Simon Wiesenthal has identified two Nazi war criminals living in Canada and has urged Canada’s Solicitor General, Robert Kaplan, to initiate action against them, the Simon Wiesenthal Center at Yeshiva University here reported today. Wiesenthal, who heads the war crimes documentation center based in Vienna, estimates that some 1,000 Nazi war criminals presently live in Canada.
His letter to Kaplan dated January 4, referred to two of them, Anton Shpak, alias Anatol Belotserkovski, and Bogda Babiak, both Ukrainians by birth. According to Wiesenthal, Shpak is a former deputy chief of police in Bela Tzerkow, Ukraine, near Kiev, who participated in the mass execution of about 2,000 Jews between October, 1941 and February, 1943. Bubiak was identified as a former leader of the SS Ukrainian “Galizien” division, based in Lemberg.
The division was established in 1943 by Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler to enlist Ukrainian volunteers on the Russian front where the Wehrmacht was taking a drubbing from the Red Army. The “Galizier” division was identified at the Nuremberg war crimes trials as a “criminal organization which carried out crimes against humanity and other atrocities.”
Immediately after the war, members of the division were imprisoned in Rimini, Italy, under American military jurisdiction. According to the Wiesenthal Center, many of the Ukrainians, who were Catholic, obtained help from Vatican sources and managed to reach the United States and Canada.
Babiak now lives in Montreal where he has been employed for 21 years as an assistant clerk at Steinberg’s, a major grocery chain. Shpak’s present where-abouts are uncertain. Wiesenthal Center officials have informed Kaplan that a man matching his description is living in Quebec under the name of Belotserkovski. Kaplan has been urged to determine whether these men lied about their wartime activities when they were admitted to Canada.
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.
