Canada, a Harbour For Nazi War Criminals

"Canada has a really dark history with Nazis in Canada."

"There was a point in our history where it was easier to get in [immigrate to Canada] as a Nazi than it was as a Jewish person."

"I think that's a history we have to reconcile."

Immigration Minister Marc Miller 

"What little we know of their [SS members] war record is bad."

"We're still hoping to get rid of the less desirable Ukrainian PoWs either to Germany or to Canada."

British Home Office official Beryl Hughes, 1948

Ukrainians dressed in SS Galicia Division uniforms march past graves during a re-burial ceremony at the SS Galicia Division cemetery near the village of Chervone, Ukraine, in 2013. Photo by Efrem Lukatsky/AP/File

Documents compiled by a commission set up in the 1980s to scrutinize Canada's record in permitting members of the Nazi SS into Canada through government-sanctioned visas, including members of the Ukrainian collaborationist special ethnic SS-linked divisions meant to work with German SS units in

rounding up Jews in massive pogroms of shooting deaths -- part of the Holocaust's 'Final Solution', a priority with Nazi Germany while it was prosecuting World War I --, have never been made available for public scrutiny.

 

In the wake of a public scandal where a North Bay Ukrainian military veteran was invited to parliament to meet with visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who was to address the House of Commons, where the entire House inclusive of parliamentarians and diplomatic guests rose on the introduction of the 98-year-old, a former volunteer serving with a Ukrainian SS division, Jewish groups in Canada are now demanding the release of the documents, unredacted.

 

The 40-year-old report along with allied documents that contain details relating to Nazi war criminals residing in Canada remains in a 'secret' category. It represents a second portion of a 1986 government-commissioned report on Nazis who were permitted to enter and settle in Canada. Another 1986 report was heavily censored, one that examined how it was that Nazis were enabled to enter Canada to begin with, post World War Two. That commission was struck in the wake of years of Jewish groups urging the government to investigate and extradite Nazi war criminals known to be living in Canada.

Over 600 pages of the document finally obtained through the country's Access to Information law, was censored. B'nai Brith is now demanding the release of RCMP and Department of Justice files on Nazi war criminals in Canada. "We've run up against a brick wall", commented David Matas, counsel for the Jewish advocacy organization ... in view of the government's ongoing decision to withhold such records from public view. A ray of hope shimmered briefly when Canada's Immigration Minister Marc Miller allowed that the government might reconsider whether the records could be released.

Canada's track record, he commented pointedly, with Nazi criminals was notoriously poor. B'nai Brith pointed out in a submission to the House of Commons committee on Access to Information in February that the government's approach to Nazi war criminals reflected its "intentional harbouring of known Nazi war criminals" along with "deliberate inaction".

And that historical puzzle has now been resurrected since MPs in the House of Commons a week ago honoured a Canadian-Ukrainian who had served in a Nazi SS division. Two standing ovations from those present were awarded Yaroslav Hunka, sparking outrage on social media, prompting the resignation of the House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota on whose invitation to the man living in North Bay, arrived at the House of Commons, with no one apparently aware, despite that House security and Canadian intelligence services were to have scrutinized the man's background prior to his entrance.

 

Yaroslav Hunka, right, waits for the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the House of Commons in Ottawa last Friday. Photo by Patrick Doyle /The Canadian Press

 

The now-98-year-old had volunteered to fight with the 14th Waffen-SS Division Galicia, a Nazi military unit recruiting Ukrainians to fight alongside German SS groups, and more to the point, help in the extermination of Europe's Jews. Poland, along with Jewish groups denounced the infamous division, citing its role in killing civilians in grouped massacres during the war. Poland, in fact has petitioned Canada for the man's extradition as a war criminal.

Large numbers of SS soldiers and other Nazi collaborators from eastern Europe settled after the war in Canada. Jewish refugee-survivors who had also come to Canada, spoke in shocked whispers to one another when they recognized on the streets of Toronto, German SS members they had last seen in the ghettos and death camps. Many of the records sought have links to the 1986 war crimes commission that was led by Justice Jules Deschenes.

