Freeland's maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak, had been a journalist before World War II. During the war in Nazi-occupied Poland and later in Nazi-occupied Austria he was chief editor of the Ukrainian daily newspaper Krakivs'ki Visti (Kraków News) for the Nazi regime.[100] After Chomiak's death in 1984, John-Paul Himka, a professor of history at the University of Alberta, who was Chomiak's son-in-law (and also Freeland's uncle by marriage), used Chomiak's records, including old issues of the newspaper, as the basis of several scholarly papers focused on the coverage of Soviet mass murders of Ukrainian civilians. These papers also examined the use of these massacres as Nazi propaganda against Jews.[101][102][103] In 2017, when Russian-affiliated websites, e.g. Russia Insider and New Cold War, further publicized Chomiak's connection to Nazism, Freeland and her spokespeople responded by claiming that this was a Russian disinformation campaign during her appointment to the position of minister of foreign affairs.[104][105][106][107][100] Her office later denied Chomiak ever collaborated with Nazi Germany.[108] However, reporting by The Globe and Mail showed that Freeland had known of her grandfather's Nazi ties since at least 1996, when she helped edit a scholarly article by Himka for the Journal of Ukrainian Studies.[104]
