Nineteen years after Justice Jules Deschênes
filed his revealing report on "War Criminals in
Canada," the Justice and Citizenship Departments
are still floundering in their effort to expel
the surprisingly large number of Nazi war
criminals who made their post-war home in Canada.
At best, they have succeeded in shipping out a
handful of the men who voluntarily served as
"Hitler's willing executioners." No one doubts
the difficulties facing Canada's prosecutors;
those accused are now in their late seventies and
eighties, witnesses have died and documents have
been scattered. Yet, the American Nazi hunting
unit, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI),
faces identical difficulties and has succeeded in
deporting more than sixty Nazi war criminals
since its formation in 1979.
What accounts for the seeming ineptness of both
Conservative and Liberal governments? The reasons
are many, but looking back, it is evident that
polite anti-Semitism in the ranks of Canada's
bureaucracy created a culture of indifference-if
not outright hostility-to issues on the Jewish
agenda.
Prior to World War II, Canada was essentially a
small, under-populated country with a relatively
small bureaucracy. Most of Ottawa's leading
bureaucrats knew each other from their school
days, spoke the same language, attended the same
universities, belonged to the same clubs and
shared the same supercilious view of Jews. They
were too well-educated and much too polite to
insult a Jew to his face, but they felt entirely
comfortable telling "Jew jokes" behind their
backs. Deputy Ministers and Assistant Deputy
Ministers tended to look down their noses at
Jews, to regard them as "pushy" and lower class.
Individual well-mannered Jews might be
acceptable, but they were not welcome in large
numbers. Jewish collective interests were of
little concern to Ottawa. Jews were regarded as
"undesirables" by Canada's immigration
authorities. From the 1920s through the 1940s,
Canada gave preference to British immigrants,
followed by Northern Europeans (Germans,
Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians). Central
Europeans were next in line, but Blacks and
Orientals were virtually barred.
Jews were seen as a special case. Even those who
were citizens of Northern European countries were
ranked as undesirables. They were too smart, too
ambitious. They aspired to join the middle class.
Few were farmers, lumberjacks or miners. Canada's
reluctance to confront the war crimes issue was
evidenced by its reluctance to work with other
nations in bringing war criminals to justice.
Canada played a minimal role in the work of the
United Nations War Crimes Commission, joining
late and leaving early. It is not generally known
that Canada also refused to support the Four
Power Agreement that legitimized the trial of the
Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. On registering its
abstention, Canada stated that "little useful
purpose would be served by Canada's adherence to
this agreement."
The onset of the Cold War militated against the
prosecution of war criminals by recasting many
Eastern European war criminals as "freedom
fighters" in the battle against Soviet tyranny.
Both the United States and Canada recruited
former Gestapo torturers and directors of slave
labour camps as anti-Soviet agents.
Indeed, the fighting had hardly ended before the
Cold War set in. Whatever its origins, it created
an atmosphere of suspicion and non-cooperation
between the Soviet Union and its former allies.
It resulted in two mutually hostile blocs, each
seeking to set up new defensive lines. With the
Russians squatting in East Germany and occupying
a portion of Berlin, it was essential to bring
West Germany onside if the Western alliance was
to be militarily effective.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was as
eager as any Western leader to contain the
Soviet Union, but he warned the British and
Americans that his countrymen could never become
wholehearted members of the Western alliance so
long as the West continued to try Germans as war
criminals. With Adenauer's warning in mind, the
British Dominions Secretary issued a memorandum
on July 13, 1947 addressed to the "White
Dominions." The memorandum read: "In our view,
the punishment of war criminals is more a matter
of discouraging future generations than of meting
out retribution to every guilty individual.
Moreover, in view of future political
developments in Germany envisaged by recent
tripartite talks, we are convinced that it is now
necessary to dispose of the past as soon as
possible." The Canadian government hastened to
agree.
