Rest home for the wicked (Canada allows many ex-Nazis living in the country to live in "peace")

The late Simon Wiesenthal denounced Canada years ago for failing to bring war criminals to justice. Our record has only gotten worse

When Simon Wiesenthal died on Sept. 20, the world mourned the loss of a man known for his tenacious passion for refusing to let the war criminals who orchestrated the Holocaust live out their days in peace. The survivor of 12 concentration camps is estimated to have aided in the capture of 1,100 Nazis worldwide. But for all his inspiring conviction, Wiesenthal refused since the early eighties to set foot in Canada. "He simply said he wasn't going to return to Canada because he felt there wasn't the political will to deal with the issue of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators," Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told reporters the week of Wiesenthal's death. But while Canada may have been famously condemned by the man who was known as the "conscience of the world," it does not seem to have made Ottawa any more anxious to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice. Rather, politicians in this country continue to send a dangerous message to more contemporary war criminals around the world looking for a nice place to retire.

With 60 years having elapsed since the liberation of the death camps, time is running out for Canada to redeem itself on the World War II file, says Bernie Farber, president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. "These guys are no spring chickens anymore," he says. But the prosecution of those Nazis who are still alive is more significant than just putting doddering old murderers behind bars, says Farber. By demonstrating, as Wiesenthal did, that war criminals cannot ever count on outrunning justice, Canada could, by continuing to hound old Nazis, demonstrate to other murderers that this country is no safe haven for them, either.

That's certainly not the message Ottawa is sending right now. According to documents obtained by the Western Standard last year from the federal Justice Department through an access to information request, as many as 1,690 alleged Second World War criminals had made their home in Canada as of Oct. 27, 2004. By last fall, roughly 25 per cent had died. And of the more than 1,000 of those still alive, only 56 are being pursued, with another seven in active litigation. No wonder the number of suspected war criminals of all varieties--from Austria, Germany, Ukraine, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and more--has soared in recent years, according to official government estimates. In 1997, the Justice Ministry estimated there were 477 such people living in Canada. In 2002, there were at least 2,406.

The reality is that Canadian officials lack the political will to hunt down and extradite war criminals, says John Thompson, president of the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto-based security think-tank. Often, he says, Ottawa is too fearful of upsetting ethnic groups (read Liberal voters) to bother with administering justice. In January, federal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler admitted as much when he told the editorial board of a national newspaper that Ottawa's refusal to prosecute criminals from the Sri Lankan/Tamil conflict who are living in Canada was the result of a need for his government to remain on good terms with the Tamil community. Liberal cabinet ministers have even been caught attending fundraising events for the Tamil Tigers terrorist group. "The Sri Lankans who are living in Canada are . . . Tamils, for the most part," Cotler said. "And you know, Toronto, I think, has the largest number of Tamils in the Tamil diaspora than anywhere else outside of Sri Lanka, so we've got to be very careful just in terms of our own relationships."

Playing politics is certainly easier than going to the trouble of investigating and trying war criminals. Lynn Lovett, counsel for Canada's Justice Ministry, says that those sorts of prosecutions fall under the joint jurisdiction of no fewer than three different government departments: Justice, Citizenship and Immigration, and the RCMP. After trying to lay charges under the Criminal Code against suspected Nazis in the eighties and nineties, Ottawa found that the process led to lengthy and expensive trials, which often failed to meet criminal trial standards for proof. The result was a string of acquittals. So, rather than press criminal charges, Canada focused on trying to deport war criminals--with only marginally better luck. Michael Baumgartner, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who lied to get into Canada after the war, was awaiting deportation orders when he died this past June.

With Nazis, Canada had the perfect opportunity to demonstrate it was capable of dealing with these sorts of criminals, says Thompson. With the hard work of people at the Wiesenthal Center and in the Israeli government, former SS guards and the like were much easier to locate than most war criminals. Sometimes, all it took was a little effort. In the eighties, Sol Littman, a Toronto spokesman for the Wiesenthal Center, embarrassed Ottawa by tracking down nearly 30 suspected war criminals that justice officials claimed they could not locate, by looking them up in the Toronto phone book and checking their social insurance numbers.

"CSIS had hunting orders for Nazis they've almost never had since," says Thompson. "To go after those guys was really easy. Everybody was doing it." To Ottawa, it seems, leaving the majority of criminals to die peacefully in Canada was even easier. But with a growing community of war criminals in this country, it seems inevitable that, one of these days, Ottawa won't have any choice but to face up to what has become a terribly difficult problem.

I certainly don’t dispute that the Allies may have committed unlawful acts. Hiroshima I know is a touchy topic here, but some may argue that incinerating civilians was not lawful. Although since learning recently that the Japanese had been working to develop their own A-bomb, America’s rush to finish it seems a lot easier to defend. The flames of Dresden was not a pretty entry into the war either – but one could argue the Germans bear collective guilt for allowing members of their citizenry to fall under state persecution – not only allowing it, but even rejoicing in it.

So for those that argue the tired refrain that the victors become the judge can be turned on its head. It is easy for Germans after Victory Day to claim ignorance of what was happening in their own nation; but one wonders if that wasn’t a case of the losers saying what anyone caught red handed would say to save their skins.

