The Canadian government’s attempt to strip a former Nazi mobile death squad member of his Canadian citizenship has taken 23 years and about $2.1 million so far, but Jewish groups say that it’s time and money well spent.
Helmut Oberlander, who turns 94 on Feb. 15, is accused of being a member of Einsatzkommando 10a (EK 10a), which operated in the Soviet Union during the Second World War.
Oberlander was never accused of participating in executions and has claimed that he was a low-level interpreter who was conscripted by the Nazis under duress when he was 17.
The unit he belonged to murdered an estimated 23,000 civilians, mostly Jews, during the war.
The Nazis made Oberlander a German citizen in 1944, before he immigrated to Canada in 1954, settled in Waterloo, Ont., and became a Canadian citizen in 1960.
Since 1995, the Canadian government has worked to strip Oberlander of his citizenship. In 2000, a judge ruled that he lied about his membership in the death squad before immigrating to Canada. The government stripped him of his citizenship in 2001, 2007 and 2012, but it was reinstated by the Federal Court of Appeal each time, because the prosecution was unable to prove Oberlander’s complicity in war crimes. (more...)
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