Marcus Kolga
By Richard Sanders
Readers of Esprit de Corps know Scott Taylor as an outspoken columnist whose trajectory can be controversial. His on-course opposition to Nazis, their collaborators and apologists, in Canada and abroad, should not be contentious, especially to members and veterans of Canada’s armed forces.
But when Taylor stood up against the glorification of Nazi SS divisions by modern governments in Eastern Europe he took flak from some, including an Estonian-Canadian activist, Marcus Kolga. As a senior fellow of the right-wing MacDonald-Laurier Institute, Kolga targeted Taylor saying he’d “mischaracterized Ukrainian and Baltic freedom fighters who resisted Soviet occupation as Nazis.” To Kolga, this branded Taylor guilty of spreading the “virus” of “a particularly popular Kremlin narrative.”
Kolga’s report, Stemming the Virus, on “the threat of Russian disinformation,” also fired at Esprit de Corps, which, he chastened, “frequently echoes the anti-NATO views common on pro-Russian websites.”
I should disclose that Kolga’s report also aimed epithets at my research, which he filed under “pro-Kremlin media and trolls.” 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.” Not knowing I’d be besmirched by Kolga, I posted, in March 2017, a wealth of evidence (still unreported by mainstream media) proving that Freeland and her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, the Nazi news propagandist, had both worked for the same far-right, Ukrainian-Canadian publications in Edmonton.
One of these, The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, was the postwar brainchild of Volodymyr Kubijovych. As a top Ukrainian coordinator of Nazi collaboration, Kubijovych pushed the Germans to set up the SS Galicia and oversaw Chomiak’s work, which included publishing his call for Ukrainians to volunteer for this Nazi division.
As a teen, Freeland landed two Canadian government summer jobs writing for Kubijovych’s encyclopedia. It romanticises ethnic-cleansing Ukrainian fascists as ethical anticommunists and whitewashes their complicity in the genocide of Jews, Poles, Roma and communist partisans who were backing the Red Army.
Visiting Edmonton, Chomiak’s wartime boss signed over his encyclopedia to a government-funded Ukrainian research centre at the University of Alberta, whose chancellor, Peter Savaryn, was a proud veteran of the Ukrainian Waffen SS and a leader of nationalist Ukrainian organizations. The Governor General subsequently awarded Savaryn the Order of Canada for volunteering with these Ukrainian groups.
As an apologist for Estonians who welcomed Nazi forces as liberators, Marcus Kolga cheerleads NATO and praises today’s SS-revering European regimes. But they are victims, he says, “targeted by Kremlin aggression.”
There is a hearty tradition of vilifying antifascists by disparaging them with offensive insults. Let’s illustrate this with a chapter from the history of the Estonian Central Council (ECC) in Canada, which Kolga served as president from 2016 to 2020.
The ECC claims to oppose those two arch-rivals, Nazism and Communism, which it falsely equates as twin evils equally to blame for WWII. But since its creation in 1954, the ECC has only aimed its fire at Reds. This, after all, was the fixation of Nazi collaborators and supporters who created and led the ECC through the Cold War until the present.
In 1964, the ECC’s vice president was a German-Estonian named Karl Eerme. An embedded war correspondent for the Nazi-led Estonian SS, Lieutenant Eerme landed in a post-war US POW camp in Germany. Moving to Toronto, he continued anti-Soviet propaganda through the ECC and stated its McCarthyesque purpose as providing “the focal point for ... all Estonians in Canada ... in their avowed and active opposition to the doctrine of Communism.”
In 1960, the USSR — having lost 27 million citizens to the Nazis and their East European supporters — sought to expose some perpetrators. It named ECC leaders, including three former SS-lieutenants, an SS-Legion staff member and two former Gestapo police commissioners. Using German documents, eyewitness accounts and other evidence gathered when forcing the Nazis from Estonia in 1944, the Soviets identified Winnipeg’s Aleksander Laak as an ECC member who represented the most brutal of Estonia’s Nazi collaborators protected in Canada.
In August 1960, the Soviets indicted Laak for “organizing extermination camp Jägala and personally shooting Jews” and reported that he’d overseen the murder of 3,000 prisoners.
“The Russian story is 99 per cent lies,” said Laak. “It is only Communist propaganda.” Dozens of Canadian journalists agreed. Headlines blaring “Red Story,” “Red Charges” and “Red Claims” rejected it as Russian “propaganda.” The RCMP gave Laak a “clear” record. The government dismissed it as “phony.” Laak’s neighbours, co-workers and employer said he was a victim of Soviet lies. Despite this support, Laak hanged himself a few days later and papers blamed “Communist propaganda” for killing him.