The International Military Tribunal had declared the SS a criminal organization, including units of the Waffen SS, like the Galicia division that Yaroslav Hunka had fought with. There are nationalist Ukrainian-Canadians today, who view the 14th Waffen Division as heroic for battling Soviet forces who at that time were allies with the US, Canada and Britain after Russia was invaded by Germany despite Russia having begun the war as part of the Axis group.

The release in Britain in 2005 of documents from British archives outlined concerns relating to the members of SS Galicia along with intentions to ship them to Canada. "The Division was an SS division and technically all of its officers and senior NCOs are liable for trial as war criminals", noted one report for the British government. In another report dated 1948 there were discussions on sending SS members to Canada. And they did.

"I was elected on getting out of these ridiculous endless wars."

"The region is in chaos because the hegemonic power does not seem to know what it wants to do, and so nobody else does."
"[Even in Britain, a close ally of the United States], nobody knows what to do any more."
Michael Stephens, scholar, Royal United Services Institute, London

"Many nations around the Middle East now are considering major changes in their strategic defense plans because they no longer see the United States as a reliable ally."
"It will be very difficult to convince nations of the Middle East that the United States is serious about what it says."
Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, adviser, Al Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, Cairo

In this photo from August 12, 2019, plumes of smoke rise after an explosion at a military base southwest of Baghdad, Iraq. (AP Photo/Loay Hameed)

Who has the enthusiastic approval of Donald J. Trump in their behaviour and actions as heads of State? Men like himself. Devious, untrustworthy, convinced of their absolute divine right to rule and rule as they wish. The ruthless, the vain and the ignorant who believe they are their nations' deliverers and benevolent dictators. Those who believe in their elite destiny that has unfailingly ushered them into their positions of power through the pretense of charlatans convincing an electorate that the ballot box is awaiting their choice.

So the freakish little pomp-head that rules North Korea elicits Donald Trump's admiration for his unswerving belligerence and demands, and Trump is willing to acquiesce to a surprising degree. He has engineered a personal rapprochement with the autocratic Vladimir Putin whose designs on his Eastern European neighbours' frantic grasp of sovereignty he is happy to challenge, recalling the bygone days of the USSR, just as Recep Tayyip Erdogan has flaunted his Islamist credentials in preparation of re-installing his version of the Ottoman Empire.

Iron Dome battery near the Syrian border in the Golan Heights (Photos: EPA)

They all envision themselves as exceptionally entitled to flout their nations' term limits to enable them to rule ad infinitum. And while the United States under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump has drawn in its octopus-arms embrace of the world outside its borders, willing to shed its grip on power and influence, it has not hesitated to advance the hegemonic influence of its adversaries, Trump's personal allies, on request.

So delivering the steadfast and loyal Kurdish allies of the United States into the psychotic hands of their fiercest enemy, allowing Turkish President Erdogan to mount a violent offensive while the U.S. politely withdraws the protective barrier of its troops, Trump bellows his pleasure at solving the problems of the Middle East as far as America is concerned, by allowing the adversaries to sort things out as they will, and they will, officiously, brutally, through ethnic-cleansing bloodbaths.

And where then, does that leave America's long-time partners like Israel and the Persian Gulf monarchs so long reliant on American protection? Good question. Trump's spur-of-the-moment decision making, based in his faultless intuition of any given situation governs his impulsive penchant for besmirching U.S. honour and puzzling its Western counterparts, never knowing what next in the ordered world of the Democratic West is to be roiled.

A suicide drone developed by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards (AFP)

A hubristic commander-in-chief in Washington has put the entire world on edge, in actual fact. His unpredictability means the United States can no longer be relied upon as a trustworthy partner with common interests in a sane and regulated world order. The brutal Turkish assault on the Syrian Kurds has enabled Erdogan, pace Putin, to take possession of Kurdish heritage territory, threatening the Kurdish military with annihilation.

Just as the U.S. was "locked and loaded" to respond to any provocations from the Islamic Republic of Iran, resulting in nothing much when Iranian missiles targeted Saudi oilfields, Israel now awaits the inevitable; rockets aiming for its sensitive military, geographic-vulnerable cities and nuclear installations with the Republic's new, more efficient and accurate missiles which it has threatened to use for that very purpose -- to destroy the "Zionist entity". So much for daylight between the U.S. and Israel.

