Canada's Deportation of War Criminals

After the Second World War it was not all that unusual for Canadian Jews, psychologically bruised, battered, horrified and traumatized by what was known about the fate of European Jewry throughout Europe, to become aware that German fascists were walking the streets of Toronto.

They knew this because "greenies", Jewish refugees who were permitted to come to Canada post-conflict, where they were denied entry pre-conflict lest they blemish Canadian society, were able to identify prison guards who had once kept them behind barbed wire in the camps, sharing aspirations toward Canadian citizenship with them.

I recall hearing my parents speaking in hushed, frightened voices with their friends, about these sightings. Describing the reputations of these guards. Wondering how it was remotely possible that the very same brutish German, Polish and Ukrainian guards who wore their Third Reich uniforms so proudly as they guarded the festering 'sub-humans' that barely subsisted in the squalid, life-defying, life-denying concentration camps, were enabled to migrate to Canada.

There, to find a new life, just like the Jewish refugees.

And it was certainly puzzling to me over the years to know that these former Nazis, now graduated to Canadian citizenship, living quiet, unassuming lives in Canada, never doing anything to draw attention to themselves and to their former lives in Europe, were never held to account. They were protected within their own ethnic communities. They were in Canada to assume new identities, to take up an alternate life-style, far removed from the war years.

But they had a criminal past, and were never called to account for it.

In that sense, Canada was no different than the United States, or Brazil or any other country that sometimes knowingly took in former Nazis and their collaborators. Werner von Braun was extremely useful in helping to develop American rocketry science. When, on occasion, and many years later, Canada was under pressure to act, and sought to identify and prosecute identified war criminals, it seemed to occur with less than complete conviction - and convictions were rare.

Now, under the current Conservative-led government of Stephen Harper, the Canadian government appears to have awakened from its moral slumber. True, there were instances when Rwandan war criminals were apprehended and a few tried right here in Canada. And now the initiative to publicize, identify and search out individuals alleged to have committed war crimes, living illegally in Canada, and to deport them, has taken the country to a new turn of global, ethical responsibility.

Immigrant or refugee applicants who do not divulge background details on their activities that could be construed as criminal, and who enter Canada under false pretenses and gain citizenship, can have that citizenship revoked as a result of giving false, inadequate, inaccurate information that would have disqualified them from entry into Canada.

Identifying war criminals from Darfur, Rwanda, Congo, Bosnia, or anywhere else in the world that has seen strife reveals a new tack. One that 'human rights' lawyers will find objectionable, ironically enough.

Their concern for the human rights of those who have obscenely destroyed the human rights of their victims is not the least bit appealing; more than a trifle misdirected.