There is no way to sugar coat it: Canada’s inability and reluctance to find and prosecute or extradite WW II war criminals amounts to gross negligence.
Consequently, as much as Rudolf Vrba liked to say he spent 90 percent of his time teaching and researching as a medical scientist in pharmacology, his “Nazi radar” never left him. He became personally involved in the detection and prosecution of alleged war criminals for much of his adult life.
Hence, an overview of this subject is required for this website.
“If you are a war criminal, Canada is your refuge of choice.”
– Steven Rambam, Nazi hunter
“I remember, when I was doing research, reading comments from United Nations officials saying that it was easier to get into Canada if you were a Nazi than if you were a Jew.”
– Irving Abella, Canadian author of None is Too Many (1982)
“Rudi was very angry that people who participated in the Holocaust were walking free in Canada.”
– Helen Karsai, close friend of Rudolf Vrba
“When we speak of racial hatred, we are not only speaking about yesterday, but of today and tomorrow.”
– Rudolf Vrba, interviewed by Tom Hawthorn
“Our judges…none of whom experienced first hand the heaped, emaciated bodies of concentration camp victims… seem unaware of the utter brutality of the Nazis’ crimes. …Perhaps they could participate in seminars arranged by our leading law schools that would deal with the history of the Holocaust and the important precedents set in key war crimes trials since the end of the war …In this way, Canadian judges may be convinced of the seriousness of war crimes cases and avoid the unpredictable, offbeat decision-making we have so far experienced.”
– Sol Littman (Toronto Star, October 20, 1998, p. A22)
*****
Stephen Rambam
In 1996, the Jerusalem Post magazine reported that an American private investigator named Steven Rambam, based in New York, claimed to have discovered 157 alleged former Nazis living in Canada, mainly from Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia.
Having posed as an academic researcher from a fictitious university in order to gain access to elderly interviewee, Rambam told anyone who would listen that he had spoken to 62 suspected war criminals who were living in Canada, mostly without fear of prosecution.
A Canadian representative of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, Sol Littman, confirmed most of the individuals identified by Rambam were known by the Wiesenthal Center.
Canada’s Justice Minister Allen Rock responded by saying, “I’d be surprised to learn there were that many people that we’ve overlooked. I haven’t seen the information the investigators have amassed. If they wish to share it with us, that would be very helpful.”
While posing as an associate professor from the non-existent Belize-based St. John’s University of the Americas, Rambam secretly tape-recorded confessions, one of which he played at a press conference in Montreal. It featured Antanas Kenstavicius, a former Lithuanian police chief of the Svencionys district, who matter-of-factly recalled his role in the murder of thousands of Jews in the fall of 1941. Kenstavicius had been legally permitted to arrive in Halifax as a refugee on May 24, 1948.
At his home in Hope, British Columbia, while serving Rambam cake and schnapps on January 3, 1996, ‘Romano’ Kenstavicius recalled the massacre of 5,000 Jews in six days in the town of Ignalina, describing how they were stripped naked, divested of their valuables before being shot in groups of ten, and left in a ditch, having previously been locked in stables without food and water.
We learned that Canada is considered, by one and all, to be considered the primary refuge for eastern European World War II war criminals – something I would have never suspected, ever. You learn about Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia. Canada has them all beat. Canada has them all beat—combined.”
– Steven Rambam, CBC National documentary, 1995
For a CBC National Magazine documentary that aired on December 19, 1995, Rambam recalled how Kenstavicius had chuckled as he admitted his men had raped Jewish women. His wife Stella allegedly corroborated the account.
A website for and about Lithuanian Canadians tells a very different story, claiming Kenstavicius was a Lithuanian patriot, captured by invading Soviets in 1941, and posthumously promoted to the rank of First Lieutenant in 1998 and awarded the Lithuanian army’s “Kūrėjų Savanorių” (Founding Volunteers) medal in 2001. But Rambam’s audiotaped conversation with Kenstavicius, verified his role as a deputy police chief who had prevented any Jew from escaping from the firing squads:
“Yes, there is about 5,000 Jews. But no names, no list. They be like just people, sheeps [sic]… Yeah, like lambs, animals. You command them to lay down. The Jews would come to lay down… Nobody fight… They’re so quiet. Ten guys stay in the ditch. And then coming the commander, they shoot. Bang and they fall down. Sometime repeat, “PAK PAK” and they fall in the ditch… All the day… First the men… after womens [sic]. The women in a separate camp. Separate barracks. The kids go with wives. With womens. Then 09 November one o’clock, finished. No more Jews.”
Suspected British Columbian war criminal Antanas Kenstavicius was born in Dapšiai, Lithuania on June 13, 1906 and he died in Hope, B.C. on January 23, 1997. He immigrated to Canada in 1948 and lived primarily in Boston Bar, B.C. as a railway worker for the Canadian National Railway. Photo from Times of Israel
Evidence from witnesses in Lithuania had already been gathered by Jewish organizations and presented to the Canadian government and RCMP in 1949 to implicate Kenstavicius but authorities had failed to unravel the case. “The lesson for us is the Canadian government couldn’t give a damn,” commented Bernie Farber, of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
Eventually some publicity about Kenstavicius via CBC helped to focus public attention on Canada’s continued failure to prosecute Nazi war criminals. “Canada is where the Nazis are,” Rambam told the Los Angeles Times in January of 1997. “Canada is the unknown haven for Nazis. Everybody knows about Argentina, but nobody knows about Canada.”
