For decades, the Canadian government has held more than a million pages of war-criminal investigation files secret, citing privacy laws and international agreements with foreign countries. Many Canadian organizations, including Jewish ones, have lobbied—unsuccessfully—for the government to release the names, which include many suspected Nazis.
It turns out, many of the names were already public. Jared McBride, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently led his students on a class project that discovered more than a thousand pages of historic Royal Canadian Mounted Police war crimes files—all freely available online.
These typed and handwritten files from the 1980s show suspects’ names, locations, case numbers, alleged crimes, and the results of the Mounties’ investigations, including collaboration with Israel, Germany and Soviet authorities. They appear to match the still-secret parts of Canada’s official 1986 Deschênes Commission of Inquiry’s records on alleged or actual Nazi war criminals who got into the country.
Jewish groups and some media outlets still have lawsuits pending to force Library and Archives Canada to release its war crimes holdings. But, as the UCLA students found out, the archives already released the RCMP documents five years ago. And nobody did anything with them—until now.
On today’s episode of The CJN Daily, Jared McBride joins to unpack what, and how, he and his students uncovered in this breakthrough moment for national justice.
Transcript
Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors.
Ellin Bessner: That’s a news show from Argentina, a few days ago, after their president announced his country will release all its files related to thousands of Nazi war criminals who made their way to South America after the Holocaust, including some of the most notorious killers of them all, Dr. Josef Mengele of Auschwitz and Adolf Eichmann, who carried out Hitler’s Final Solution, the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.
The Netherlands made a similar decision in January, while the Americans released 8 million pages already 25 years ago. In Canada, for nearly 40 years, Jewish groups have been appealing to our government’s national archives to do the same, ever since the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry wrapped up its investigation back in 1986 into whether there were Nazi war criminals living in this country, The answer was “Yes, some were.” The government was tasked with going after the baddest ones. A few were charged. When that didn’t work, Canada tried stripping them of their citizenship and kicking them out. Only a few were ever deported, and the rest either died or, in most cases, the files were closed.
Experts say investigators back then didn’t have enough time or information to do a thorough job because of the Cold War and the archives in Eastern Europe not being accessible yet. Part of the Deschênes Report’s findings have been published, but the judge ordered the other files sealed. These contain approximately 1,800 names of war crime suspects here and all the background on them. We now know there are likely over a million pages of documents, and to this day, Library and Archives Canada refuses to release them, citing privacy issues and that it would violate international agreements that Canada made with other countries.
Now, interest in this issue heightened 18 months ago, in September of 2023, when Canadian MPs stood and clapped for an elderly veteran who, it later turned out, was a member of the Ukrainian Waffen SS squad that killed Poles and Jews during the war. Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he’d consider opening more files. Only a few pages were subsequently released, and B’nai Brith Canada and others have court cases underway to force the issue.
But now, though, a class of history students and their professor at the University of California in Los Angeles appear to have found the names. They stumbled on a trove of archival RCMP files online, probably most, if not all, of the secret list of suspected war criminals. And here’s the crazy thing: it turned out the Canadian government actually released these files publicly five years ago to someone, we don’t know who, who made an access to information request. And they’ve been on a Canadian website.
Jared McBride: There’s a million things that could be done here. But instead, what they decided to do time and again, whenever this issue pops up, it rears its head every five or ten years, is to take a look at it in its face and just say “No” and pretend it’s not there and move on. And the moment we’re in right now is a product of that behaviour for the better part of half of a century.
Ellin Bessner: I’m Ellin Bessner, and this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Thursday, April 3, 2025. Welcome to The CJN Daily, a podcast of the Canadian Jewish News, and made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
Before we get into today’s story, I want to let you know about The CJN’s new, fully reimagined print magazine. It’s called Scribe Quarterly. It’s a beautiful, innovative work of Jewish journalism catering to the Canadian Jewish community. And it’s completely free. Just sign up today at thecjn.ca/subscribe.
I’ve also been going through the RCMP files, and in many cases, the police report that these suspected war criminals had never entered our country, or if they had, they’d already died. You can see how Canada collaborated with German, Israeli, and Soviet authorities to help build a case. While there are still many blacked-out sections, you can clearly see names and even handwritten notes by RCMP officers. UCLA history professor Jared McBride’s students didn’t even have to set foot in Canada to find these war crime files from the 1980s. McBride is an expert in the Holocaust, mass murder, and war crimes, especially from Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe. He’s been a staunch critic of Canada’s secrecy about all these files. Even before this new discovery, McBride had assembled his own database of war crime suspects who were granted entry into Canada all those years ago. He did it by consulting American records and just piecing together things from readily available Canadian newspaper clippings and other public sources of information. Which is why when McBride saw the new RCMP files that his students found, he wasn’t surprised to see people mentioned, like Helmut Oberlander of Waterloo, Ontario, who served with the Einsatzgruppen, a former Nazi death squad. He died in 2021 at the age of 97. Professor McBride joins me now from Los Angeles.
