Far from a recent development, Canada’s celebration of the Nazi Yaroslav Hunka has deep roots. Owen Schalk surveys the history of ruling class and government support for Nazi elements among Canada’s Ukrainian populations as a means to combat the left.
Memorial to the 14th Galicia Division of the Waffen SS in St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery, Oakville, Ontario (Graham Paine/Torstar).
Canada has a Nazi problem. This should come as no surprise to readers familiar with the Yaroslav Hunka scandal, in which an unrepentant Nazi collaborator received a standing ovation from a packed House of Commons for “fighting against Russia” during World War II. Most recently, however, it has come to light that the federally funded Victims of Communism memorial in Ottawa, which allows donors to dedicate bricks to individuals they feel have been victimized by communism, is riddled with Eastern European Nazi collaborators. More than that, Library and Archives Canada is refusing to release a list of the over 900 alleged Nazi war criminals who were welcomed into Canada after the Second World War.
Developed in collaboration with the conservative non-profit Tribute to Liberty, the Canadian government claims that the Victims of Communism memorial “will recognize Canada’s international role as a place of refuge for people fleeing injustice and persecution and honor the millions who suffered under communist regimes.” The monument has been funded by successive Conservative and Liberal governments and endorsed by former NDP leader Tom Mulcair and Green Party leader Elizabeth May. This despite the fact that, according to a recent report for the Department of Canadian Heritage, more than 330 of the 553 memorial entries are dedicated to individuals linked to the Nazis.
Readers may be aware of the various Nazi statues standing in Canada right now: the bust of Holocaust perpetrator Roman Shukhevych in Edmonton, Alberta, for example, or the monument to the Ukrainian SS Galicia division in Oakville, Ontario. While these monuments are sometimes vandalized, the state never interrogates why Nazi memorials are present in Canada in the first place. Instead, police target the accused vandals for damaging private property, such as when they investigated the vandalism of the SS Galicia monument as a “hate crime” against Ukrainians.
These news stories come and go, dissipating beneath Canadian leaders’ constant assertions that Ottawa protects human rights globally and upholds an ill-defined “rules-based international order.” The deeper, disquieting reality of Ottawa’s collaboration with Nazis is rarely investigated. If it was, Canadians would find that many of their country’s leaders harbored fascist sympathies in the 1930s, and after the Second World War, they welcomed Nazis into Canada as a matter of policy designed to weaken socialist-inclined immigrant communities. The political beliefs of these Nazi collaborators continue to influence Canada to this day, as evidenced by the Hunka affair, Nazi statues across the country, and the Victims of Communism debacle.
Hunka: No Lessons Learned
The Hunka affair was an international embarrassment for Canada, but it did not provoke any sort of mainstream historical reckoning beyond a short-lived curiosity about Nazi ratlines, in particular those of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. In fact, members of the Ukrainian nationalist community in Canada continue to defend Hunka’s Nazi past.
In May 2024, Lubomyr Luciuk, a history professor at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, defended Hunka during a speech at Edmonton’s Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex. “Mr. Hunka has lived in Canada for 71 years now,” said Luciuk. “[He] is a law-abiding citizen, broke no laws, paid his taxes, raised a family, they’re productive, contributing Canadians, and for all of that, because he wanted to see President Zelenskyy and came to parliament, he was called a Nazi.” After proclaiming that Hunka is “an innocent Canadian citizen” who deserves an apology, the audience applauded.
Luciuk is not alone. During the Hunka scandal, Jurij Klufas, president of the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada (UNF), praised the Nazi veteran, stating there was nothing wrong with applauding a man “who fought for his country.” Klufas falsely claimed that Hunka’s Nazi past was “Russian disinformation.”
In the aftermath of Hunka’s visit to parliament, journalists discovered that the University of Alberta had named an endowment in his honor. More than that, another Ukrainian Nazi named Peter Savaryn had served as the university’s chancellor from 1982 to 1986. During the Second World War, Savaryn had fought with Nazi Germany against Canada’s ally, the Soviet Union, serving, like Hunka, in the voluntary SS Galicia Division. Savaryn and Hunka were just two of around 2000 SS-Galicia Division members who were welcomed into Canada after WWII.