I understand clearly the point you and others are making on this point. And it is a great point to make. For some weird reason we have arrived in the Western World to think Fascism is bad, Socialism is good – when really they are simply factions of the same belief system. One reason this is so is that the generation that fought Hitler were largely a generation that embraced socialism. Many of them were elated when the Fascists and Communists made a pact to divide Poland. Only after Hitler’s betrayal did they come to demonize Fascism – and perhaps make their distinction between National Socialism and “pure” Socialism. So there is a anti-Fascist bias in our striving for international justice. It explains why Pinochet was destroyed, but Castro will die of old age.

I think what is particularly disgusting about Hitler’s followers is they not only sought to eliminate political opponents, as Stalin did, but were obsessed with racial purity. They followed the logical conclusion of eugenics to its very end. I admit we can argue until the cows come home who were the worse villains.

We can argue until the cows come home, because Fascism, after its demise 60 years ago (and please let's not include Pinochet among Fascists) was propagandized till no end, and still is propagandized, as the ultimate evil. The lie repeated 100 times becomes the truth. No, it's gone, it was gone in 1945, while Siberian gulags lasted for another 15 years, murdering in that time as many if not more as the Nazis had done (and certainly Mao did his share of murders during the same time.) All this does not register in your or mine conscioussness as the endlessly repeated crimes of Hitler. It simply doesn't exist. So it's a matter of perceptions, individual and societal, and those have been shaped by the propagandists, many of them sympathizers, fellow travelers or paid lackeys of the Communists.

There is no argument which is more evil, there is a question why we stubbornly continue to disregard the crimes of Communism.

Communist/socialist countries are very up on class background purity (witnessed by my dad personally when he was a young boy growing up in early years of Communist People's Repiblic of China just prior to the Great Leap Forward years). The only thing it is different from the Euro snobs in places like Edwardian Britain is that it is turned upside down in favour of those who are from humbled class origin and who are not wealthy. This type of classification is, as one historian in the 1970s put it, a form of mental racism.

But no leftists in the West would seriously consider this. This is one great hypocrisy they exhibit.

Clearly most people, my self included, recognize the Nazi regime as inherently wicked, as were regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

I don't think the crews who dropped the A-Bombs were evil and I don't think they thought they were doing evil.

However, there were unecessary measures taken after the war in Operation Keelhaul in which about a million Russians were repatriated by the U.S. and Britain. These Russians faced death by and large, and our side knew it. Those who took part in Operation Keelhaul knew it was a terrible thing they doing and felt very guilty about it for the most part, I imagine. I think they are very comparable to German soldiers involved in deporting innocent people to concentration camps. I think the analogy is very apt. I think both the German soldiers (and Ukrainians, Latvians, etc.) AND ours did what was morally wrong in these instances. I don't think we should hunting those people because they are "evil" because they are no more evil than their American and British counterparts in these two similar crimes. To be fair, the guiltiest in Operation Keelhaul were our top commanders, and I don't think it would serve any purpose to try them post-mortem for a terrible crime that somehow they excused themselves of in their own minds. They, however, committed as serious a crime against humanity as almost all the "Nazi war criminals" being pursued today.

I feel I ought to clarify some of my thoughts on this matter.

First, I don't think we should be trying to put our own veterans who may have taken part in atrocities in WWII on trial. In the heat of battle and war, bad and morally confused decisions are made. Even though Operation Keelhaul occurred after the war ended, it could be considered to be part of the war, a terrible thing, in its own right, though it was.

The point I am trying to make about pursuing people designated by some as "Nazi war criminals" is that any crimes they may have committed were done over 60 years ago. They almost certainly didn't think they were committing crimes that they would be punished for 60 years after the fact. Their cause was wrong and evil, I believe. But that fact does not make them evil in itself.
Leaving them alone is far more just than pursuing them
because they are NOT, in my opinion, the human devils some think them to be or, in fact, necessarily particularly wicked at all.

In my lifetime I have heard from a teacher, a co-worker, and a retired Army Colonel, stories of specific atrocities committed by our guys during and after the war.

1) My high school Latin teacher told us how his commanding officer told one of his men, who had just lost his best friend in battle to take a German prisoner out for a walk. What he meant was: "I'm giving you license to kill this German in cold blood." And that's exactly what happened.

2) A retired U.S. Army Colonel told me of his brother witnessing, during Operation Keelhaul, Russian deportees breaking the glass windows of the trains they were in with their heads and then cutting their own throats on the broken glass. He said his brother felt terrible about this. But what could he do to stop the deportation of these innocent people and their ghastly fate? (See any parallels here?)

3) A co-worker of mine who served in Japan in the USAF during the Korean War told me of a U.S. G.I. who befriended, if that's the word, a Japanese family of five after the war. For some reason the father of the family said something that offended him, and he proceeded to shoot the entire family. He was punished by receiving literally lowest form of reprimand from his commanding officer for committing this appalling quintuple murder, in other words, the mildest slap on the wrist.

My point is evil acts were committed by individuals on our side and their side. I am not defending the evil policies of mass murder of the Hitler regime. I can understand how some people still want revenge, although they say and may think it's justice. What the "Nazi-hunters" are doing is wrong, though, and they should cease and desist in committing the cruel and incredibly vindictive (and short-sighted) campaign they are on.

I hope this gets my point across a little better.

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