Jared McBride: Thanks for having me.
Ellin Bessner: The famous list that everybody’s been waiting for. First of all, how did you get it? Did you come to Ottawa and get it? How?
Jared McBride: I have been interested since this whole [standing ovation for Yaroslav Hunka] affair in answering this one simple question of how many names have already been in the public domain when it comes to alleged war criminals in Canada. I’m coming at this particular research question from my own work on the American case, of which I’m aware that hundreds of these names were in circulation, whether it was newspapers, government reports, released materials. I just had a working assumption that in the Canadian case, a lot of these names were public already as well, even though a lot of the media discourse about this and government discourse has been basically premised on the idea that no one knows any of the names at all, which I found to be a little bit silly.
So I put together a research team. I’ve been working with some undergraduates, some ambitious and very smart and dedicated undergraduates here, mostly history majors, on various research projects and teaching them how to do historical research. We decided to jump into the Canadian case, and we’ve been working our way through materials.
I need to obviously emphasize this: all publicly available materials, right? So we have not found anything that was leaked to us; we have not found anything secret. Everything is publicly available. So, we’ve been working through really commonplace things like newspapers from the 1980s, in which dozens of people’s names are listed in newspaper articles because it was being talked about all the time then. We were working through record collections at LAC, at the Libraries and Archives of Canada, where you could see some of these collections listed online.
Jared McBride: We have not flown six undergraduates to Ottawa. One of the things that we found accidentally was a release of some materials from the RCMP collection at LAC. This is record group 196, which is the RCMP collection, and they have a collection there on their war crimes unit. As everyone knows, after the Deschênes Commission, the RCMP was tasked with doing investigations in the war crimes alongside justice. In 2011, they turned over a bunch of documents to the archives.
Jared McBride: As is common in most countries, documents are sitting in the archives, and I found them in an online repository because somebody had filed an ATIP request, which is basically like FOIA, Freedom of Information Act. Someone filed an ATIP and said that they wanted to see a dozen or so of the documents from 196. They wanted to have redactions removed. The LAC responded and provided them with a set of PDFs.
Jared McBride: And even though, as an American, I am not allowed to file an ATIP request with the Canadian government, I am allowed to ask for other people’s ATIP requests, and they give me the documents directly. So, we effectively just doubled back on someone else’s work. But what’s interesting is that a number of the documents we looked at cannot be identified. So, we’re staring at several lists; there’s some stuff from the Soviet government, and there’s some stuff about communication with the Israeli government. We’re looking at all these documents out of context because…
Jared McBride: we’re not in the archives ordering them; they’re there. And we’re just trying to figure out what’s going on with these documents. There are lots of names in these documents. We know they’re legitimate because they’re findable at LAC. And then, all of a sudden, one day, we’re staring at this one particular list in which the cover’s been ripped off. So, you don’t know what the list is called. You just know that there are lots of names, lots of redactions, a bunch of scribblings, and a bunch of codes. And then, all of a sudden, it hits us: this list is dated to 1986. This list has 776 names, and then there are 71 names…
Jared McBride: most of which are German. And then there’s another 38 names at the end of this list in an addendum. We then go back to the Deschenes report from 1986, look at the appendix for Part ll. Part ll is secret, and Part l is open. In the appendix for Part ll, it lists 774 names, 71 German names, and a 38-name addendum. And the other beauty of this list was, in Part l of the Duchesne, there’s like 400 pages of summaries of all these cases.
Jared McBride: Some of these summaries are awful and inaccurate and problematic, but there are summaries of all these cases. There are identifying markers in those summaries. They’re anonymized, so they’ll just say Case 574, right? There’s a bunch of data in there; you don’t know what it is. You have no context for whatever corresponds with this secret list. So, we just went in and started comparing the names with the summaries, and everything matched perfectly. We don’t know that LAC knew what they were working with. You know, they may not have known it was the Deschenes list.
Ellin Bessner: All right. I know how, as a journalist, there is a website where you can find out who else has asked for government documents, and you piggyback, basically, on that. And so that’s what you did. Do you know who asked for it?
