The Canadian government has pledged to examine proposal to crack down on former Nazi war criminals who obtained Canadian citizenship by concealing their Nazi past, The matter was raised at a meeting in Ottawa between Secretary of State Hugh Faulkner and a delegation of the Canadian Jewish Congress headed by Alan Rose, national executive director.
the CJC requested the government to abrogate the citizenship of any person accused of war crimes who obtained citizenship under false pretenses, According to the CJC this has been a “long and worrisome problem” of many years standing since Canada has no machinery or procedure for revoking naturalization.
According to a CJC spokesman, Faulkner Immediately Instructed Undersecretary of State Jean Boucher to carry out a thorough Investigation in close cooperation with Rose and to examine concrete proposals for a solution of the problem. The spokesman noted that Faulkner, who Is not Jewish, once spent six months on an Israeli kibbutz where many of his colleagues were survivors of Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps.
According to the CJC there are war criminals among certain Eastern European elements, notably Ukrainians, Estonians and Lithuanians, who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and subsequently immigrated to Canada and obtained citizenship by concealing their past activities. The CJC cited a recent case of a naturalized Canadian who went to Soviet Georgian on a visit and was arrested there for Nazi crimes committed during the war.
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