Semper Occultus?

While you do not choose your ancestors, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ nevertheless vet to Kingdom Come those of applicants to their ranks. How, then, can the new Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service be Blaise Metreweli, whose grandfather, Constantine Dobrowolski, was possibly still alive in 1969 after having been an infamous defector from an Allied Army to collaboration with the Nazi Occupation of Ukraine, such that he had been called “the worst enemy of the Ukrainian people” by the Allies when they had placed on his head a bounty equivalent to £200,000 today? Well, why not? If anything, such a background is a qualification for the job. Indeed, that may well have swung it for her.

The Sonnenrad and the Wolfsangel are displayed by Svoboda, Pravy Sektor, the National Corps, C14, the Azov Battalion, the Aidar Battalion, the Donbas Battalion, the Dnipro-1 Battalion, the Dnipro-2 Battalion, and all the rest of them. Those symbols have only one possible meaning. You may as well wear a swastika, and they sometimes do. These are the factions on whom Volodymyr Zelensky depends, and it is beside the point that he himself is Jewish; most of Hitler’s 27 million Soviet victims were not Jewish, and the post-War Western fantasy that the War had been fought because of the persecution of the Jews is more or less unknown in the former USSR.

The real founders of NATO, as of so very much else after the War, were Nazis. Not overly officious traffic wardens, but real, live, actual Nazis. Before the War in Europe was officially over, the generous political donors in the arms trade decided that the next lucrative enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, which in fact had neither the means nor the will to invade Western Europe, just as Russia manifestly cannot conquer even Ukraine, much less anywhere else. Therefore, we began to clutch to our bosom the people in Europe who were most anti-Soviet. Guess who? The sky was literally the limit for Wernher von Braun, as recently explored even here, and effectively so for Walter Hallstein, Adolf Heusinger, Kurt Waldheim, and numerous others. None of their pasts had ever been any kind of secret. Operation Gladio was full of Nazis, as were the parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countries, operations that had particularly close ties to Britain.

How could the Manchester synagogue attack have happened in the land of the Kindertransport? Having taken in only 10,000 Kindertransport children, Britain took in 15,000 Nazi collaborators, one and half times as many. 1,000 Kindertransport children had been interned as enemy aliens, and some of them had been sent as far as Australia and Canada to get rid of them, but there was none of that for the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician). Those were ethnic Ukrainians from a formerly Austro-Hungarian area that had been incorporated into Poland after the First World War, meaning that they were able to claim pre-War Polish nationality in order to enter Britain even though they had massacred ethnic Poles during the War. It had been Churchill who had handed Galicia over to Joseph Stalin, but that did not stop many of the 1st Galician from making their way to Britain. See how very much at home they made themselves.

After all, it was by then Clement Attlee’s Britain. The Attlee Government imposed austerity at home in order to go to war to restore the rule of old Nazi collaborators in Greece. Attlee took Britain into NATO alongside Fascist Portugal from the very start, and NATO has now admitted Finland, which did not drop the swastika from the insignia of its Air Force until 2020, nor from a number of its Air Force flags until this August, meaning that NATO forces had been flying flags with the swastika on them. NATO’s “educational” publications, defining Russia as the eternal enemy, laud the 1940s collaborators as the liberating heroes. Their successors are in government in much of Eastern Europe, legislating for the entire EU.

Another founder member of NATO was Canada, where at that time, just after the War, showing your SS tattoo was a guaranteed way of getting in, because it proved how anti-Soviet you were. As late as the 1990s, old Nazis whom the Americans wanted to deport simply moved to Canada, which let them in, and where they carried on drawing their German military pensions. In Mark Carney’s party and into Carney’s adult lifetime, Justin Trudeau’s father protected thousands of these people as Prime Minister almost continuously from 1968 to 1984, and Chrystia Freeland is the granddaughter of Michael Chomiak, who edited Krakivski Visti, a Nazi paper in occupied Krakow, printed on a press confiscated from a Jewish newspaper.

Whatever the complexities of life in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, there was only one possible reason to join the Waffen SS. Life was complicated in Western Europe during the War, but would you make excuses for the Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Belgians who joined that? Or for its British Free Corps, originally called the Legion of Saint George? There were others besides, and in every case the argument was the same, that the real enemy was the Soviet Union. If Yaroslav Hunka was a hero, then so were they. Including Hunka’s Galician brothers-in-arms who ended up in Britain, which had been planning a surprise attack on the USSR from no later than 22 May 1945, and which therefore needed all the Hunkas that it could find. Hunka himself lived in Britain from the end of the War until 1954, and his late wife was British. In 1951, in Britain, she married an SS veteran.

Germany itself has never had a firewall. Not only had key figures in the foundation of the Federal Republic, of NATO and of the EU very recently been Nazi officers, but one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD, specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. In 1990, the NDPD took fewer votes than it officially had members, so perhaps that commitment had been met. If so, then it did not last. Look at the voting patterns of the former East Germany now.

No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl were as frank as they themselves had always been. By the early 1960s, more former members of the Nazi Party, a party that had been 8.5 million strong at the end of the War, were on the staffs of many West German government departments than there had been current Nazi Party members on those staffs during the Third Reich. In parts of Austria to this day, you can tell what were the American from what were the neighbouring Soviet zones from the vote for the Far Right, since as early as the summer of 1945 local Nazis fled across the river from the latter to the former. There had been no difference in voting patterns before the War. Old collaborators were often set up, usually in London, as governments-in-exile of Eastern European countries, or at least included in them, while Western spooks aided and abetted their stay-behind networks back home. From 1989 onwards, those emerged blinking into the light, essentially unchanged. And here we are. “We” have been allied to the Nazis for more than 13 times as long as we were ever at war with them.

For example, although in all fairness he himself died in 1939, Kaja Kallas’s great-grandfather, Eduard Alver, was a key figure in founding the anti-Soviet Kaitseliit militia that became the Estonian component of the Forest Brothers, collaborationist exterminators of the Jews. It is no wonder, although it is still inexcusable, that it recently came as “news” to her that Russia and China had been among the victors of the Second World War. Thankfully, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty does not mean what most Europeans, and possibly most Canadians, think that it means, since no United States Senate would ever have ratified that. Ask them in Hungary and Slovakia, whose oil supply non-NATO Ukraine can apparently bomb with complete impunity. It really has been 80 years, has it not? But while there may be no more Iron Cross or Arrow Cross, they will always have Vauxhall Cross.