Evidence of Canadian participation in efforts to provide safe haven for certain Nazis right after World War II is contained in an unpublished section of the Deschenes Commission’s report on Nazi war criminals in Canada, presented to the House of Commons last week.
According to MP Robert Kaplan, a former Solicitor General, “it’s essential that it be brought out so that Canadians will know the whole story of war crimes.”
Kaplan was referring to study done for the Deschenes Commission by researcher Ati Rodel which could be embarrassing for Ottawa on several counts. It outlines Canada’s willing participation in a British-U.S. plan to settle German scientists, many of them active Nazis, in Canada, the U.S. and Britain to keep them out of Soviet hands.
Rodel is said to have found evidence, though not conclusive, that British and American intelligence may have spirited known Nazi collaborators out of Eastern Europe into Canada, without the government’s knowledge, in order to establish anti-Soviet spy networks.
Rodel’s study includes a review of anti-Semitic, fascist, political organizations active before and during the war, such as the Iron Guard in Rumania, Thunder Cross in Latvia, and the Arrow and Cross in Hungary which collaborated with the Nazis. Some of their members may have entered Canada despite regulations to keep them out.
One part of the study deals with Count Jacques de Bernonville, a French collaborationist who was the “right hand man” of war criminal Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon.” The Count, who reached Quebec after the war, was enabled by Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent to leave the country before he could be extradited to France.
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