The Nazi fighter Savaryn became an influential political figure in Alberta, serving as president of the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta and vice president of the Alberta wing of the national Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. The Governor General’s office had previously granted Savaryn the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest civilian honors.
Around the same time, a November 9, 2023 article by Conrad Sweatman revealed that the longtime director of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, a man named Ferdinand Eckhart, was a Nazi who had signed an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, polemicized in favor of Nazism, and worked at IG Farben, the company that built the Auschwitz death camp and manufactured Zyklon-B for the Nazi gas chambers. Eckhardt had received numerous honors from the Canadian government, including the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal and, like Savaryn, the Order of Canada.
And of course, there is the matter of Chrystia Freeland, the second most powerful official in Canada, being the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist named Mykhailo Chomiak. During the Second World War, Chomiak was the editor-in-chief of Krakivs’ki Visti, perhaps the Nazi Party’s leading Ukrainian-language propaganda organ. Based out of occupied Krakow, the paper was overseen by a German intelligence officer, and a friend of Chomiak, named Emil Gassner. The offices out of which Freeland’s grandfather worked had been seized from their Jewish owner, Mojżesz Kanfer, who was later murdered in the Belzec death camp in eastern Poland.
Chomiak served as the Nazi paper’s editor from 1940 to 1945, publishing violently antisemitic articles that promoted Nazi extermination programs. After the war, Chomiak settled in Alberta, where he was readily accepted into Canadian society.
Prior to Chomiak’s Nazi past becoming well-known, Freeland praised her grandfather at public forums. In 2015, she described Chomiak as a “journalist,” neglecting to mention that her grandfather’s “journalism” consisted of Nazi propaganda. “All my grandparents loved Canada,” she said, “but my Ukrainian grandfather was the most passionate.” On Black Ribbon Day – an event that falsely equates the crimes of Nazism with communism – in 2016, she tweeted a loving tribute to her grandparents, including Chomiak, claiming, “They were forever grateful to Canada for giving them refuge and they worked hard to bring freedom and democracy to Ukraine.”
In 2017, as more and more Canadians learned about her grandfather’s past, Freeland refused to acknowledge Chomiak’s participation in the Holocaust. She claimed that accusations against her Nazi collaborator grandfather were “Russian disinformation”–despite the fact that she had known about Chomiak’s Nazi activities for at least two decades.
Despite appalling revelations about prominent members of the Canadian cultural and political elite being connected to unrepentant Nazis (or being Nazis themselves), Library and Archives Canada (LAC) continues to block the release of a list containing the names of Nazis who were welcomed into Canada after World War II.
Under public pressure to release the names, LAC consulted with “members of Canada’s Ukrainian community” who informed the federal institution that naming Nazis in Canada would “embarrass” the Ukrainian community and “result in new legal action (criminal prosecution, citizen revocation, or otherwise) being brought against the individuals named in the report.” Following the consultation, LAC decided not to release the list. LAC did not consult any Holocaust survivors, who have long called for the list’s release, about its decision to keep the Nazis’ identities secret.
“Everybody knows about Argentina, but nobody knows about Canada”
The Canadian government welcomed thousands of Nazi war criminals into Canada after 1945, intending to use them as weapons against the left. The Canadian Jewish Congress condemned the government’s embrace of Nazi collaborators, while a New York Times headline labelled Canada a “Haven for Nazi Criminals.” In 1997, war crimes investigator and private detective Steven Rambam said, “Canada is where the Nazis are. Canada is the unknown haven for Nazis. Everybody knows about Argentina, but nobody knows about Canada.”
While the Canadian government welcomed thousands of Nazis into the country, the RCMP simultaneously watched, intimidated, and harassed labor activists and Communist Party affiliates. Nazis, particularly Ukrainian Nazi collaborators, proved to be useful tools for Canadian capitalists who wanted to break the backs of the labor movement in the Eastern European diaspora, as William Gillies explains:
Immigrants…were granted entry specifically because their [Nazi] collaborationist pasts made them useful in crushing left-wing organizing in Ukrainian Canadian communities. Collaborators assumed control of community organizations, some of which were transferred to them by the federal government, having seized them from socialist groups during the war. The process was often quite violent… All of these actions were condoned by the Canadian state in the name of anti-communism.