Illustrative: Iran says it successfully tested the Hoveizeh cruise missile on February 2, 2019 (Screen grab via Tasnim)

"Iran’s most recent attack on Saudi oil production demonstrates the sophistication and extent of Iranian capabilities. Iran used Ababil 2 drones and Quds-1 cruise missiles to execute the attack. Neither weapon has the needed precision when controlled from a distance, so it is likely that Iranian intelligence infiltrated Saudi Arabia and guided the weapons in their terminal phase. This constitutes one of the great U.S. intelligence failures since 9/11 — a U.S. ally’s oil production crippled due to large-scale sabotage by a hostile power."
"Strategically, only America and Israel can check Iranian ambitions. The U.S. maintains a network of Middle Eastern and European bases from which it can concentrate ground and air forces against any point in the region; a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf or Eastern Mediterranean greatly complicates Iran’s ability to operate freely in Syria and Iraq, or to close the Strait of Hormuz and pressure U.S. allies in Asia. Moreover, U.S. diplomatic, financial and commercial pressure can still strangle the Iranian economy, despite the damage the JCPOA and its aftermath did to the U.S. sanctions regime. Unless Iran can eliminate U.S. presence in the Middle East, its broader campaign will remain constricted."
Seth Cropsey, senior fellow, Hudson Institute, director, Center for American Seapower

Abandoning Syrian Kurds to Turkey's Deadly Invasion

"This unilateral action [Turkey invading Syria's northeastern border to establish a 'safe zone' through clearing the presence of Kurds from majority Kurdish enclaves between Syria and Turkey] risks undermining the stability of an already-fragile region, exacerbating the humanitarian situation and rolling back progress achieved by the Global Coalition Against Daesh, of which Turkey is a member."
"We call for the protection of civilians and on all parties to respect their obligations under international law, including unhindered access for humanitarian aid."
Department of Foreign Affairs, Canada

"Damascus needs the Kurds. The Kurds and Damascus have two things in common: enmity for Turkey and a desire not to see Sunni rebel militias ruling the northeast of Syria."
"But they don’t agree on anything when it comes to ruling northeast Syria."
"I think there will be real friction but I do think the Russians will be able to manage it. There is a deal to be made [between Russia, Syria and Turkey]."
Joshua Landis, head, Center for Middle East Studies, University of Oklahoma

Smoke rises from the Syrian border town of Tel Abyad, following an offensive by pro-Turkish forces. Photograph: Bülent Kılıç/AFP via Getty Images

 Turkey, as a member of the North American Treaty Alliance, has under the ruling Justice and Development Party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, increasingly challenged the values and loyalty to shared democratic principles of all other members of NATO. Erdogan's incendiary hatred for the Kurds living within Turkey and within the boundaries of Iran, Iraq and Syria is expressed by his description of their nationhood-aspiring collective as "terrorists".

It is well understood within NATO countries that Turkey gave support to Islamist Sunni rebels and militias including those of Islamic State, whom Erdogan regards as legitimate fighters, not terrorists.

As Erdogan unleashed his full military might against the towns and villages with largely Kurdish populations along the corridor within Syria contiguous with the border of Turkey, airstrikes on civilian targets have continued to claim the lives of civilians. The Syrian Sunni rebel groups reliant on Turkish support have been invited by Erdogan to join Turkish troops in battling the YPG and the Syrian Democratic Forces, responsible for the well-being of millions of Kurdish lives.

Which gave the Syrian rebels entry to the semi-autonomous Kurdish state in Syria's northeast, which the Kurdish military with U.S. air cover wrenched back from Islamic State terrorists to enable them to wreak their ISIS-style atrocities on Kurds, going so far as to video their barbaric slaughter of vulnerable victims, including a female Kurdish politician caught with her bodyguards while driving on a road the rebel militias were entering into Kurdish territory.

Germany and France along with several other NATO members, and now Canada, have declared an immediate halt to military weapons transfers and sales to Turkey as its army pushes into Kurdish territory. Everyone was caught off guard by U.S. President Donald J. Trump's sudden agreement in a telephone conversation with his Turkish counterpart to withdraw American support in northeast Syria and leave the Kurds to look after their own welfare, after they had spent years of sacrifice battling Islamic State not only for their own security but that of the U.S.

