U.S. researchers have found what they say is a late draft of a secret list of more than 700 suspected Nazi war criminals believed to have settled in Canada after the Second World War, prompting fresh calls for the federal government to finally unseal and release the full list.
A research team led by UCLA historian Jared McBride, an expert on war crimes in the Second World War, has unearthed what he concludes is an annotated version of the list of alleged war criminals in this country examined by a 1986 Commission of Inquiry led by retired Superior Court of Quebec judge Jules Deschênes.
Anonymized descriptions of such individuals living here were published in Part 1 of the Deschênes inquiry report. But the second half of the report, naming them, has been kept secret for decades, despite calls to release it, including from historians, Jewish groups and the Canadian Polish Congress.
Last year, the government rejected an access to information request from The Globe and Mail to make it public. The Globe has seen the list of names, and accompanying notes on their investigation, unearthed by the UCLA team.
Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, said “there is no longer any rationale for the government to continue to keep these documents secret.”
“The government must immediately release the full case files and once and for all reckon with the truth instead of preserving the shameful cover-up that has shielded war criminals for so many years,” she said.
Prof. McBride found the partly redacted ledger, which includes notes on identity checks, in a batch of documents collated by the RCMP in the Canadian government’s archives.
The document includes the names of alleged war criminals in Canada studied by the Deschênes Commission, with matching case numbers. Marked “Secret,” it was revised on Oct. 6, 1986. The Deschênes report was published in December, 1986.
Prof. McBride and a team of his students at UCLA spent months verifying that the document was a working version of the commission’s list – including matching names with anonymized case numbers in Part I of the report, as well as the birthdays of alleged war criminals who settled here after the Second World War.
The document, which includes scribbled comments about the investigations, also lists dates of entry to Canada, destination on entry, as well as “action” to be taken. In some cases, according to the document, people had died, including being assassinated. In many cases, the document says, there was “no substance to allegations” that the person was a war criminal. Many were found never to have come to Canada. And in some cases, there was not enough time to investigate.
Alti Rodal, author of the Rodal report – Nazi War Criminals in Canada: the Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present – which was prepared for the Deschênes Commission in 1986, said the list examined by Prof. McBride, which she has seen, appears to be a late draft of the unpublished Deschênes list of alleged war criminals resident in Canada.
She said the investigators and lawyers recorded as working on cases listed in the document studied by Prof. McBride were those working on the Deschênes Commission.
The names of 774 suspected war criminals were provided to the commission by a variety of sources, including Sol Littman, Canadian representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; the RCMP; the Canadian Jewish Congress; private citizens – including Holocaust survivors; and foreign governments.
The version of the list examined by Prof. McBride includes alleged war criminals whom the government took action against. It names Helmut Oberlander, a member of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads during the Second World War. The Canadian government spent years trying to strip him of his citizenship, but he died at the age of 97 in 2021 while the matter was still before the courts.
Volodymyr Kubiovych, a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who helped organize the SS Galicia division and who was editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine compiled at the University of Alberta, is also named. A photograph of a parade in Lviv, Ukraine, in July, 1943, shows Mr. Kubiovych making a Nazi salute alongside Otto Wächter, a senior member of the SS who also served as governor of Galicia and Krakow. The document notes that Mr. Kubiovych had died in Paris in 1985.
Prominent Ukrainian-Canadian advocates have opposed the release of the Deschênes list, with some raising fears about personal safety. Last year, after declining to release it, the government expressed concern that publishing it could boost discredited Russian propaganda about Ukraine having Nazi ties.
Although some members of the Ukrainian SS Galicia division who settled in Canada after the war are on the version of the list studied by Prof. McBride, other Ukrainians who volunteered to join the Nazi-led division, and who settled here, are absent from it.
Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the SS Galicia division who was given two standing ovations in the House of Commons public gallery by MPs during the visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2023, causing Canada international embarrassment, does not appear to be on the list.
Many of the names of people still living in 1986 are redacted, but not their birth dates. The alphabetized list does not include Mr. Hunka’s recorded 1925 birth date. He turned 100 this week.
Prof. McBride said it was “stunning” that the draft list had sat in Library and Archives Canada’s vault for years, saying that it had been previously released, without a cover page, among 17 files in response to a request for documents under access to information laws in 2019.
“The list is a hodgepodge of names gathered from various streams and the governmental commission’s preliminary notes on these individuals,” Prof. McBride said.
“From the broader context and even clues from this document, we can see that the commission was not remotely thorough or comprehensive enough in their work to make any definitive claims one way or another about people on this list.”
Per Anders Rudling, a historian who has researched alleged war criminals in Canada, said there were likely “several draft or working lists that circulated,” and he thought this was one of them.
Prof. Rudling of Lund University in Sweden said, “with the help of birth dates, dates of naturalization, dates of entry [to Canada], multiple names on the list can be checked. It all matches up. Plus, perhaps most paradoxically, many of these names have been in the public domain for decades.”
In the Deschênes report, case 340 is noted as having been stricken from the list. On the list of names obtained by Prof. McBride, there is no case 340.
Prof. Rudling said the document seems to be “the RCMP version of the Deschênes list.” He said Ottawa should now publish the final version of the list of names drawn up by the Deschênes Commission.
In a statement, the RCMP said it could “neither confirm or deny whether a correlation exists between Part I of the Deschênes Report and the investigation notes in Library and Archives Canada’s possession.”
Library and Archives Canada declined to comment on the status of the list of names.