals and collaborators as a matter of state policy. Deschenes tartly dismissed the charge that thousands of them had found refuge in Canada “as grossly exaggerated.”

Last September, the UCC sent a fundraising circular to members requesting funds to sue the government in order to prevent the declassification of the secret annex. The names contained in the Report likely include hundreds of Ukrainian Canadians, veterans of the infamous 14th Galician Division of the Waffen SS, and supporters of the notorious fascists Stepan Bandera and Andrei Melnyk, two rival leaders of the OUN, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (banned in Russia). Many of those named likely directly participated in the Holocaust of European Jewry.

Holocaust survivors and their advocates were shut out of these discussions.

If the names of the 900 Nazis were released, Canada would face a repeat, on an exponentially larger scale, of the political scandal that erupted after the House of Commons, led by Prime Minister Trudeau, gave a unanimous standing ovation to the 96 year-old Waffen-SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka in September 2023. Hunka, who volunteered to fight for Hitler’s Third Reich, was hailed as a Ukrainian “hero, who fought the Russians in WWII.” Hunka was invited to Parliament as a guest of honour by the Prime Minister’s Office, on the advice of influential UCC supporters, to listen to a war mongering speech of Zelensky.

Hunka being applauded by the dignitaries in the House of Commons gallery. Canada’s then Chief of Defence Staff General Wayne Eyre is on the far left.
Photo: AP

Beginning in 1947, only two years after the end of World War II, the Canadian state began to admit known Nazi war criminals and collaborators to act as an anti-communist vanguard against the working class. Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent wrote in a personal message to the Minister of Labour in 1948 that the fascists were “people who have demonstrated that they are free men and are on our side of the line in the fight against Communism.”

The 900 names contained in the Deschenes Commission Part II Report are those of hardened Nazis against whom the federal Government gathered evidence in advance of prosecutions which were never pursued. But these 900 names are merely the tip of an enormous iceberg, consisting of tens of thousands of lesser-known fascists and collaborators from various Eastern European countries.

The 14th Waffen SS Galician Division, two thousand or more of whose members ultimately found refuge in Canada, was formed in 1943 at the urging of the Ukrainian Central Committee, a branch of the OUN-Melnyk, which was entirely a puppet of the “General Government” in Nazi-ruled Poland. The Committee’s newspaper, Krakivski Visti, employed Mikhail Chomiak — the grandfather of Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s Deputy Prime and Finance Minister till her high-profile resignation last month — as its managing editor, in charge of the paper’s relations with its Nazi sponsors. The Division is implicated in the mass murder of Poles, Jews and Slovak partisans. It surrendered to the Allies in 1945, only days after cynically re-branding itself the “First Division of the Ukrainian National Army,” in a vain effort at concealment. Many of the unit’s soldiers joined after previously serving in collaborationist special police battalions which carried out the Holocaust in Ukraine from 1941 to 1942.

The UCC has fought relentlessly to whitewash the crimes of the Nazi’s Ukrainian accomplices, recasting the UPA, which carried put well-documented mass slaughters of Poles and Jews as “freedom fighters.” This includes the lie that the UPA “fought both the Nazis and the Soviets.” In reality, just 6 percent of OUN/UPA (banned in Russia) casualties can be attributed to skirmishes with the Nazis. The vast majority were killed fighting the Soviets.

These are the social elements whose crimes the UCC and the Canadian state seeks to cover-up, whitewash and politically excuse; for whom the Canadian state rolled out its welcome mat after World War II so as to use them as instrument of its Cold War policy; and with whose political descendants Canadian imperialism is working in close concert today.

This is why the demand must be forcefully raised for the immediate release of the names of the 900 people the Deschenes Commission identified as Nazi war criminals and for full disclosure of all the evidence against them and all files relating to their entry to Canada and subsequent ties to the Canadian state, ‘The Defend Democracy’ stresses.

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