For most of Canada's history, the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police, the "Mounties," served as
Canada's counter-intelligence service. As such,
it was the RCMP's task to screen out war
criminals applying to enter Canada and to hunt
down any war criminals who had slipped through
the screening process. But the use of the
Mounties created fresh complications. In the
pre-war years the RCMP had successfully
infiltrated the Communist Party of Canada and
stalked Soviet spies. Members of various ethnic
communities were used to inform on their
left-leaning countrymen. After World War II,
there was a plethora of anti-communist immigrants
eager to help the police identify Bolsheviks in
their communities. It so happened that many of
the immigrants later named as war criminals were
the same people whom the RCMP had previously
classified as friends and helpers, good guys in
the global battle against communism. As a result,
the RCMP frequently had difficulty sifting truth
from fiction when questioning men who tried to
pass themselves off as "freedom fighters against
Bolshevism", hiding the fact that they were war
criminals.
Robert Kaplan, appointed Solicitor General by
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was eager to
pursue the war crimes issue. He sought out Simon
Wiesenthal in Vienna and returned with a list of
alleged war criminals hiding in Canada. But he
was greatly discouraged by his Prime Minister. A
brilliant lawyer and charismatic political
figure, Trudeau thought of himself as a world
citizen, too sophisticated to concern himself
with such parochial issues as the victimization
of the Jews by the Nazis. Although personally
scornful of the issue, Trudeau was nevertheless
willing to grant Kaplan "one"-but no more than
one-war criminal to pursue. It was clear to
Kaplan that if he insisted on an all-out pursuit
of war criminals in Canada, he would displease
the Prime Minister and risk his position as a
Cabinet member. Helmut Rauca, the scourge of
Kovno, became the "one."
Given Trudeau's token approach to the issue, it
was left to Conservative Prime Minister Brian
Mulroney to take up the issue. Early in his first
term, he appointed the Deschênes Commission of
Inquiry on Nazi War Criminals, although Mulroney
confided to me in a personal interview some years
after he left office that he was disappointed in
the work of the Commission. Much more could have
been done, he said, if such a commission had been
appointed twenty years earlier. "In any event, I
proceeded and appointed the Commission simply
because it was the right thing to do, for the
sake of the Holocaust survivors and the honour of
Canada."
However, even given Mulroney's best efforts, it
was exceedingly difficult to shake Canada out of
its lethargy. The Deschênes Commission failed to
make use of the evidence that was readily
available to Deschenes in Czechoslovakia,
Romania, Hungary and the USSR because he was
suspicious of the quality of "Soviet evidence."
Above all, he avoided the use of evidence
gathered behind the Iron Curtain so as not to
rile up Eastern European émigré groups that had
been infiltrated by war criminals.
Despite the obvious sincerity of the "boy from
Baie Comeau," the Supreme Court of Canada almost
brought the prosecution of war criminals to a
complete halt in its decision in the Imre Finta
case. Finta, a Hungarian police captain, had
supervised the round-up of Jews in Szeged and
overseen their deportation to Auschwitz. Against
all logic and every legal precedent, the court
accepted the defence plea that Finta was not
guilty because he was carrying out what he
perceived as lawful orders. The "just following
orders" defence was thoroughly examined during
the Nuremberg Tribunal and rejected. Subsequent
war crimes trials in Germany, Holland, France and
the United States refused to allow it. It was
left to the Supreme Court of Canada to fly in the
face of fifty years of legal precedent and make
the prosecution of war criminals on criminal
grounds virtually impossible.
What was left to the Canadian authorities was the
charge of lying to immigration officials when
applying for entry by concealing one's true past
as a Nazi collaborator. The punishment, a far cry
from the sentence deserved, remains deportation
to one's country of origin.
And so, the process limps along, hampered by an
indifferent bureaucracy, slowed by lack of a
dedicated political leadership and tied up in
endless legal appeals. There is, of course, a
natural biological end to Nazi war criminal
prosecutions. Natural attrition has brought their
numbers down; in a few years death will take care
of all of them.