Misleading material: clarifying the facts on Nazi war criminals in Canada

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/10/2024 (411 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Readers of Lubomyr Luciuk’s op-ed in the Free Press (Slim tips and flapdoodle in the hunt for Nazi war criminals in Canada, Sept. 16) were offered a menu of subtle and not-so-subtle misrepresentations to confuse people about what the Deschênes Report said and with what implications.

The misrepresentation begins with his opening observation that the report contains “information about persons investigated by the commission but against whom no evidence of wartime criminality was found.”

This statement is incorrect, and misleads. Justice Deschênes recommended that most of the almost 900 cases brought to his attention be closed not because they were investigated and “no evidence of wartime of wartime criminality was found,” or “for lack of proof” (as Luciuk repeats), but because the individuals never entered or had left Canada, or had died.

Luciuk highlights seven or eight allegations that Justice Deschênes dismissed as “spurious and unfounded” — insinuating that this may apply to the entire list.

In fact, the classified Part II of the Deschênes Report includes detailed opinions on 29 of the individuals in the Master List (along with names of witnesses). For 20 of these cases, Deschênes found sufficient prima facie evidence to recommend the initiation of court proceedings and the establishment of a unit within the Department of Justice to act on the Commission’s recommendations.

I served as the Commission’s Director of Historical Research and stand by my statement that research on cases examined by the Deschênes Commission was limited.

This was due in part to time constraints that did not permit following up in a number of foreign archives, as well as political considerations (see Deschênes Report, Part I, page 828).

Moreover, the Commission limited its mandate to look into only allegations previously submitted to the Government of Canada.

It did not cast a wider net and did not look for individuals by cross-referencing war criminals’ lists compiled after the war with Canadian immigration records. It is noteworthy that the bulk of these immigration records were destroyed by the government in 1982–83, coinciding with a surge in advocacy for legal action on the issue of Nazi war criminals in Canada.

Luciuk, who knows better, asks “what I was paid for” if research was inadequate.

Luciuk knows that my task was to tell the story of Canadian government immigration and security screening policies and practices — to explain how Nazi-related war criminals might have entered Canada; and to record the government’s responses to allegations about the presence of war criminals in the country in the postwar decades.

It was not to research the particulars of individual cases, assigned by the commission to another team of investigators.

Regarding the Galician Waffen-SS Division, mentioned in Mr. Luciuk’s article, I refer readers to my two key findings in 1986 — that individuals complicit in the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity were incorporated into the division in the course of its career, particularly towards the end of the war, and that members of the division were never adequately screened for wartime activities — see the Rodal Report (largely but still not fully declassified), also available online.

These two findings have since been corroborated by respected Ukrainian scholars, including Manitoba’s own Myroslav Shkandrij in his 2023 book, In the Maelstrom: The Waffen-SS ’ Galicia’ Division and Its Legacy.

After both the First World War and the Second World War, the West’s interest in accountability for horrific crimes was abandoned as both justice and historical truth receded in importance with the emergence of other priorities.

Let us hope that Ukraine’s efforts since February 2024 to carefully document Russia’s war crimes against the people of Ukraine and crimes against humanity are not similarly trumped by other priorities.

Alti Rodal iwas the director of Historical Research for the Deschênes Commission.