3000 War Criminals Believed in Canada

A delegation from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles told Canadian Solicitor General Elmer McKay that as many as 3,000 Nazi war criminals and collaborators from all parts of Europe may have found haven in Canada and urged the Canadian government to track them down.

The delegation, which visited Ottawa last week, had an hour-long meeting with McKay, according to Sol Littman, the Wiesenthal Center’s Canadian representative. He said that “Most of the people who took shelter in Canada (after World War II) came from Easter” European countries,” and among them were “Ukrainian SS men, Latvian police auxilliaries, Yugoslav Ustashi, Rumanian Iron Guardists, Hungarian Cross and Arrow members and Slovak Hlinka Guardists.” Most of those Nazi and fascist groups were directly involved in the extermination of European Jews.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center, noted that “Canada was used by the British and American intelligence services as a dumping ground for an assortment of collaborators and fascist elements from throughout Europe.”

Littman urged McKay to continue and expand the work barely begun by his predecessor, former Solicitor General Robert Kaplan. “We need more than a lone Mountie — no matter how industrious — to tackle the job of investigating and pursuing war criminals in Canada,” he said.

Martin Mendelsohn, the Wiesenthal Center’s general counsel, stressed to McKay the importance of the U.S. effort to denaturalize and deport war criminals which began in 1977 and culminated with the creation of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) in the Justice Department in 1979.

The Wiesenthal Center’s estimate of the number of war criminals in Canada is based on an eight week tour of six European countries recently completed by Littman. He visited England, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania and Yugoslavia.