Paul Lungen’s reportage for the Canadian Jewish News on April 5, 2019 confirmed that the Canadian Jewish Congress had long ago alerted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the importance and presence of Kenstavicius. Possibly to defray further embarrassment, Kenstavicius was subsequently presented with a deportation order but his lawyer claimed his client had suffered a heart attack. A delay was granted. Kenstavicius died before the case could be pursued into the courts.
In January of 2019, Rambam had told the Times of Israel he had inspected 15,000 cases of suspected Nazis and pro-Nazi criminals since 1981. “These people are not hiding,” Rambam told the Toronto Star. “They are living blissfully knowing they will never be touched. If you are a war criminal, Canada is your refuge of choice.”
See CBC documentary on Rambam: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1764272231
Canada had restricted the immigration to Canada of ex-members of the Nazi party, the German armed forces and collaborators in 1949, but these restrictions had been relaxed in subsequent years and were withdrawn in 1962. When Parliament debated Bill C-215 in 1979 to rescind Canadian citizenship from anyone convicted of war crimes, the bill was ultimately withdrawn.
Konrad Kalejs
On behalf of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Sol Littman wrote to Justice Minister Allen Rock requesting an independent review of Canada’s failure to identify and extradite pro-Nazi war criminals. “It is hard to conceive that any other department would have such a sorry record, such a long list of failures, so many delays and blunders,” he wrote. “Something has clearly gone seriously wrong.”
While the government could cite 1,117 investigations by 1992, identifying 300 high-priority cases, only three suspects were subsequently configured by Canadian research for deportation proceedings: the aforementioned Antanas Kenstavicius (Lithuania), Konrads Kelejs (Latvia) and Josef Nemsila (Slovakia).
None would be convicted of war crimes.
Born in Riga on June 26, 1913, Konrad Alfred Kalejs became a cadet in the Latvian army at age 22 but joined the Nazi-controlled Latvian security police after the Nazi occupation began in 1941. Under its brutal leader, Viktors Arajs, the so-called Arais Kommando massacred murdered thousands of Jews, Gypsies and communists for the Nazis. Eventually, Kalejs was identified as a senior officer who ran the Salaspils concentration camp and organised campaigns on the eastern front. An ex-Kommando named Rudolf Soms verified that Kalejs led attacks on Russian villages and “annihilated the inhabitants.” He’d migrated to Australia in 1950 and became an Australian citizen in 1957 by claiming he’d spent much of the war as a farm labourer. Two years later he was able to move to the U.S. where he became a millionaire in real estate, retaining his Australian citizenship. When U.S. investigators uncovered his pro-Nazi past, he was ordered out of the country for lying on his visa application.
Due to his personal wealth, he was able to forestall his eventual extradition back to Australia, from which he made his way to Canada. He was deported back to Australia in 1997 after more court battles. Legal battles re-ensued in Australia so he skipped to Great Britain in 1999 where his identity was uncovered at a luxury retreat in Leicestershire for elderly Latvians. Having come under international criticism for not bringing a single Nazi war criminal to trial since its independence in 1991, Latvia eventually charged Kalejs with war crimes in September of 2000 but by this time Kaleis had fled back to Melbourne where, during a TV interview, he confessed to knowing Arais and serving for the Nazis’ police force.
Implicated in the shooting deaths of six prisoners at Salaspils, the ailing 88-year-old continued his legal battles in May of 2001 to defray extradition orders from a Melbourne magistrate. Kaleis’ lawyer was able to persuade the court that the client was burdened by dementia, cancer, blindness and partial deafness. Unable to recall his past, Kaleis was excused from the proceedings and died on November 8, 2001.
Jozef Nemsila
Rudolf Vrba’s countryman Josef Nemsila was alleged to have been a district commander of the Hlinka Guard who participated in the deportations of approximately 70,000 Jews. (Slovakia paid Nazi Germany for each Jew sent abroad, this enabled Slovakia to seize Jewish properties and possessions.) Deportation efforts to return Nemsila to Europe were stalled after a federal judge ruled in 1996 that he was protected by a 1910 law that granted him legal domicile status after five years of residency.
A lawyer for Nemsila had successfully argued that he ought to be protected under section 123 of the Immigration Act for any pre-1978 activities. Nemsila had his deportation hearing delayed in 1995, at age 85, so he could seek legal counsel. It was then reported that the alleged Hrlinka guard Josef Nemsila had died of complications arising from diabetes on April 18, 1997, 47 years after he had allegedly lied about his past in order to enter Canada. “Our reaction is ‘Here we go again,”’ said Irving Abella, national chair of the war crimes committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress, citing two previous deportation cases that ended with the suspects’ deaths in the preceding two years.