Jared McBride: Investigative Journalism Foundation, 2019. They filed a request, and I don’t know what they had seen from LAC originally, but they asked for these 12 documents and then uploaded them online. They put them online in 2024. We found it by accident. (Eds. note: IJF said they did not file the request, only published what someone gave them.}
Ellin Bessner: That’s insane. Why did they never do anything with it?
Jared McBride: Well, I don’t know. So, I mean, again, this is the kind of thing where we’re still processing the fact that this was just sitting in plain view with the Investigative Journalism Foundation. I mean, kudos to them. I don’t know if they knew what they got. I don’t know if LAC knew that they were giving it to them. But again, it’s publicly sourced material which, to everyone listening, is available to everyone, right? You know, we were not doing secretive work. But it’s a wonderful, it’s a lesson to everybody—you know, young journalists and young historians—that sometimes the thing is right in front of you; you just have to do your homework.
Ellin Bessner: Okay, let’s talk about what’s in there.
Jared McBride: The list itself was never going to be, you know, a tell-all about the situation. The list captures a moment in time when a government was taking a first stab at looking into this issue in the mid-1980s, with limited resources at the time, time constraints, and all kinds of politics swirling around. So, the list was never going to be a definitive list.
They said 300 or so had never entered Canada. A couple of these people were not even in Europe during the war.
So, it’s not just to be critical of the Canadian government; this was supposed to be the first step. There are all kinds of people on here. I don’t know if they were involved in war crimes. Some of them were definitely involved in war crimes, and some of them were not relevant. But that was always going to be what this list was going to show.
I’m willing to bet, and this is the kind of deeper research that has to be done at a later stage when access is actually provided. I’m willing to bet there’s people on this list who are definitely not involved in war crimes, and then there are people who they wrote off the list and said either didn’t enter Canada or they were wrong about or people that they didn’t have enough evidence for, at the time, that may have been involved in war crimes. I’m actually sure that there’ll be some cases like that. So it’s a mixed bag, right? It was never going to be a smoking gun of “Here’s 800 war criminals living in Canada,” which, you know, maybe one side of this debate was going to say, “Well, here’s all the names, and all these people are war criminals.” I mean, no one should use that list in this way. At the same time, it’s not “Here are 800 people who are falsely accused by the Soviets,” right? It’s also not that either.
There’s a lot of complications built into how and why certain names showed up on this list and what the future trajectory of these names in these investigations will be. But that requires opening the investigation files, right? This is just a first cut. It’s a sloppy first cut, and I understand why. I mean, maybe it’s a later question, the privacy issues—I understand why people are concerned. But there’s still a story here of why people’s names showed up on this list in the first place. How did they get there? Why were these names submitted? Why were some of these names even entertained by the Commission? Because you could have just easily removed some of these people before you even looked into them. So there’s a lot of questions that are in the air that could be dug into, I should say. There’s only about a fourth of the names actually on the list. We can’t see the rest. But I will note we can name many of them from our other sources by cross-referencing, right. How many? I’m not sure yet. That’s future work. But there are 240 names or so visible, and the rest are still redacted. We were also trying to figure out the formula. I do believe we’ve cracked it, but the formula as to why they released certain names and not others to…
Ellin Bessner: Okay, do you want to tell us what you think, what your theory is on that?
Jared McBride: So, my theory is that it’s people who have been dead for 20 years. So, there are a number of well-known war criminals on this list whose names are still redacted. Just to highlight the famous 29—there are 29 people who were actually brought into court, or at least court cases were filed against 29 individuals by the Canadian government. There are people from the 29 who, again, you can read about in every newspaper in Canada. You can just go and get the court filing for those who died sometime less than 20 years ago, whose names are redacted. All of these releases, all of this storyline—and not to say this doesn’t happen in the US case too—but just the convolution of how and why names are released, who gets released, and who doesn’t. Their logic was that whoever was looking at this just said “This person died in 2010. So I’m going to redact the name”, but I have enough identifying information to know that that was a person who was tried by the Canadian government in the 1990s. Why is their name redacted in this?
Ellin Bessner: So who was that person?
Jared McBride: Oh, there’s multiple, there’s multiple people from the 29, I think I was only able to identify maybe four or five. I mean, we’re still new to digging. We’re going to do higher levels of analysis of the list, cross-reference the list, and start building out the rest of the names on our own.
Ellin Bessner: Right. So we’ve got Erich Tobiass, we’ve got the Latvians, we’ve got Helmut Oberlander, we’ve got tones of other ones that the Canadian Jewish Congress went after unsuccessfully, somewhat successfully, and they all died. You know, this fellow that we were all looking at in 2023? He’s on the list?
Jared McBride: Hunka?.
Ellin Bessner: Yeah.
