“This war must continue — the democratic warlords and the kike capitalists behind them want it!” —Adolf Hitler, 1941. Speech reprinted in Krakow News, edited by Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather.

Earlier this week, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland — one of the most powerful people in the Canadian government — tweeted in support of Holocaust Remembrance Day. And I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to point out how cartoonishly evil and cynical that was.

It’s probably not widely known — I mean, who outside of Canada pays attention to Canadian domestic politics — but Chrystia Freeland has some serious unrepentant Nazi skeletons living in her family collaborationist closet.

A few years ago, a couple of Ukrainian Canadians discovered that Chrystia’s maternal grandfather — Michael Chomiak — was a Nazi collabo and a fascist propagandist. Among other things, he ran Krakow News, a Ukrainian-language newspaper, out of Nazi occupied Krakow, Poland.

The paper praised Hitler, ran giant ads for Ukrainian SS recruitment, spread antisemitic propaganda, pumped out vile garbage that helped justify the mass slaughter of Jews, Poles and Russians, and fully supported the war effort against the Judeo-Bolshevik and Kike Capitalist Alliance. At one point towards the end of the war, Michael Chomiak published a pro-genocide special issue that was meant to remind Ukrainians about the Jewish threat, even if most Jews had already been genocided at that point. He did all this while using a printing press that had been seized from a Jewish newspaper and while living a short train ride away from Auschwitz and a half dozen other extermination slave camps — where Jews were being butchered night and day.

Apparently Chrystia’s grandpa was well liked by his German bosses. He was pliable and sensed what could and could not be printed without having to be explicitly told.

As the Red Army advanced west and ultimately liberated Auschwitz, Chrystia’s gramps ran with the Nazis, lived in a displaced persons camp in Germany (the kind that I wrote about earlier), and ended up in Canada — where he lived out his life as a respectable intellectual and even ran a Ukrainian newspaper, which is now known as “New Pathway.” He died in 1984.

Chrystia knew this about her grandfather’s Nazi past (in fact, it was first aired in public in an obscure academic journal back in the early 1990s). Yet she has spent most of her career — first as a journalist, then as Canada’s powerful Foreign Minister, and now as as Deputy Prime Minister — praising her grandfather’s legacy and whitewashing the past.

Throughout her public life, Chrystia has consistently supported Ukrainian nationalist groups and movements. She’s also talked about how her outlook on Russia and European geopolitics has been shaped by her grandfather’s experience with the Soviet Union — which means that a Nazi collaborator’s genocidal views on Russia have informed Canada’s official foreign policy. And just to rub in how much she still agrees with grandpa’s Nazi-era politics, Chrystia never stops tweeting out her meetings with Canada’s various rebranded Ukrainian collaborationist emigre groups.

When confronted with the truth about her family’s past a few years ago, Chrystia did the classic thing: she blamed the whole thing on Russian propaganda and disinformation.

Of course, Chrystia isn’t the only Canadian with this kind of Nazi history. She grew up in a very nationalistic Ukrainian immigrant community — a big chunk of which came to Canada just like her grandfather did and which still lives in thrall of its wartime fascist collabo movements and leaders.

In short: Canada’s aggressive interventions in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union have a big domestic politics component. Many Ukrainian Canadians are apparently still itching to redo World War II — the war that they lost.

—Yasha Levine

PS: Next week I’m interviewing Alex Boykowich, one of the people who surfaced all this info about Chrystia Freeland’s grandpa in what I hope will be the start of a periodic “Immigrants as a Weapon” podcast. Listen to it here.

PPS: Read about how Chrystia Freeland is married to a New York Times Russophobic journalist. A match made in heaven!

Immigrants as a Weapon is a new investigative newsletter that looks at the weaponization of nationalism and immigrant communities. Check out this introductory post.