A former newspaperman-turned-politician, Karol Sidor (Slovakia) has been cited as the founder of the paramilitary Hlinka Guard, modelled on Mussolini’s blackshirts in Italy. As a Hlinka Guard commander, he publicly stated Slovakia should be “cleansed” of its Jews. He proposed mass deportations. Jews, he let it be known, were “notorious poisoners of pure Christian wells. While of old the Jews poisoned our ancestors with alcohol, at present they infect our youth with Marxism.”
Karol Sidor in 1938
Angela Sidor and children
Having written a biography of Andrej Hlinka, Sidor was for a time touted as a possible successor to the priest/leader Tiso. As an associate of Ferdinand Ďurčanský, he was first elected to the Slovakian parliament in 1935. Editor of the newspaper Slovak until 1938, he was a confirmed antisemite and he headed a commission on the “Jewish Question” in 1939. Having also served briefly as the Slovakian premier and Minister of the Interior in 1939, Sidor was articulate but judged a possible liability because he was more pro-Catholic than pro-Hitler. Wary that Sidor might say or do something to jeopardize Slovakia’s relationship with Nazi Germany, Tiso prudently sent Sidor to Rome to serve as his unofficial ambassador to the Vatican for most of World War II. During the war Sidor also served the Tiso regime as a liaison in neutral Switzerland—where private fortunes could be stored.
Sidor was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in abstentia by the Czechoslovakian courts in 1947 but in the same year he had secured an American passport. He was initially refused asylum in Canada until Pope Pius XII intervened on his behalf in 1950. With his Vatican and Swiss connections, Sidor wore a cloak of respectability as a Catholic until his death at age 52. Sidor was born in Ružomberok on July 16, 1901 and died in Canada on October 20, 1953. Some of his private papers are stored at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford, California. His wife and children gained entry to Canada as displaced persons, via Italy.
Whereas the United States would see fit to deport dozens of alleged war criminals, Canada would deport only three—Helmut Rauca and Jacob Luitjens and Michael Seifert—and all three of these deportations were instigated by foreign investigations.
Helmut Rauca
Rauca was only apprehended by Canadian authorities after the West German government requested his extradition.
Luitjens was apprehended due to the coordinating efforts of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in the United States.
Seifert, the so-called Beast of Bolzano, was only apprehended after Italy requested his extradition for eleven of his various murders.
The total jail time to be served by these three men combined turned out to be less than six years.
Helmut Rauca had joined the Nazi Party two years before Hitler was in power. As a member of Einsatzgruppe A with the rank of Hauptscharführer, Rauca was allegedly complicit in the murder of more than 10,000 Jews from the Kaunas Ghetto, Lithuania. Keeping his surname, but switching his given names. Rauca had immigrated to Canada in 1950 and became a Canadian citizen in 1956. As Solicitor General in the Liberal government of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Toronto-born Jew Robert Kaplan was able to help send Rauca to be tried in Frankfurt, West Germany on May 20, 1983. Rauca died of cancer in October of 1983 while awaiting trial. That same year Sol Littman published a book, War Criminal on Trial: The Rauca Case.
Jacob Luitjens
The most successful case against any war criminal who had taken refuge in Canada was the result of investigations undertaken by Simon Wisenthal whose deputies managed to track down the Dutch collaborator Jacob Luitjens hiding in Canada in 1992, having been sentenced to life imprisonment in abstentia on September 14, 1948 in The Netherlands. Aided by Mennonites, he had fled to Paraguay as “Gerhard Harder” and managed to migrate to Canada in 1961. He taught in the Botany Department at the University of British Columbia and was therefore a member in the same science faculty wherein Rudolf Vrba was teaching and conducting pharmacology research into brain chemistry. Born in the West Indies in 1919, Luitjens was nicknamed “the terror Roden” for his actions in Drenthe province during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands. As a member of the Dutch paramilitary group Landwacht, or Land Guard, he had helped the Nazis arrest Jews, His life sentence amounted to only three years in prison in Groningen until March of 1995. He eventually granted an interview in 2022 and died at age 103, in Lemmer, a town in the north of the Netherlands, on December 14, 2022.
Michael Siefert, Beast of Bolsano
Infamous as the “Beast of Bolzano,” former SS prison guard Michael Seifert was an ethnic German accused by witnesses of leaving a fifteen-year-old boy to starve to death, raping and killing a pregnant woman and gouging out an inmate’s eyes. He managed to spend 49 years undetected in Canada until the government of Italy requested his extradition. The Bolzano camp in the South Tyrol region was a holding centre for Jews, resistance fighters and German army deserters. Seifert had successfully migrated to Canada by claiming he had been born in Estonia.
After Seifert was found guilty in abstentia of eleven murders by a military tribunal in Verona, Italy, in 2000, it took the Canadian government more than seven years to surrender Seifert to Italian authorities on February, 15, 2008. The Canadian Minister of Justice didn’t order his transport to Italy until December 28, 2005; then Seifert appealed his extradition before the British Columbia Court of Appeal. That court ordered him to be jailed on August 4, 2007 and Seifert’s appeal versus incarceration failed. Seifert died in an Italian military prison in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, in the Campania region of Italy, in 2010. His body went unclaimed by friends or relatives. He was buried in a cemetery near Caserta.