The Ukrainian Canadian community was a prime target of the state due to its broadly leftist sympathies and organizational strength. Canadian authorities sought to repress these Ukrainians even before the 1930s. In 1918, for instance, Ottawa banned the left-wing Ukrainian Social Democratic Party (USDP) and arrested several of its leaders. Following the repression of the USDP, the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) emerged as a hub for progressive Ukrainian Canadian organizing, but soon the state tried to smash this group too. Following the passing of the Defence of Canada Regulations in 1940, authorities outlawed the ULFTA, interned numerous members, seized the organization’s presses, and destroyed its libraries, as described in the book This Is Our Land: Ukrainian Canadians Against Hitler by Canadian Jewish journalist Raymond Arthur Davies.
With ULFTA leaders interned and their property seized or destroyed, the Canadian state sold confiscated labour temples to its preferred segment of the Ukrainian community: the small but growing right-wing, which was in many cases vocally pro-Nazi.
Repressing the Ukrainian Left
The early wave of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada largely belonged to the peasant class, and in their countries of origin many participated in political movements advocating for progressive causes. These were the immigrants who became active in the labor movement and left-wing organizing in Canada, forming groups like the USDP and the ULFTA (the ULFTA changed its name to the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, or AUUC, following government repression).
Later upheavals in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Austria led to a new wave of Ukrainian immigration: deeply nationalist and anti-Soviet, they became a useful weapon for the Canadian state in its political repression of the Ukrainian left.
Through the 1920s to 1940s, there were three major Ukrainian Canadian organizations: on the left, the ULFTA (later AUUC); on the monarchist right, the United Hetman Organizations; and on the fascist-supporting right, the UNF. As University of Toronto historian Kassandra Luciuk writes, “Many nationalists…endorsed a culture of Völkisch-ness, martial worship, strict religious adherence, corporatism, common language, and hierarchies of race, class, and gender. In Europe, the largest organizational manifestation of such politics was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).” The OUN–which had ties to the Canadian UNF–was a right-wing terrorist group that declared its loyalty to the Nazis during WWII and participated in numerous massacres of Jews and Poles during the Holocaust.
In the 1920s and 1930s, various OUN fighters paid visits to right-wing Ukrainian Canadian organizations, as a newsletter of the Ukrainian Sharpshooters Society outlines: “In 1929 Col. Eugene Konowaletz visited us; in 1931 O. Hrybiwski; in 1932 Melnychuk and Sushko; in 1935-36 Gen. Kapustianski; this year (1937) Gen. Kurmanovich and O. Hrybiwski.”1 Many of these men would go on to become prominent Nazi collaborators. On their visits to Canadian cities, they were welcomed into halls owned by Ukrainian nationalists, celebrated by the UNF, and given donations for OUN operations.
Through its magazine The New Pathway, the UNF spread antisemitic propaganda and called for Ukrainian Canadians to support the Axis powers. “As to the role of Germany as our ally, there is a general agreement,” asserted The New Pathway. “In Germany we see our most natural and powerful ally.” Even while Canada was at war with Germany, the UNF’s mouthpiece continued to praise Hitler’s regime. Following the German invasion of the USSR, in which 4.5 million Ukrainians fought to repel the Nazi advance, The New Pathway proclaimed: “The Ukrainian masses are welcoming the German invasion with the words: ‘Let it be the Germans but not the Red Muscovites.’”
Following the seizure of a ULFTA printing press in Winnipeg, the Canadian government turned it over to the UNF to print pro-Nazi material of this kind. Other prominent halls and properties were sold to right-wing Ukrainian organizations: the Ukrainian hall on Euclid Avenue in Winnipeg, the Toronto Labour Temple, the labour temple in Crowland, Ontario, and more.
After banning the ULFTA, Ottawa supported the creation of the right-wing Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), of which the UNF and monarchists were founding members. “In addition to giving the government direct access to Ukrainians and their affairs,” writes Kassandra Luciuk, “the UCC would serve as a vigilant watchdog against communism.” Even today, the Canadian government treats the UCC as the singular voice of Ukrainian Canadians.
Unlike many communities throughout Canadian history, including Jewish people during the Holocaust, Ukrainian Nazis were given easy entry into Canada. According to Holocaust historian Irving Abella, showing an SS tattoo was a surefire way to be accepted, as the tattoo proved one was “reliably anticommunist.”