Jared McBride: No.
Ellin Bessner: But you don’t know, he might be on the other parts? But you don’t have it or you do have?
Jared McBride: We don’t believe so. Right. And so we don’t believe so. But again, this also speaks to historicizing this list. He’s not on there. There are a few other people who should be on there, not on there. But there are people who actually investigated, we know, are investigated later on by the Canadian government, which all goes to say is this list captures the Deschenes’ work. It’s a moment in time. Then the work is turned over to RCMP. The RCMP, I assume, based on what we know, opened files on their own accord. I don’t believe they were completely beholden to just this list for their investigations, and at least it doesn’t seem to be, because a few known RCMP investigations don’t appear to be on this list.
Ellin Bessner: Out of the 700 and whatever you.
Jared McBride: Know about the 776, there’s about 200 that are just opened. Canadian journalists, everyone, should understand this. The Canadian government released 200 names from the Deschenes list. So those names are unredacted to the public, plus some of the German scientists.
And then from there’s an addendum list. So there’s actually three lists that make up the full list, 240 total. (200 from the main list. So those names are out there, right? They’re just there on the list. You can see them. It’s publicly available document released by the Canadian government. Now, with the Deschenes list, this version of it there is, you know, there’s birth dates. And so obviously, if you can tie someone on the right page to the. you know, where they are alphabetically with a birth date from other information, you can do that. So how many we’ll be able to quickly identify on our own accord, again, just for private research, we’re not sure yet, but I would take a guess off the top of my head, you know, a fair amount, very quickly.
The same goes for the Rodal Report. Anyone who’s anonymized in there, I’ve already figured out a number of those people. That’ll also be pretty easy to do now. So the question is, at what point in time would the Canadian government like to get ahead of the story? But if history’s been a teacher here, maybe at no point? Maybe it was always bound to be a bunch of American undergraduate students who are going to have to figure this out instead of the Canadian government. The whole thing’s absurd. It’s an absurd situation that it’s come to this. You know, I’m proud of our work and also I’m proud of all the other work and other people who have worked on this issue, but the situation itself remains bizarre. It’s an absolutely bizarre situation.
Ellin Bessner: So I think this was a mistake. They made a mistake. They didn’t realize what they were doing because that’s happened today in the American government. We heard that somebody got war plans?
Jared McBride: Yeah, well, somehow not surprising, but no, in terms of LAC, you know, archivists are mostly our saviours when it comes to historical work. And I’ve worked with archivists all around the world. I admire them, so definitely never disparage them. Do I think that they knew what they had? Well, I would have to assume not, because the government just voted on keeping the Deschenes list secret in perpetuity. Meanwhile, they were releasing it via ATIP. So, you know, I just have to assume that this was an accident because it wasn’t named and it wasn’t made clear and the RCMP miscommunicated or didn’t communicate clearly when they turned it over. Maybe they didn’t know what it was when they gave it to them, or.
Ellin Bessner: Maybe they were like, “This is stupid. We’re going to do it and see what happens!” You know? It’s during COVID so all kinds of stuff happened. You never know. There’s all these lawsuits now, right, Jared? There’s B’nai Brith’s Judicial Review. I don’t know what that’s going to mean now that they can get this stuff themselves. And then there’s the Globe and Mail’s.
Jared McBride: I mean, other groups have specific interests. In many ways, this was just an exercise for my undergraduates. And you know, having this chance to work with primary source material has been really fascinating and fun to do. But if you’d asked me in September if I thought that my work with the undergraduates this year would result in this, I mean, I would have said, you’re crazy. But, you know, but again, here are.
Ellin Bessner: So, you know, so you’re going to put it in a peer-reviewed article?
Jared McBride: No.
Ellin Bessner: Or they will? Or it’s going to come out? Why can’t you put it out on the website so everyone can see it?
Jared McBride: Well, there might be concerns, right? And I’m, as an historian, my purview is going to be scholarly publications. I occasionally do Op-Eds. I occasionally do media and talk about things. As historian, I take privacy seriously. I take the weight of the topic very seriously. Whether it’s dealing with victims or perpetrators or everybody in between. These are heavy topics and they deserve a lot of care and concern. So I would never just put it out there. Although, again, I would just say to other people, and I wouldn’t be the venue for that. I wouldn’t be the proxy for that, the government’s already done that.