MP Robert Kaplan, as Solicitor General in the Trudeau government from 1980 to 1984, tried to push the Canadian government into ending the immunity of Nazi war criminals in Canada. He elicited extradition requests from Western governments and initiated investigations.
The Complete Failure of the Deschênes Commission
MP Robert Kaplan
On January 23, 1985, Robert Kaplan, no longer Solicitor General, rose in the House of Commons and informed Parliament that Josef Mengele had applied to immigrate to Canada in 1982, and it was feared he might, in fact, still be in Canada.
It was this revelation from a highly respected member of parliament that prompted Canada’s Minister of Justice to announce on February 7, 1985 that Jules Deschênes, a Justice of the Court of Appeal of Quebec, would head an independent Commission of Inquiry to determine whether or not “a considerable number of Nazi war criminals” might have gained admittance to Canada through a variety of illegal or fraudulent means.
The Deschênes Commission, with an operational budget of $2 million, submitted its findings at the end of 1986, a year later than originally anticipated, and the Government tabled the ‘Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, Part 1: Public to the following year.
In a nutshell, the Canadian public was told that any allegations that Canada was a haven for WW II war criminals were much exaggerated. Public reassurance would be bolstered by the following synopsis:
The master list of possible suspects compiled by the Commission contained the names of just 774 individuals; an addendum listed 38 names, and there was a further list of 71 German scientists and technicians. Of the 774 suspects on the master list, 341 were found never to have landed or resided in Canada, 21 had landed in Canada but had left for another country, 86 had died in Canada, and 4 could not be located in this country. The Commission could find no prima facie evidence of war crimes in the files of 154 further suspects. Therefore, it recommended that 606 files be closed.”
Whereas central European countries were, by and large, not eager to expose the extent to which its former citizens had been willing and eager to kill Jews and steal their properties, the one country that was most eager to have Canada extradite alleged war criminals, Israel, had a 1967 Extradition Agreement with Canada that contained two obstacles to the extradition of Nazi war criminals to Israel: the offence leading to extradition must have been committed within the territory of Israel, and must have been committed after the signing of the agreement (1967).
To show that some actions were being taken, Canada appointed an Assistant Deputy Minister to head an investigation of 20 suspects. Ten months after the Deschênes Report was submitted, and by the 40th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, no charges had been laid. Initially, three charges were laid.
None would stick.
Imre Finta
Imre Finta gained the distinction of being the first person to be prosecuted in Canada for war crimes arising from World War II in December of 1987 after having assisted in the deportation of 8,617 Jews from Szeged, Hungary as a policeman for the Nazis. He was acquitted of kidnapping and manslaughter in Ontario’s Supreme Court and this verdict was upheld by the Ontario Court of Appeal in April of 1992 and by the Supreme Court in March of 1994. He died in his sleep in a Toronto nursing home in 2003.
In December of 1989, Michael Pawlowski, became only the second person charged under Canada’s war crimes law. The 72-year-old resident of Renfrew, Ontario, was charged with eight counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the deaths of 410 Jews and 80 Poles during World War II. Specifically, he was alleged to have murdered 400 Jews in the hamlet of Snov, and another ten who escaped, as well as 80 Poles in the village of Yeskovichi, in the Minsk region of his native Byelorussia, in 1942. Ultimately, he was not convicted of eight counts of murder after judges refused to allow the prosecution to send a judicial commission to the Soviet Union to collect evidence, finding that the introduction of such evidence would prejudice Mr. Pawlowski’s right to a fair trial.
The government had wanted to present videotaped testimony from witnesses in Belarus, the former Soviet republic of Byelorussia, but the Supreme Court of Canada upheld an Ontario Court judge’s ruling blocking the testimony. The Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the Crown appeal from Judge Chadwick’s ruling in the Pawlowski case and charges had to be dropped in February of 1992 when Pawlowski was age 74. The Crown was forced to contribute to Pawlowski’s legal costs. In response, David Matas, a lawyer for B’nai Brith Canada, wrote Justice Delayed: Nazi War Criminals in Canada to assert that crimes trials were a low priority for the Canadian judiciary.
Stephen Reinstetter, unconvicted, 1991
In January of 1990, Stephen Reinstetter was charged with kidnapping 3,000 Jews in order to send them to death camps in 1942. Charges were ultimately dropped against this former Hlinka Party official in 1991 after a commission was sent to Czechoslovakia to take testimony from elderly witnesses. The federal government abruptly dropped charges against him on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
Having failed to gain any convictions by May of 1992, the Crown’s efforts to pursue Nazi war criminals were understandably judged as lacklustre by those who took an interest. In November of 1992, the Institute for International Affairs of B’nai Brith released a harshly critical study of Canada’s abject failure to prosecute Nazi war criminals but the Canadian media, by and large, was disinterested. The Minister of Justice decided it would be prudent to discontinue further investigations by March of 1994.
