Canada Let in Thousands of Former Nazis: Files I’ve Seen Tell Why

 

The Hunka affair should lead to finally opening our war criminal archives. I saw first-hand why they are explosive.

Growing up in Winnipeg, I was sometimes fascinated and sometimes skeptical as my dad, an immigrant Jewish railway worker with not a single grade of formal education, kept pointing out people in our North End neighbourhood he insisted were Nazis that Canada had welcomed after the Second World War.

In 1984, I indicated to the archivist at Library and Archives Canada who specialized in federal immigration files that I wanted to see records that might help me determine whether my dad was on to something. His answer: “There’s a story to tell, and you are the person to tell it.”

I had never met the archivist before and I assume that his favourable opinion regarding me had something to do with my having developed a reputation as a left-wing historian. But, after warning me that the documents he was providing me were replete with redactions, he said I would find that my dad’s viewpoint was amply supported within the materials the Department of Immigration had been willing to make public.

Ironically, just months later, after an incident suggesting that Josef Mengele, the monstrous Nazi physician who performed medical experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz, might be living in Canada, the Canadian government appointed the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada to research and report on the issue of whether Nazi war criminals resided in Canada and, if so, who they were and how they got here.

The Deschênes Commission, as it was also called, reported in 1986 and did confirm that there were many war criminals in Canada. But a large part of its report was kept secret, and the public report, in my view, ignored the issue of why there were tens of thousands of former Nazis in Canada, including a very large number of individuals whom the Nuremberg courts after the war labelled as war criminals.

The commission report suggested a rather lazy effort by immigration bureaucrats to keep track of who they were allowing to enter Canada in the late 1940s and afterwards when labour demands seemed to trump all other concerns. My research suggests that is nonsense.  (more...)

Canada Let in Thousands of Former Nazis: Files I’ve Seen Tell Why