Canada failed to deal with their WWII Nazis

 

The death of former Einsatzgruppe D operative Helmut Oberlander at his home in Waterloo, Ontario, late last month ignominiously ended one of the most frustrating and infuriating episodes in the belated postwar efforts of English-speaking democracies to take legal action against Nazi war criminals and collaborators who had immigrated to these democracies under false pretenses.

Unlike the situation in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, where the trials of Holocaust perpetrators began relatively shortly after the end of World War II, the English-speaking democracies realized only decades later that all of them – with the exception of South Africa, which was hermetically closed to immigration during the postwar period – had failed miserably in screening refugees from Eastern Europe, thousands of whom had committed Holocaust crimes.

(In other cases, the Western allies knowingly overlooked the Nazi past of German scientists, engineers and technicians who had worked on the production of V-2 rockets, and a number of individuals who were considered as spy potential behind the Iron Curtain.)

Thus initially in the US in the mid-1970s, and several years later, in Canada, Australia, and Great Britain, and even later in New Zealand, the authorities were confronted by this problem.  (more...)

Canada failed to deal with their WWII Nazis