Nevertheless, the government did attempt to prosecute a former Yugoslav police officer who was stationed in Belgrade during World War II. In December of 1992, Radislav Grujicic of Windsor, Ontario was charged with ten counts of murder, with conspiracy to murder and with conspiracy to kidnap, but the Crown stayed proceedings in April, 1994, due to Grujicic’s ill health (heart disease and diabetes) at age 84. There would be no conviction. It was later revealed that Grujicic had worked briefly for the RCMP’s Special Branch, under the name Marko Jankovic, spying on suspected communists as a former CIA operative.
The Supreme Court of Canada had just upheld the acquittal of Imre Finta in a narrow 4-3 decision in March of 1994. In late April the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association and the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada submitted arguments requesting that the Supreme Court re-hear the appeal. Although the Attorney General of Canada supported the request, the Supreme Court turned it down.
Having achieved lacklustre results, to put it mildly, the size of its War Crimes Unit to support the scope of the Deschênes Commission was reduced from 24 to 11 in January of 1995. It was determined that the only successful way to “go after” suspected war criminals in Canada was to punish them with civil proceedings. Suspected war criminals might be stripped of their citizenship, after which they might be deported. Twelve cases were subsequently referred to the Immigration Minister for scrutiny.
Here, below, are excerpts from a report on the findings and repercussions of the Deschênes Commission prepared by Grant Purves of the Political and Social Affairs Division—a report originating in 1987 but revised on October 16, 1998—to update the Canadian public and government officials as to the alleged presence of war criminals in Canada.
“In some 12 cases referred to the Immigration Minister, it had to be decided whether there was sufficient evidence that the accused war criminals or collaborationists had obtained entry to Canada by concealing information from and lying to security and immigration officials. The government began proceedings against the twelfth of this group in July 1997 and by early October 1998 had initiated proceedings in a further three cases. Death due to old age, however, has been almost as successful as federal prosecutors in dealing with the accused: three have died while their cases were underway; two have decided not to oppose proceedings and have left the country; one has been found guilty of concealing material circumstances, and one has been found not guilty.”
After citing failures to convict “Kenstavicus” [sic] and the aforementioned Nemsila, Purves mentioned that Erich Tobias had died not long after the Supreme Court had ruled in September of 1997 to prosecute a case against him. Tobias had been identified as a suspect for the murders of Jews in Latvia,
Allegedly complicit with the confinement and deportation of Jews as a member of the Royal Hungarian Police in 1944, Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary opted not to oppose the loss of his Canadian citizenship and left the country because a case was to be heard in July of 1997.
Similarly, Mamertas Maciukas left the country to avoid prosecution after he was accused of participation in a Lithuanian police battalion that oppressed civilians.
Wasily Bogoutin
After it was determined in February of 1998 that Wasily Bogutin was complicit in the execution of “civilians” as well as their deportations to “forced labour camps” in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, his Canadian citizenship was formally revoked but deportation procedures were not immediately forthcoming. It was ultimately determined that he should not be found guilty of any charges. The official rationale was stated thus: “The Minister of Citizenship and Immigration applied to admit statements by three persons now deceased or mentally incompetent – The Federal Court of Canada, Trial Division, dismissed the application – The evidence was neither necessary nor reliable – Given the witnesses’ age and health when interviewed, their deaths and mental incompetence were not sudden or unexpected – Nine other witnesses testified to the events – The statements, made 50 years after the events, were not spontaneous declarations, were not mechanically recorded and contained obvious hearsay – Further, local communist officials helped contact and locate the witnesses and there were problems with the cautions given.”
In other cases, suspects were excused and the practices of Canadian immigration officials were scapegoated. For instance, in 1998, Judge McKeown found that Peteris Vitols had not concealed his membership in the Latvian Army or Waffen SS and that on entry to Canada he may not have been asked about his membership in volunteer police organisations or about his wartime activities. Judge McKeown found no evidence that Vitols had personally committed war crimes; furthermore, the definition of “collaborator” was poorly drafted at the time Vitols was processed and security officials were using their discretion as to whether or not to “clear” low level collaborators who could otherwise be considered desirable immigrants.
* * *
Dmytro Kupiak standing in front of the restaurant he owned on the Queensway in Ontario
Accused of war crimes by the Soviet Union, Dmytro Kupiak, was one of four alleged war criminals Moscow was attempting to have extradited from Canada in 1994 for the slaughter of innocents during the end of World War II. He was the subject of a 1991 book by Bronislaw Szeremety, Warlord: His Crimes and False Memories, written to counteract Kupiak’s own vainglorious account of his horrendous exploits when he commanded death squads of local bandits who allegedly tortured, burned alive and dismembered alive their victims. His murderous exploits are also referenced in War Criminals in Canada (Detselig 1995) by University of Regina professor James McKenzie.
According to a Wikipedia entry in 2023: “The commander of the SB OUN-UPA death squad in charge of the annihilation of Adamy, Dmitry (Dymitr) Kupiak (who operated under the pseudonym Sławko Weslar in the Nazi German Distrikt Galizien) after the war emigrated to Canada, under the name Dmytro Kupyak. His five co-conspirators were tried in October 1969 by the Lviv District Court in Soviet Ukraine and sentenced to 15 years of hard labour. Kupyak “Klei” published his own memories in a book called Spohady nerostrilanoho (Memoirs of an Unshot, Toronto 1991), in Ukrainian. His war crimes’ investigation by the Canadian Department of Justice was subsequently terminated.”