State-backed Violence
Kassandra Luciuk’s essay “‘They Will Crack Heads When the Communist Line Is Expounded”: Anti-Communist Violence in Cold War Canada,” provides further documentation and analysis of Canadian authorities’ collaboration with Ukrainian Nazis after WWII.2
In lobbying the Canadian government to accept more right-wing Ukrainian immigrants, the UCC assured Ottawa that “these displaced persons if assisted to settle in Canada would spearhead the movement and combat communism since they are victims of its menace.” This policy quickly bore fruit: in Timmins, Ontario, dozens of new arrivals beat two communist organizers for being “no good.” Soon an alliance formed between employers, the UCC, and the RCMP, all of whom had an interest in suppressing the Ukrainian left.
At the same time, RCMP spies joined Ukrainians on their worksites, where the undercover operatives distributed right-wing literature, delivered lectures, and persuaded new arrivals to avoid communist-backed unions and instead join the safe, moderate unions that had been vetted by the government. By and large, the state’s plan succeeded. Acting RCMP commissioner Stuart Wood described the new arrivals as “brilliant men who do not want any more of communism and are very thankful to be in Canada.” The Canadian press was excited too. A Globe and Mail editorial wrote approvingly that the new Ukrainian immigrants “will crack heads when the communist line is expounded.”
And heads were cracked. In November 1948, a bomb exploded inside the Edmonton Labour Temple. Later that month, an AUUC gathering in Saskatoon was attacked by protestors who vandalized the city’s temple. And in December 1949, AUUC member William Terecio came to Val-d’Or, Québec to speak about a recent trip to the Soviet Union. Government-backed nationalists descended on the event.
As soon as Terecio began his talk, twenty angry [nationalists] armed with sticks, stones, and bottles stood up at the back of the hall and charged at him…The mob was eventually removed, but they were not done for the night. After regrouping at their own hall just down the road, they decided to kidnap Terecio and drop him on the outskirts of town – a potential death sentence in the frigid December temperatures of northern Québec. But upon their return, the Labour Temple was dark. Terecio, who had fled town in the trunk of a car just minutes earlier, was nowhere to be found. Unsatisfied by the prospect of letting him off the hook, the group divided themselves into smaller teams to search and patrol the neighborhood.
As violence against the Ukrainian left intensified, the AUUC appealed to Minister of Justice Garson for help. The organization warned that unless the government intervened, the nationalists would take Ottawa’s silence as support. Garson forwarded the appeal to RCMP Commissioner Wood, who dismissed it outright. He replied that right-wingers had the right to confront leftists, that the nationalists were useful for “combatting the domestic left,” and besides, the attack was possibly a “false flag” anyway.
Assured of Canadian government backing, the right-wing violence increased. On October 16, 750 people attacked popular AUUC leader Peter Krawchuk during a speech at the Labour Temple in Winnipeg. A sixteen-year-old AUUC member was hospitalized after nationalists kicked him repeatedly in the head. Following the attack, AUUC provincial secretary Anthony Bileski demanded an inquiry into the perpetrators of the violence and, importantly, into the police as well. The city defeated the motion for a public inquiry fourteen to three, with one conservative alderman blaming the left for the violence, claiming “where there are communists there is likely to be agitation and strife.”
The inquiry into the riot did proceed, but it was led by a member of the Subversive Squad, Winnipeg’s secretive anti-communist police. In his report, the officer stated that “he did not believe” the nationalists “had done anything wrong.” The final report concluded that the AUUC was responsible for the violence and there was no evidence to prosecute anyone for the beating of the sixteen-year-old. The Winnipeg Tribune newspaper cheered the verdict, claiming that the left was “creating disturbances in various countries in accordance with their general policy of fostering strife and chaos.” The AUUC responded that the police had given “a green light to hooliganism in this city, so long as it is committed in the name of anti-communism.”
Politically Motivated Policing
Before the next event in Val-d’Or, AUUC members approached the police and requested the presence of a uniformed constable. The police denied their request. Unsurprisingly, when Krawchuk arrived at the hall to deliver his speech, a group of nationalists began banging on the door. Police arrived but promptly left, abandoning the people inside. Later, the officers claimed the attackers “were not committing any crimes” and “it was not the duty of police to intervene in disputes on private property.”