Canada had promised upgraded weaponry to be delivered to its Kurdish allies whom members of the Canadian military have been engaged in training. Those weapons were held up, placed in storage and remain there, never delivered to the courageous Kurds whose defensive weapons are no match for those of the technologically-advanced Turkish military nor its warplanes. Canada has a record of supplying significant levels of military goods to Ankara yearly, estimated at over $115 million in defence-related products in 2018 alone.

The military electronics and imaging goods Canada sold to Turkey is now being used in bombing the Kurdish enclaves. Turkey is a signer of the selective Automatic Firearms Country Control List where Canadian defence companies can sell tightly restricted weapons to the Kurdish military through export permits. The Kurds (the 4th largest ethnic group in the Middle East), have been allies of Canada, and Canada, like the U.S. and other NATO-aligned countries, have failed the Kurds, long deserving of establishing their own sovereign territory on their ancient ancestral land, allocated by France and Britain to Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey 100 years ago.

Long history aside Kurds have never achieved a permanent nation state Reuters

Canada's current minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, while condemning Turkey's invasion of Kurdish-majority semi autonomous northeastern Syria, also saw fit to laud Ankara for resettling Syrian refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war and the bombing rampages of Syria's Shiite President Bashar al-Assad who, like Turkey's Erdogan, described the Syrian Sunni protesters as "terrorists". As for the haven that Erdogan has given Syrian refugees, he has been attempting to persuade and to forcibly return them to Syria.

And this is where the 'safe zone' he is attempting to clear of Kurds comes in; Erdogan's intention is to move an estimated two million of the 3.2 million Syrian refugees out of Turkey to populate the towns and villages that hundreds of thousands of Kurds have been forced to flee under Turkish air bombing. With the decision of the European Union to halt any further sales of military goods to Turkey, Erdogan has responded by threatening to open the floodgates once again into Europe for Syrian refugees, jettisoning the agreement he has with the EU which has already absorbed millions of refugees.

Kurdish authorities in desperation had little option left to them to try to protect the vast numbers of Kurdish people at risk of annihilation through Erdogan's cleansing aspirations, but to call upon a lesser evil to come to their aid. Syria's regime was happy to comply, for in so doing, the Kurdish geography of northern Syria, representing almost a full one-third of territory wrested from Islamic State would thus fall back under Syria's authority. How the Kurdish authority could negotiate with the regime to respect their autonomy while challenging the Turkish incursion to save Kurdish lives will be a mystery.

Now, it is Russia's turn to intervene. Its alliance with Syria is of utmost importance to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin, able to take possession of a deep-sea port and air installations for Russia to reestablish hegemony in the region once again, with the departure of the United States started by the Obama regime and continued by that of Trump's White House. Syria's stability is Russia's first priority, a priority that will revolve around Mr. Putin persuading his Turkish ally to stand down from his intentions before many more lives are lost.

With the near-absence of the United States to mediate within the Middle East, the axis of power has been shifting steadily and perhaps irrevocably, and now there is Russia, allied with Iran, with Syria, and further afield with Turkey. Iran brings with it Qatar, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, as well as Syria and Hezbollah and Hamas. A coterie of terrorist-inclined Islamists to continue roiling the always-muddied waters of the violent Middle East.

Holocaust - Prosecution of Nazi Criminals

"It was unknown that the Allies prepared prosecutions of Adolf Hitler and the rest of the Nazis for the death camps in Europe while the Nazis were still in power and while they were still running occupied Europe."
"There are many such dossiers [in the files of the UN War Crimes Commission] of legally prepared indictments of Hitler and other Nazis for many of their crimes, including the extermination of the Jews, and these were drawn up long before D-Day."
"You  can't say that people didn't know. They did know and still didn't act."
"There was a great deal more evidence and a great deal more that could have been done to prosecute than was done."
"The commission's files contained indictments against thousands of Nazis who were then allowed to go free."
"[The UN files contain evidence of war crimes which] provides a whole hardware store of nails to hammer in the coffin of Holocaust denial. This is a huge trove of prosecutions of the Holocaust from during World War II, legally authorized documentation."
"They [the UN War Crimes Commission] had a very effective, low-cost system for prosecuting low-level perpetrators, and we badly need something like that today."
"If they could be taking evidence from people escaping from under the jackboot of the SS, why aren't we doing the same when it comes to people escaping from Syria?'
Dan Plesch, historian, Human Rights After Hitler