Born in 1918, Kupyak died on June, 13, 1995 in Toronto. Canada never consented to send him to the Soviet Union to face charges. There is a school in Ukraine that bears his name.
Delay, delay, delay… On February 20, 1998, a federal court ruled that Vasily Bogutin had gained admission to Canada by fraud, false representation or by concealing material circumstances but it took cabinet another six months to formally rescind citizenship. Bogutin then made a refugee claim to the Adjudication Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board. It took time for the Canadian legal system to clarify that “a person is excluded from the refugee definition if there are serious reasons for considering that the person has committed a war crime, or a crime against humanity.” Bogutin was still embroiled in ineligibility proceedings when he died. By filing that refugee claim, it became clear there was a loophole in the immigration system and it was proposed there ought to be a 1993 amendment to the Immigration Act also in response to similar delaying tactics employed by Jacob Luitjens. When it was passed it became known colloquially as the Luitjens Amendment.
Legalese was also a major stumbling block in efforts to determine whether or not Peteris Vitols had also gained admission by false representation, fraud or concealment of material circumstances. As part of the Waffen SS and a Latvian police battalion in 1941, he was taken prisoner by the Allies and ended up in camp for displaced persons in Germany. He did not tell Canadian immigration about his service to the Nazis but claimed in his “de-naturalization” hearings that he was never asked to do so. Mr. Justice McKeown heard from an immigration officer named Keelan who had been employed in 1950 interviewing displaced persons in German and decided it was likely Vitols had not been thoroughly questioned. The judge therefore dismissed the government’s case against Vitols in September of 1989.
Other post-war immigrants to Canada who were also accused of concealing their affiliation with pro-Nazi forces during World War II include Vladimir Katriuk (a policeman in Byelorussia), Serge Kisluk (a policeman associated with atrocities in Ukraine), Eduards Podins (concentration camp guard in Latvia), Wasyl Odynsky (guard in forced labour and concentration camps in Poland), Michael Baumgartner (guard in concentration camps in Poland and Germany) and Ludwig Nebel (a police lieutenant in Galicia involved in the arrest and detention of more than 200 Jewish civilians who were turned over to the Gestapo).
Another reason some suspected World War II criminals were not apprehended, questioned or prosecuted was their association with ongoing and secretive American efforts to combat global communism. Radislav Grujicic, as previously mentioned, was a former CIA operative who had worked for the RCMP’s Special Branch under the alias Marko Jankovic. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Grujicic had been h hired by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency after the war for its clandestine Operation Paperclip. Grujicic had immigrated to Canada in 1948 and became a Canadian citizen in 1956. He was a paid informer for the RCMP security service from 1949 to 1951. Yugoslavia asked for extradition when his cover was blown but Canada did not grant the extradition request on the grounds that Canada did not have an extradition agreement with Yugoslavia. In 1994, when the federal Justice Department finally prosecuted 83-year-old Radislav Grujicic of Windsor, Ontario for crimes against humanity (not against Jews but rather conspiring with German occupying forces in Belgrade to persecute communists), the case was soon stayed because the accused suffered from heart disease and diabetes.
Sol Littman
Sol Littman, Canadian director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, accused federal officials of deliberately losing the case, proceeding with the knowledge that the case would not be viable due to the poor health of the accused. “I think they were intent on discrediting the whole war crimes prosecution process,” said Littman, “to make it seem pitiless and vengeful in the eyes of the Canadian public.”
Jozef Kirschbaum’s career within the ruling Hlinka Party was closely aligned with that of his older friend, law professor Ferdinand Durcansky, who was cited as a Category A war criminal in 1946 and sentenced to death in absentia by Czechoslovakia’s elected communist government in 1947. Having joined the Hlinka Party in 1927, Durcansky used Nazi funding to create anti-Semitic publications (1936-1938) and later became Nazi Slovakia’s Foreign Minister and Deputy PM, having served as a Cabinet Minister for Justice, Health, Transportation and Public Works portfolios.
Ferdinand Durkansky
As a businessman, he owned drug companies in Slovakia and later in Argentina. He took refuge in Rome in the wake of WW II and used Vatican connections to escape to South America, as did Eichmann. Following the lead of Kirschbaum, he gained safe refuge in Toronto (1950-1951) and retained Canada as outlet for anti-Semitism into the 1970s. Long associated with the pro-fascist Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations (ABN), Durcansky was linked to U.S. spy agency program in West Germany known as “Upswing” (1952-1958) coordinated by former Nazi intelligence officer Major General Reinhard Gehlen, previously chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence service on the eastern front.
According to Mark Aarons and John Loftus in their book, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis and Soviet Intelligence, Ferdinand Durcansky unsuccessfully planned a post-war coup in Slovakia and later “travelled freely in and out of Canada, despite the fact that the government was fully aware of his war crimes.”
