List of suspected Nazi war criminals welcomed in Canada should stay secret, information watchdog rules

Seems a bit too precious given not released earlier prior to the Russian attack on Ukraine:

…LAC had told Caroline Maynard, the Information Commissioner, that disclosing the list would result in significant injury to Canada’s relationship with a foreign government. LAC also told her it would “cause significant injury to the defence of a foreign state allied with Canada,” Maureen Brennan, an investigator in Ms. Maynard’s office, said in the e-mail. 

The e-mail said the harm would extend “beyond Canada’s relations with the foreign government in question” and would adversely affect Canada’s relationships with other allied states.

“I reviewed LAC’s consultation materials and note that there was an overall consensus that, in the current political climate, disclosure of the information would give rise to serious concerns about reasonably expected harm,” Ms. Brennan said. 

Dozens of leading scholars from around the world, including Sir Richard Evans, former Regius professor of history at Cambridge University and author of 18 books, including Hitler’s People, have called on Canada to declassify the report.

On Friday Canada’s Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the famous Nazi hunter, reacted with dismay that the information watchdog had upheld Ottawa’s decision to keep the list secret. 

“The government’s claim that revealing the truth about Nazi war criminals living in Canada could somehow be a threat to national security or international diplomacy is an insult to the intelligence of the public,” said Jaime Kirzner Roberts, senior director, policy and advocacy at the center. 

“It is long past time for the facts to come out about the Nazi perpetrators of genocide and war crimes who were allowed to escape justice and live comfortable, protected lives in our country.”

A research team led by UCLA historian Jared McBride, an expert on war crimes in the Second World War, last year unearthed what he concluded was an earlier annotated version of the secret list.

The Information Commissioner’s office argued that this list had been released through an access to information request in 2019, “at a time which predates the relevant current global context.” 

Among the names on this list, seen by The Globe, was 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.

Professor Per Rudling of Lund University in Sweden, who has researched the settlement of alleged Nazis in Canada, said he found the decision to keep the list secret “curious.” He said Ukraine had opened up its own KGB archives and the U.S. has released the bulk of its documents pertaining to alleged Nazi war criminals. 

“Of all comparable Western liberal democracies, Canada stands out as being particularly restrictive on archival materials in regards to purported war criminals,” he said in an e-mail. 

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