A group of children at the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp on Jan. 27, 1945, just after the liberation by the Soviet army. The Associated Press

For one thing, what would come of the scrupulous accumulation of damning anecdotal evidence that interlocutors could obtain by questioning Syrians escaping from the death-clutches of Syrian dictator Assad? The United Nations, from its earliest years when in 1945 it inherited the mantle of the League of Nations to the present, has acted as a nonchalant conscience to the world. The United Nations acts as witness to world events, lauding itself as a force for peace in the world, but because its member-states act always in their own interests, and a majority of the members give short shrift to human rights, the institution is feeble and incapable.

The civilized world's heart bleeds at the prospect of children suffering, facing deadly harm, tortured and mutilated, and slaughtered. A great uproar of indignation is heard, but nothing of any real significance beyond the rhetoric of politicians making speeches to impress listeners with the mistaken belief that help and rescue are all possible. A process that soothes the public. And then the plight of the helpless and the vulnerable is soon forgotten, placed high on a shelf too troublesome to reach for to re-ignite resolve should frustrating new indications of such abuses recur.

Photos of Jewish children in the Auschwitz concentration camp. (Credit: De Agostini/G. P. Cavallero/De Agostini Picture Library /Getty Images)

It is not as though this historian discovered something absolutely never before known. Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews, and the steps taken to carry it forward were no secret. Even before the infamous Kristallnacht took place the Third Reich and its propaganda machine had formulated the pattern whereby Europe's Jews were marginalized, dispossessed, dehumanized, ghettoized, then sent to work camps and to death camps. As for what happened in the death camps, escapees and survivors spread the word.

Disbelief met their claims, but that soon enough turned to grim acceptance of what was occurring. Still, the Allies decided they couldn't spare the ammunition it would take to bomb the transport mechanism whereby Europe gave up its Jews to collection points from which they could be gassed and their bodies incinerated, although the German military felt it could spare the rolling stock, the fighting men and the vital reserves to pursue its genocidal goal. Even before the League turned into the UN the institution had fairly full knowledge of what was happening.

The United Nations War Crimes Commission meets on May 6, 1945, in the Royal Court of Justice in London with members of a U.S. Congressional Committee that had just completed a tour of German concentration camps. (Credit: Photo12/UIG/Getty Images)

What is new is that though Mr. Plesch, director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at University of London discovered that the Allied leadership and the United Nations was set to undertake a wide prosecution of those who aided and abetted and made possible the extermination of six million Jews, the determination to follow through was lacking, other than for the formalities of the Nuremberg Trials to set an example for the world that evil has its payback consequences.

The world gasped in collective horror at the liberation of Auschwitz and Treblinka and all the other countless death camps where living corpses were freed from their fate and a wide distribution of the news of what had taken place was released worldwide. But the victors made their accommodations with the vandals of humanity. Not only did work to regenerate Germany take place, but Nazi scientists, war criminals themselves, were given haven in the United States where those like Wernher von Braun helped America design rocketry munitions that Hitler had instructed them to create for Germany.

The West knew very well long before the war came to its end that there was a window before the Final Solution went into overtime whereby they could rescue Jews from fascist death agonies planned for them. The SS.St.Louis whose German captain did his utmost to help save close to a thousand German Jewish men, women and children, was met with refusals from a cross-section of the free world, from Cuba to the United States to Canada and Great Britain. No Jews need apply for haven, and so the ship limped back whence it had come.

But Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States worked feverishly to see that justice would prevail in the creation of the UN War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), co-operating to investigate 36,000 international criminal cases -- until an American decision to turn its attention from punishing Nazis to fighting communism ended up shuttering the UNWCC; a low priority, after all. Leading to American intelligence officials urging the UNWCC files to be prohibited from public access.

It was a UNWCC form whereby Canada outlined charges against SS commander Kurt Meyer, convicted of ordering the murders of 20 Canadian prisoners of war in 1944 that led Mr. Plesch to the vast archive and a subsequent effort on his part to persuade UN authorities that the secret material should be released.

Microfilmed documents, part of the UN War Crimes Commission Records (1943 – 1949), at the United Nations Archives in New York. (Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten)