Canada Process to Try Nazis Seems to Have Reached End

Little more than three years after Parliament enacted legislation enabling Canadian courts to try suspected Nazi war criminals living in Canada, the process appears to have reached the end of the road.

Last Friday, Justice James Chadwick of the Ontario Supreme Court in Ottawa rejected a government appeal to send a judicial team to the Soviet Union to gather and videotape evidence against Michael Pawlowski of Renfrew, Ontario.

The justice concluded that Pawlowski could not receive a fair trial under the procedures for taking evidence in the Soviet Union.

He cited the fallibility of memory nearly a half-century after the events occurred and the difficulties of cross-examining witnesses whose testimony was on videotape played in translation.

The 74-year-old Pawlowski, a native of Byelorussia who has lived in Renfrew since 1951, was originally charged in November 1989 with eight counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges concerned the deaths of 410 Jews and 80 Poles who were killed in the Minsk region of White Russia in 1942.

Four of the charges had to be dropped when a key witness, Petr Korelev, died last month. According to Justice Department lawyer Peter Sutton, he would have given critical testimony regarding the massacre of 80 Poles and eight Jews in the village of Yeskovichi.

According to Winnipeg lawyer David Matas, author of “Justice Delayed: Nazi War Criminals in Canada,” the government will probably press its case against Pawlowski, a naturalized citizen, despite the lack of substantial evidence.

That strategy is likely to result in an acquittal, but the subsequent appeal could serve as a challenge to Chadwick’s ruling, Matas suggested.

EFFORTS HAVE COME TO NOUGHT

The case illustrates some of the pitfalls which may not have been foreseen when Parliament added the war crimes amendment to the Criminal Code in September 1987.

The legislation was enacted after a special commission headed by Quebec Superior Court Judge Jules Deschenes sifted through a list of 650 suspected war criminals in Canada and identified 20 urgent cases and 218 that warranted further investigation.

The law allows Canadian courts, for the first time, to prosecute suspects for crimes committed on foreign soil, and also allows for civil proceedings, such as deportation and extradition.

Pawlowski, a retired carpenter, was the second of three alleged war criminals arrested under the measure. The charges against him are the only ones still on public record.

So far, Canada’s attempts to convict anyone of war crimes have come to nought.

The first defendant, Imre Finta of Hamilton, Ontario, a former captain in the pro-Nazi Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie, was acquitted a year ago. He had been charged with the kidnapping, forcible confinement and robbery of 8,617 Hungarian Jews in Szeged in 1944.

In March, charges were dropped against Stephen Reistetter of St. Catharines, Ontario, who was accused of sending about 3,000 Jews in Bardejov, Slovakia, to Nazi death camps.

Crown lawyer Gilles Renaud said there was insufficient evidence to proceed against Reistetter after two witnesses died and others proved unwilling or incapable of testifying.

In Vancouver, more than two years have elapsed without a ruling since a denaturalization hearing against Jacob Luitjens, a Dutch-born botany professor who was convicted in absentia in the Netherlands for collaborating with the Nazis in World War II.

Canada’s only successful proceeding against a war criminal long antedates the war crimes amendment. In 1983, Albert Helmut Rauca of Toronto was extradited to West Germany to stand trial for the murder of 11,585 Jews in the ghetto of Kaunas, Lithuania. Rauca died before the case could be heard.