So the government’s already made it available to everybody to see openly. So if other people want to do that, that has nothing to do with us, really, or my team or my work. To go back to what our role in this was, our role was connecting dots, not releasing material. You know, if we ever did publish something, it would be in a scholarly journal. But even in that situation, it wouldn’t be naming names and throwing stuff around because I actually, contrary to how we’ve been painted and how this discourse has gone, that’s not the goal. That’s not our goal. That’s not our interest. Or my interest as a story. It is not simply getting names from a list and throwing them on the Internet or accusing people of things that. Things that they’ve done. There are a lot of layers to this story. This Commission, to the war crimes investigation that proceeded after Deschenes for the next 20, 30 years. This is a very layered and intricate and interesting story that deserves time and historical research, not cheap clicks and not hysteria. And so that, as a historian, that’s how I will approach things with this material.
Ellin Bessner: Right. I’m asking because, you know, the Netherlands in January did release 45,000 names of possible collaborators. And it was a huge controversial choice to do it. And it was only done, from what I understand, for people who physically went to the archives. You can’t just put it all on the Internet. It had to be serious. They were very careful about how people access this stuff. So I’m asking that with that in mind. Sure, they treated it carefully, but yet there were cases where people were like, “I didn’t know my father was a collaborator.” Oh my gosh.
Jared McBride: And those sensitivities can play into a decision, but this has been painted in a black and white manner by various parties, right? I mean, to go back to the list itself, these people are not all guilty of war crimes. They’re just not. But that doesn’t mean that no one’s guilty of a war crime, right? You know, this idea that either the list must be completely redacted and blocked from public view for, I don’t know how long, the argument is forever, or that it has to be all released tomorrow. I’ve talked with people who have strong views on both sides of that. I don’t necessarily have a strong view. I think the most proactive measure, in your example of the Dutch case, the most helpful measure would be if this was done by the Canadian government itself, obviously. If the Canadian government stepped up and came up with their own process, explained this process, you know, and made the decision that was best for the country and maybe model it after similar processes in other places that have done this. I think that would be the best approach to this, rather than having people just accidentally put all these things together and do it in this method.
Like, I’m a trained historian. I would never irresponsibly share information, even if it was archival information. But that doesn’t mean that someone else might not do something that’s more improper, right? So you’re inviting this, right? You’re inviting this situation by not taking proactive measures. You know, I really would love someone in the Canadian government to explain this to me. But, you know, take these 29 cases, these people were tried in court. So I should say, in the Part ll of Deschenes, there’s special summaries of all those 29 cases. That’s top secret. They were tried in court. Why is that part still top secret? Why are there RCMP files?
And we know this. I’ve talked to other journalists who tried to order the RCMP investigation files for those 29 cases. They’re still being blocked. Those people are dead. The cases were brought to court and the government is still holding them. So it’s just one of these questions where in terms of opening up databases, the Dutch, other countries, the Americans already did this, right? Even if they wanted to do this piecemeal, even if they wanted to do it in stages, you can have only access on site for people with letters from their university. Sooner or later it’s going to come out. But you would want to get ahead of this. But clearly there hasn’t been a particular administration who has decided that that was worth it. And I get, you know, on one hand, I get it. Politically, I don’t know, it’s probably nothing. What it shows is surely there were people in the government who made good faith and concerted efforts to actually do something. I’m sure there were people at RCMP and Justice who worked hard and actually wanted to see some justice here. But overall, in the scheme of things, this is not a success story for the Canadian government. So the Canadian government doesn’t look good there. And obviously releasing this list is going to upset some other groups. So I can understand why it’s bad politics, but just because it’s bad politics doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do.
Ellin Bessner: We should end it right there. I appreciate you giving me the time. Thank you so much. And to your students, I hope they all get A’s and PhDs out of it.
Jared McBride: Yeah, we’ll see. Thanks.
Ellin Bessner: And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like for this episode of The CJN Daily, made possible in part thanks to the generous support of the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.
The link to read the files is in our show notes and we’ll be doing more stories on what they say in the coming weeks.
Our show’s production team is made up of Zachary Judah Kauffman, who is the senior producer. Andrea Varsany, who’s just joined as producer. Michael Fraiman is our executive producer, Marc Weisblott, the editorial director. And our music is by Dov Beckow. Thanks for listening.
Show Notes
Related links
- Hear B’nai Brith Canada’s former legal director, and a former war crimes investigator turned historian both weigh in on the importance of Canada releasing the names of suspected Nazi war criminals who entered the country, on The CJN Daily.
- Why Canada was reluctant to prosecute suspected Nazi war criminals who entered the country, in The CJN.
- Get the secret RCMP war crimes files officially released by Canada in Jan. 2020, after an Access to Information request. The files are all hosted now on the Canadian-based Investigative Journalism Foundation’s database.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Judah Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Marc Weisblott (editorial director)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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