The Nazi War Criminal Issue Resurfaces In Canada
B’nai Brith Canada for years has sought full access to a report written by historian Alti Rodal for the Commission of Inquiry On War Criminals In Canada. The commission, headed by Jules Deschenes, was charged with investigating allegations that the Canadian government admitted European collaborators who committed crimes against humanity on behalf of Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II.
Although much of Rodal’s report was released to the public in 1985 and 1986, portions of it were redacted in the name of national security. B’nai Brith questioned Ottawa’s rationale and called on the government to publish it in full.
Several days ago, B’nai Brith’s request was belatedly granted when Federal Court judge Simon Fothergill ordered the government to publish its secret sections concerning the resettlement of Nazi accomplices in Canada.
If, as expected, the government does not challenge his verdict, this shameful interlude in Canadian history will finally be exposed to the light of day in the public domain, where it should have been in the first place.
From the end of World War II onward, European war criminals such as Helmut Oberlander, Imre Finta, Helmut Rauca and Jacob Luitjens were allowed to settle in this country, at a time when the Canadian government strictly limited the admission of Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors into Canada.
This jarring moral disconnect was usually justified on the grounds that these war criminals possessed information that could be of value to the Western alliance during the Cold War.
Fothergill, in his judicious ruling, focused on a section in the report dealing with “irregularities in the resettlement of defectors and former agents” in Canada. In some cases, Nazi collaborators were accepted by Canadian immigration officials in Europe without background checks. Fothergill said that this historically relevant chapter in Canadian history should be fully available to the public.
To no one’s surprise, Rodal welcomed his decision, telling The Globe and Mail that her report in its entirety should be released. As she put it, “After decades of misguided decisions, serious neglect, and lack of transparency, it is long overdue for the government of Canada to make its Holocaust-related records publicly available in a comprehensive digital archive.”
As she pointed out in her report, US spy organizations, principally the Central Intelligence Agency, played a central role in the movement of war criminals into Canada, sometimes under false identities and documentation. They were deemed useful assets due to the information they had acquired about the Soviet Union and its European allies ranging from Hungary and East Germany to Poland and the Baltic states.
“It is a scandal that, during a time when Canada maintained severe restrictions on Jewish immigration to this country, it facilitated the entry of perpetrators of Nazi crimes,” B’nai Brith Canada’s chief executive officer, Simon Wolle, told The Globe and Mail. “Canadians have a right to know the truth about not only Canada’s actions, but the U.S.’ covert efforts to sneak ex-Nazis into Canada.”
Jared McBride, a professor of history at the University of California in Los Angeles who studies ethnic mass violence and the Holocaust, concurs with Fothergill’s assessment. The Central Intelligence Agency program alluded to in Rodal’s report is “inefficiently researched,” is “largely shrouded in mystery” and warrants “considerably greater scholarly attention,” he said.
Now that a court in Canada has properly addressed this issue, Canadians will finally have an opportunity to read about it.
Better late than never.
