The concept of a secret registry of names kept by the federal government feels at odds with our perception of Canada. While there may once have been records of so-called undesirables or suspected subversives, the practice now seems outdated.
But there is at least one such list—reportedly about 900 names long—that is one of the government’s most closely guarded secrets. It is a record of alleged or suspected war criminals and collaborators who were believed to have found refuge in Canada after the Second World War. These individuals were investigated nearly forty years ago by the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by retired Quebec Superior Court chief justice Jules Deschênes. The so-called Deschênes Commission was initiated in part due to persistent rumours that Josef Mengele, the sadistic Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, had entered and possibly lived in Canada in the early 1960s. When Deschênes issued his final report in 1986, the annexes that listed those investigated were never made public.
Ottawa is refusing to declassify the list, as reported last week by the Globe and Mail, which joined a group of organizations to file an Access to Information request for the names. Bernie Farber, formerly with the Canadian Jewish Congress and the son of a Holocaust survivor, called the decision “a shameful blot.”
Whether this is a tenable long-term position for the government remains to be seen. The passage of time has neither diminished the public’s interest in the issue nor has it become any less relevant, as last year’s Yaroslav Hunka scandal amply indicated. Pressured to act after Hunka—the then ninety-eight-year-old former Waffen-SS volunteer—was honoured by Parliament as a Canadian and Ukrainian hero for fighting the Russians in the Second World War, Immigration Minister Marc Miller indicated the government would release redacted or classified materials related to the file.
While Hunka has never been accused of war crimes, it is known that he volunteered for a Ukrainian SS division in 1943, a year after the Nazis’ Wannsee Conference set Hitler’s Final Solution in motion. Hunka’s unit was often called the Galicia Division, in reference to the Eastern European region where its recruits were drawn from. An estimated 2,000 Galicia Division veterans reportedly came to Canada in 1950 by special dispensation of the Canadian government. The Deschênes Commission determined there were perhaps as many as 600 former members of the unit left in the country in the mid-1980s.
Whether the Galicia Division participated in war crimes is a matter of considerable debate. The published, and public, first part of the Deschênes Commission’s final report concluded that charges against the unit had never been substantiated and that members had already been screened by Allied officials before their admission to Canada.
But four decades earlier, the Nuremberg tribunal had already established that the entire SS organization—including iterations like the Galicia Division—was a criminal enterprise, complicit in the Holocaust. The Deschênes findings were also contradicted by Alti Rodal, a historian hired by the commission to research the circumstances that led to the presence of Nazi war criminals in Canada. In a 1987 article for Canadian Dimension, journalist Sol Littman cited Rodal, noting that while Soviet and British agents were sent to screen the Galicia Division for potential war criminals, both failed to carry out the task effectively. The British agent, for example, had no history of the unit he was investigating, no documents to refer to, and could not speak Ukrainian.
Adding to the complexity, when the Galicia Division surrendered to Allied forces in 1945, it was a hodgepodge composed of the survivors of other decimated SS units and the former members of Auxiliary Police units set up by the occupying German Army. Even though there wasn’t evidence at the time to suggest the whole division participated in war crimes, it is known that some of its members were pulled from units believed to be guilty of such acts. There is also evidence pointing to the unit’s participation in numerous massacres—of Poles and possibly of Jews as well—as late as the spring of 1944.
“When the Deschênes Commission was active forty years ago, it could only rely on evidence provided by the Soviet authorities,” says John-Paul Himka, a professor emeritus in the department of history and classics at the University of Alberta, whose research focuses on Ukraine and the Holocaust. “Today Ukraine has opened all the archives that had formerly been kept secret, including the records of the Soviet security organs and documentation from the German occupation of Ukraine. There are also many more testimonies of Jewish and Polish victims of violence than there were in the 1980s. So it should be possible to verify where the individuals on the list stood on the spectrum of guilt and innocence.”
In preparation for the possible release of the commission’s classified annexes, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) consulted with what they termed a “discrete group of individuals or organizations” this summer. As reported by David Pugliese of the Ottawa Citizen, neither Holocaust survivors nor scholars were invited to weigh in on the issue, while representatives of the Ukrainian community were.
During the meetings, some of those present worried declassifying the rest of the final report could result in criminal prosecutions as much as in damaged reputations. In the aftermath of the Hunka scandal last year, Progress Report reported that the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies had received upward of $1.4 million in endowments and donations dedicated to members of the Galicia Division and one member of the Nazi-collaborationist Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Another veteran, Peter Savaryn, had been the university’s chancellor and had even received an Order of Canada. Stakeholders consulted by LAC also expressed concern that releasing the information could bolster Russian propaganda interests, as Vladimir Putin has characterized his war against Ukraine as a de-Nazification effort.
There’s also an element of history repeating here. “The Ukrainian Canadian community was generally opposed to the Deschênes Commission, viewing it as a Soviet-inspired attack on Ukrainians in Canada,” says Himka. An email obtained by The Walrus shows that the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) had been fundraising $150,000 to mount a legal challenge in case the government decided to release the names.
If such a disclosure ever occurs, it is unlikely to result in extraditions or war-crime trials, suggests Himka. “The overwhelming majority of the people on the list will have passed away by now.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean it shouldn’t be done. “First,” says Himka, “the leaders of the organized Ukrainian community have to confront the past, of migrants to Canada who were involved in the crimes of the German occupation. Second, the suppression of the full records of the Deschênes Commission invites study of the Canadian government’s role in protecting the reputation of those Ukrainians who were collaborationist or involved in crimes.”
The small cadre seeking to delay or prevent full transparency on this file are not doing their community any favours. The UCC, according to Himka, is a major lobbying group. What’s more, says Himka, there is an effort afoot by some members of the organized Ukrainian community to rewrite the history of the Second World War. It was the UCC that recommended that Hunka be invited for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit last year.
While Himka hopes the Ukrainian Canadian community will welcome openness on this issue, the responsibility ultimately rests with the federal government. Canada needs to account for its actions, past and present. Earlier this year, Miller released a previously redacted section of the Rodal Report as well as related government memos. The information contained therein revealed that the country had, since the war, refused at least four requests for the extradition of suspected Nazis. This included one request, opposed by former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in his capacity as justice minister in the late 1960s, for the extradition of a Latvian alleged to have been a firing squad captain who took part in the murders of over 5,100 Jews. Trudeau was concerned about how the extradition would impact social cohesion, arguing it would spark tensions among post-war Eastern European immigrant communities.
Declassifying part of an allegedly flawed investigation isn’t enough. Failures of policy—from allowing suspected war criminals into the country in the first place to the reasons this information was kept from the public—deserve comprehensive scrutiny.