A HISTORICAL MYSTERY
For further reading, consult Unauthorized Entry: The Truth about Nazi War Criminals in Canada, 1946–1956 by Howard Margolian (University of Toronto Press). For further research, the National Archives of Canada contains the private papers of Solomon Littman (1920-2017), the former Canadian Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, author of War Criminal on Trial: The Rauca Case (1983), founding editor of the Canadian Jewish News and the first Director of B’nai Brith’s “League for Human Rights.” Born in Toronto, it was Littman who alleged SS doctor Josef Mengele had applied for a visa to Canada from Buenos Aires in 1962.
The Deschênes Commission formally discredited that contention in its report. His second book, Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion (2003) investigated members of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS division who were allowed to resettle in Canada after WW II. In containers 42, 43 and 44 of Littman’s archive there are materials pertaining to individuals who are listed within a National Library category called SUSPECTED WAR CRIMINAL CASE FILES in which there are close to two hundred names listed alphabetically.
FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION
Helmut Oberlander was accused of participation in the execution of civilians as a member of the German Einsatzcommando.
Johann Dueck was accused of concealing similar activities as a policeman in German-occupied Ukraine.
Both men were tried before Associate Chief Justice James Jerome of the Federal Court. In early March 1996, an Assistant Deputy Attorney General complained personally and in writing to Chief Justice Julius Isaac about the length of time it was taking Justice Jerome to render verdict. The official also stated that the government would transfer the cases to the Supreme Court if they were not expedited.
The Chief Justice replied that Justice Jerome had agreed to speed up work on his decisions. When news of the private meeting and letter became public, Justice Jerome resigned from the cases. His successor, Justice Cullen, ruled that judicial independence had been infringed and ordered a halt to the proceedings. The Federal Court of Appeal overturned the stay of proceedings, a ruling that was upheld by the Supreme Court in a ruling of September 1997.
Tobias has died. Judge Noel, of the Federal Court, has ruled that, since the proceedings are civil, not criminal, the two remaining accused can be formally questioned in advance of their trials and the defense must disclose the position they will take at the revocation hearings.
“At the beginning of his hearings in October 1998, the government abruptly withdrew allegations that Dueck had been personally involved in the arrest and execution of civilians. The Oberlander hearings are expected to conclude early in 1999.
In 1997, federal lawyers in St. Catharines, Ontario accused Serge Kisluk of collaborating in Nazi crimes and atrocities against Ukrainian civilians, alleging he was an auxiliary policeman in the Turlysk region, and claiming Kisluk had obtained his citizenship papers by false representation or fraud.
- Vladimir Katriuk, accused of concealing his participation in actions against partisans and atrocities against civilians while a policeman in Byelorussia, is awaiting the judge’s decision following completion of the hearings;
- Serge Kisluk, accused of concealing membership in a police unit that committed atrocities in German-occupied Ukraine, is also awaiting a decision;
- Eduards Podins, accused of concealing his past as a concentration camp guard in Latvia, is scheduled for hearings in November 1998;
- Wasyl Odynsky, accused of failing to divulge his role as a guard in forced labour and concentration camps in Poland during 1943 and 1944, is scheduled for hearings in November 1998;
- Michael Baumgartner, accused of concealing his membership in the Waffen SS and work as a guard at concentration camps in Poland and Germany, is scheduled for hearings in November 1998; and
- Ludwig Nebel faces deportation proceedings for concealing his illegal Nazi activities in his native Austria in the early 1930s and his command of a “resettlement action” while a police lieutenant in Galicia during the war. The latter action led to the arrest and detention of more than 200 Jewish civilians, and their later surrender to the Gestapo.
- Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary was accused of involvement, while a member of the Royal Hungarian Police in 1944, in the confinement of thousands of Jews and their subsequent deportation to death camps. In July 1997, just before his trial was to begin, he decided not to oppose the loss of his citizenship. He has since left the country.
- Mamertas Maciukas, accused of concealing membership in a Lithuanian police battalion which had committed crimes against civilians, also decided not to contest the proceedings and voluntarily left the country.
This link is to the declassified Rodal Report on Nazi War Criminals in Canada.
And finally, this link is to the B’nai Brith response to the declassification.
RODAL REPORT AFTERMATH
[Here follows an Addendum for the release of the long-secret ‘Nazis in Canada’ Rodal Report that was finally made public by the government of Canada in 2024. This article could be re-titled, Hey, Our Babysitter Was A Nazi.]
—
Toronto family who unknowingly employed war criminal fears nothing has changed
Story by The Canadian Press
OTTAWA — Almost 30 years ago, Gail Bocknek turned on the evening news and watched dumbfounded as a man who had worked for her family for decades was identified as a Nazi war criminal.
Bocknek, the daughter of European Jews who had many extended family members die in the Holocaust, felt sick.
“I was just glad that my parents didn’t live to see this,” Bocknek said in a recent interview.
The stomach-churning memories of that day resurfaced for Bocknek last fall when Canadian parliamentarians of all stripes unknowingly applauded a man who had fought with a Nazi unit in Ukraine.
