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 While there may once have been records of so-called undesirables or suspected subversives, the practice now seems outdated.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.