Once the police left, the [attackers] began throwing bricks and coal through the windows and eventually tore a railing from the front steps to use as a battering ram…Terrified women and children rushed through the emergency exits into the darkened streets, not knowing if the mob awaited them…Thomas Kremyr, who was unlucky enough to be standing in the foyer when the assault began, was dragged down the front stairs and beaten. His wife ran to his defence, but she was whipped with sticks and bottles. After several minutes the couple were pulled to safety, but Kremyr’s injuries were serious. Unconscious, he was taken to the hospital with internal bleeding and several broken bones.
Local union member Donald Mackenzie was hospitalized with a spinal injury. A sixteen-year-old suffered a severe cut to the head. When a woman across the street called the police and reported injuries in the hall, the officer told her “those people have to look after themselves.”
“All the while,” writes Kassandra Luciuk, “the newspapers…were flooded with articles that curiously mirrored the line propagated by the UCC, government officials, and the security service.” Articles claimed that the left had attacked first and that their injuries were faked or their own fault. “New Canadians came to hear Krawchuk’s speech,” wrote the Northern Daily News, “and he responded by creating trouble…”
Next year, a bomb exploded during a Thanksgiving concert held by the AUUC at its Toronto Labour Temple. Roughly 1000 people had gathered for the event. The bomb blew out the windows and shot railway spikes into the crowd. AUUC member Peter Prokop blamed members of the SS Galicia division, newly welcomed into Canada by immigration authorities, for the bombing. The UCC responded by falsely claiming there were no SS Galicia veterans in Canada. When the presence of Ukrainian Nazis in Canada was confirmed, the UCC claimed that “participation in the [SS] division had been coerced in every instance and did not necessarily correlate with radical beliefs”–a statement that mirrors the justifications of Ukrainian Canadian nationalists today.
The investigation into the bombing was led by anti-communist Red Squad members and famous labor spy John Leopold. Despite promising leads, the investigation went nowhere. In one case, investigators spoke to an accused Nazi collaborator named Dmytro Dontsov who had no alibi for the day of the bombing. However, RCMP leadership dismissed the accusations against him as “communist propaganda.” No charges were ever laid and case files remain hidden behind a wall of censorship. This points to an important reality of Cold War Canada. As Kassandra Luciuk puts it, “The laxity with which the police, courts, security service, and government responded to these ongoing incidents demonstrates how, in the early years of the Cold War, law and justice were mutable and unevenly enforced depending on the political orientation of those involved.”
In short, during the 1930s and 1940s, the Canadian state helped right-wing Ukrainian nationalists increase their influence over the diaspora, including by supporting violent attacks on the Ukrainian left. By openly siding with the right-wing Ukrainian community, the Canadian state stoked intercommunal violence and helped silence the Ukrainian left, leading the nationalists to violently assert control over the major diaspora organizations in Canada–a situation that remains to this day.
A Canadian Tradition
The Hunka affair, the Victims of Communism fiasco, and continued secrecy around Nazis in Canada are consequences of Ottawa’s domestic and international anti-communist policies, which included the violent repression of progressive Ukrainian Canadians. People like Hunka, Peter Savaryn, Ferdinand Eckhardt, and Mykhailo Chomiak were not anomalies. They were welcomed into Canada specifically for their politics, which the Canadian state viewed as a useful weapon against left-wing organizations and ideas.
Despite the state’s largely effective efforts to portray Canada as a benevolent force on the world stage, the government’s complicity with Nazi collaborators goes back decades. From the state’s Cold War weaponization of far-right immigrants, to the defence of Nazi statues, to the honouring of figures like Hunka, Savaryn, Eckhardt, and Chomiak, it is a long Canadian tradition, and it is past time that Canadians and the world at large recognize this disturbing element of Canada’s past and present.
- This quote, and excerpts from The New Pathway, are taken from Raymond Arthur Davies, This Is Our Land: Ukrainian Canadians Against Hitler (Toronto: Progress Publishing Co., 1943).
- Sources and quotes in the following two sections are borrowed from Luciuk unless otherwise stated. See: Kassandra Luciuk, “‘They Will Crack Heads When the Communist Line is Expounded’: Anti-Communist Violence in Cold War Canada,” Labour/Le Travail 90 (November 2022): 149-178.