Alex Laak, 53, a self-confessed Nazi gauleiter, committed suicide last night by hanging himself in the garage of his home here.
Last week, a Radio Moscow broadcast discussing the forthcoming trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, Nazi “specialist” in the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews, charged that “a former Nazi leader and other fascist murderers are living safely abroad, some of them in Winnipeg.”
Laak wrote a letter to a local newspaper, the Winnipeg Free Press, saying that the Moscow Radio evidently meant him in mentioning Nazis living here. He confessed in his letter that he had been guiltier of a Nazi concentration camp at Tallin, Esthohia, in 1942 and 1943.
Canada’s External Affairs Department, at Ottawa, denied at first that there were any former Nazis living in Canada. Today, however, a Department spokesman stated that, if there were any Nazis in this country, “they entered illegally.” Laak has been in Canada since 1948.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