And they resurfaced once again earlier this month when the Liberal government agreed to declassify 15 more pages from a 1985 report on Canada’s less-than-flattering history of allowing former Nazis into Canada and failing to prosecute or deport them when their crimes came to light.
Bocknek said although decades have passed, she is not convinced anything has changed. She has little confidence that Canada’s current laws are sufficient to keep out people who committed atrocities overseas.
“I’m just saying that they’ve got to be accountable and they have to protect us,” she said.
Bocknek said she was about six years old when her parents hired a housekeeper, Emma Tobiass, who became a fixture in their lives. Emma’s husband, Erichs Tobiass, was employed as a mechanic for a car dealership but also worked for the family regularly doing odd jobs and house sitting.
“They came and stayed with my brother and I when my parents were out of town,” she recalls.
When Bocknek married and had children of her own, Erichs and Emma Tobiass continued to work for her family as well, including looking after her children.
Bocknek said he was never a “warm man” but was also never cruel.
Then in March 1995 Bocknek was watching a dinner hour newscast and saw a report that Canada was trying to revoke the citizenships of four men believed to have been Nazi collaborators.
Bocknek heard the name Erichs Tobiass, but no photo ran with the segment, leaving her unsure if the report referred to the man she knew.
She frantically called the TV station looking for more details, to no avail. At 11 p.m. they watched the news again and this time there was a photo.
“And it was Erichs,” said Bocknek.
She said the first thing she did was go out to the front of her house where some lilies Erichs had planted for them still grew. She pulled them all out and “threw them into the ravine.”
Soon after she tried to call him, looking for answers.
“He wouldn’t come to the phone,” she said.
“This lady answered, and I said, ‘I would just like you to ask Erichs one question.; And she said, ‘what?’ And I said, ‘Would he have killed my brother and I?’
All Bocknek got in response was a click as the woman hung up the phone.
While the family had no idea about his true identity, the Canadian government did — and had for nearly 30 years.
In 1966, Tobiass was on a list of six alleged war criminals from Latvia provided to the Canadian government by Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor who dedicated his life to tracking down Nazi war criminals.
A 1995 report on Tobiass’s case said documents show Canada refused to meet with Wiesenthal about the list.
Tobiass was alleged to have been part of a Nazi commando unit with the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, which stands accused of murdering as many as 30,000 Jews between 1941 and 1943.
He moved to Canada in the 1950s and became a citizen in 1957, settling in Toronto.
Bocknek said she never got any indication of that history from either Erichs or Emma.
“You know they never had children, and Erichs said to my brother and I when we went to (her) funeral that Emma always thought of us as her kids, and we sort of knew that. That’s how she looked after us,” said Bocknek.
Canada was among many western countries that admitted thousands of Nazi war criminals in the years after the Second World War, even as many countries, including Canada, were rejecting Jewish asylum seekers.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller said it is clear Canada’s history on this front is “shameful.”
“It was easier to come in as a war criminal than it was as a Jew,” he said in an interview.
Canada began taking steps to confront that history in the mid-1980s, holding a commission of inquiry known as the Deschenes Commission to look at how so many war criminals had ended up as Canadians.
That commission identified more than 800 people possibly living in Canada with ties to the Nazis, with 29 meriting special attention by the government.
While parts of that report have been released publicly, there are still many pages that have not, including the list of names. It remains unclear exactly how many were ever investigated.
The Justice Department’s war crimes unit, created after the Deschenes Commission released its findings, said in 2002 it had attempted to prosecute or deport 18 people, but only two had actually left the country. At least half of that number died before their cases concluded.
In 1987 Canada changed the Criminal Code to allow war criminals to be prosecuted in Canada for crimes overseas. But the first prosecutions failed after one defendant successfully argued he had just been following orders.
Canada decided in 1995 it would move to try and deport suspected war criminals if prosecutions wouldn’t work. Tobiass was one of the first four people informed in the winter of 1995 that his citizenship was being reviewed.
Legal wranglings delayed the case for years and he died in 1997 at the age of 86.
Other cases lingered in the courts for decades, including that of Helmut Oberlander, one of the three men Canada tried to deport along with Tobiass.
A judge concluded in 2000 that Oberlander had failed to disclose his wartime activities when he applied for citizenship in 1953. Canada revoked his citizenship for the first of several times in 2008.
The case remained in the courts for more than another decade as Oberlander fought the various revocation decisions. He died in Waterloo, Ont. in 2021 at the age of 97, still a Canadian citizen.
Bocknek said she has no confidence that Canada is properly checking on the histories of those it admits, even today.
“People lie on their citizenship applications all the time,” she said.
Miller said the system is better but agreed it is not perfect.
“The security situation in Canada today is radically different than it was then,” he said.
“But it doesn’t mean that it is airtight.”
He said Canada unsuccessfully tried to revoke the citizenship of someone accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia as recently as January.
“So these things do happen. I’m not naive enough to suggest to you that this doesn’t happen anymore. But the way we do triage today with biometrics and background checks and the extensive information that we require from people coming into Canada … is much more extensive than it was in the late ’40s or throughout the ’50s and even ’60s.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 19, 2024.
- Mia Rabson, The Canadian Press