The ECC joined the fray. One article, “Estonians Fear Smear Campaign,” said Toronto’s 8,000 Estonians were afraid they would “come under a Soviet propaganda barrage.” Although the USSR focused on Laak, the ECC’s leader Enn Salurand said all Estonian-Canadians were “bracing themselves for a Communist campaign designed to discredit them.” How many of Estonia’s tens of thousands of SS men came to Canada is unknown.
Salurand helped found the ECC and was its secretary-general for 25 years. In 1931, he helped create and lead an outfit back in the Baltic, the Estonian National Club. Its eugenics-based ethno-nationalism, intolerant of minorities, got it outlawed by the Soviets when they occupied Estonia in 1940. After coming to Canada, Salurand is said to have never missed a board meeting of the Estonian veterans’ publication, Combatant.
When Laak’s photo appeared in newspapers, Jewish Holocaust survivors in Canada and the US called the press, identifying him as the slave-labour camp’s commandant. “Laak was wearing the SS uniform and was in charge,” declared Toronto’s Greta Zarkower. “Laak and his men took all our valuables.... I was beaten unmercifully, regularly, with a riding whip by SS men.” The media fell silent on Laak for six months.
This silence ended when three top Estonian Nazis went on trial in September 1960. Ralph Gerrets, Laak’s deputy, confessed in Soviet court that they killed thousands, mostly Jews and “Gypsies,” and that Laak took part. Gerrets described shooting small children and dumping them in trenches. Forty witnesses identified Laak as camp commander.
Female survivors recounted being “ordered to undress on arrival at the extermination camp while being examined by Gerrets and Lt. Alexander Laak.” Some testified Laak arranged for “girl inmates” to be “forced to take part in orgies at night and murdered afterward.”
Despite this shocking testimony, no Canadian papers mentioned Laak’s name, or previous claims of innocence by the ECC, RCMP, government and media. Instead, most stories blasted the trial as propaganda. When the three Estonian war criminals were sentenced to death, Canadian journalists didn’t mention Laak but concurred the “show trial apparently aimed at discrediting anti-Soviet Estonian refugee groups.”
Estonian Canadians also went silent, except for one letter to the editor from an ECC-linked Montreal group. Its vice president, Martin Puhvel, castigated the Gazette for covering the trial at all and defended Estonian collaborators as heroes. Describing the trial as “vicious propagandists fairytales,” he said “the Soviet propaganda machine has ... launched a campaign of calumny and vilification against Estonian patriots whose only ‘crime’ lies in defending their homes against murderous, unprovoked aggression by the Russian enslavers.”
Calling the trial a “vicious smear campaign,” Puhvel denounced the media for helping “the enemies of freedom” by “spreading grisly, painful stories of massacre of infant children by men who were busy defending their homes” against the Reds.
Kolga is also active in the Estonian World Council (EWC), an international diaspora network he has served as vice president. Like the ECC, the EWC’s founders and spokesmen included Waffen SS veterans. Take for example, German-Estonian Gerhard Buschmann who joined Nazi intelligence (Abwehr) in 1940 and subsequently won two Iron Crosses. He created and lead the Sonderstaffel Buschmann, a Luftwaffe squad with 50 aircraft. Among other crimes, Buschmann aided the 900-day Siege of Leningrad that killed over one million Soviet civilians.
During the Cold War, Buschmann continued the anti-communist crusade by working for the US army and American intelligence. Becoming the leader of the Estonian SS veterans group in the US, he was one of the EWC’s best known representatives. For example, in 1968, he was a key witness at a huge “mock trial” in Washington, DC., that blamed communism for everything imaginable.
Immediately after the trial’s conclusion, the Soviet embassy in Washington was bombed. Newspapers spread unfounded accusations by Buschmann and others involved in the trial that the Soviets themselves had bombed their own embassy.
One article said: “Gerhard Buschmann, a member of the Estonian World Council, said adverse publicity all over the world has pressured the communists to take such action in an attempt to discredit the trial.”
For decades this “blame the victim” approach wielded by Eastern European émigré groups has been weaponized to deflect their historic links to Nazi atrocities. The ECC, EWC, and Ukrainian organizations that Freeland has identified with since her childhood, need to acknowledge their fascist roots and stop defaming those who report the truth about ongoing, state glorification of fascist war heroes.
Author Richard Sanders’ most recent publication is called Defunding the Myths and Cults of Cold War Canada. It exposes the Canadian government’s ongoing financial support for several East European émigré groups which, having been founded, led and inspired by Nazi collaborators, continue to venerate Waffen SS veterans as heroes. References for all the quotations in this article can be found online at https://coat.ncf.ca/
