On Feb. 10, the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada published its decision on whether Library and Archives Canada was justified to block the release of the full, un-redacted 1986 Deschenes Commission report on suspected Nazi war criminals and collaborators who came to Canada after the Second World War.
The government archives department claims it can’t release everything, because Canada received some key information after the war from an allied foreign government—who wouldn’t like it published, even all these years later—and doing so could jeopardize Canada’s international relations. Plus, releasing RCMP file numbers could be dangerous.
The OIC ruling suggested that B’nai Brith Canada, who has been lobbying for decades to unlock Canada’s murky wartime immigration policies, should take the case to the Federal Court of Canada. And that’s just what B’nai Brith Canada has done. On Jan. 21, lawyers for the Jewish human rights group filed documents asking for a judicial review of keeping the “Deschenes Report” secret.
On today’s episode of The CJN Daily, we’re joined by Sam Goldstein, former legal counsel to B’nai Brith Canada, and also by historian and author Howard Margolian, a former war crimes investigator who thinks Canada let in relatively few hardcore Nazis back then—but still wants the names released as well as their entire case files.
Related links
- Read B’nai Brith’s legal application to the Federal Court for a judicial review of Ottawa’s refusal to release all the classified war criminals documents. Read the Office of the Information Commissioner’s ruling on B’nai Brith’s appeal.
- Read how Pierre Trudeau opposed prosecuting Nazi war criminals who had entered Canada–revealed in the most recent batch of 1986 Deschenes Commission war crimes documents, released by Ottawa in February 2024, in The CJN.
- Hear why B’nai Brith Canada and historian Alti Rodal continued to push for all the files and names to be released, on The CJN Daily from Oct. 2023 and from September 2024.
Transcript: Our transcript was created partly with AI. Please excuse typos.
Ellin Bessner: And joining us now from Toronto is Sam Goldstein, who was B’nai Brith’s director of legal affairs during the initial process to get the files released, and historian and author, Howard Margolian, from Ottawa. former researcher with the Department of Justice’s War Crimes Department Welcome both of you to The CJN Daily, and I’m introducing the two of you to each other because you don’t know each other.
Sam Goldstein: Thank you. Nice to meet you, Howard.
Howard Margolian: Nice to meet you, too.
Ellin Bessner: The Library and Archives Canada said that it is not going to fulfil requests to have these complete files released to the public. They are saying, there’s several reasons why the decision was taken. Sam, let’s start with you. You were B’nai Brith’s former legal director. You were intimately involved in this. What did they say were the reasons that they can’t release it to the public now, in this time in our history?
Sam Goldstein: Well again, Ellin, thanks for inviting me, and thanks for following up on this important topic. So it’s underneath the Information Act, and the Information Act, while it says that Canadians have a right to access information from the government, it then lists a number of exceptions where information that could be requested can be denied.
They denied the information on several sections underneath the Information Act, but by and large the general reason for denying it has to deal primarily with the fact that the information that was obtained was obtained from a foreign government, or a foreign investigative body or a foreign organization. Another reason is personal information. and another reason is that it may disclose investigation information underneath the law of Canada that’s being currently investigated. But essentially it comes underneath a sort of a larger rubric of national interests and comity towards other international organizations. So it’s basically under that larger rubric that they don’t want to release this information because it might offend a foreign government, to put it in the vernacular.
Now it doesn’t stop here, Ellin. It can certainly move forward. And remember, B’nai Brith has been waiting for a response for about 2 years since we put the initial request.
The next step is appeal the decision to the Information Commissioner and after the Office of the Information Commissioner makes its decision, then that decision can then go to the Federal Court of Canada for an independent review which we lawyers call judicial review. So we’ll finally get before a person who’s not a government employee
And I’m not too surprised that we got the denial. I was always obviously hopeful we would get the information. but I know that. and certainly The Globe has reported upon this earlier this year, that the request that B’nai Brith was making (and The Globe and Mail, and The Daily Beast, which is a publication in the United States were also requesting this information)–that CIJA, the Centre for Israel and Jewish affairs, has been undermining the efforts of getting this information by lobbying the Government not to release it. So I wasn’t too surprised when you have a Jewish organization telling the government ‘Don’t release this information’ that the government sided with the reasons. We could get into that in a moment. But I’m hopeful now…and eventually we’ll get before a Federal Court judge. And that’s where I think we should invest our greatest resources, and energy and hope.
Ellin Bessner: Okay, that’s a lot to unpack. CIJA did come out on the record and call for the files to be released – in the principle of transparency. But say any form of disclosure should be done with proper context to avoid a witch hunt in the court of public opinion…
Howard. I’d like to have you jump in if you wouldn’t mind, because I want to ask you. We’ve never spoken to you about this case. Wwhen renewed attention came onto this whole issue after Yaroslav Hunka was given the standing ovation in the House of Commons, could you just tell us, when you saw that former Ukrainian Waffen SS soldier being given a standing ovation, what went through your mind, and what was your reaction?
Howard Margolian: I’d have to say I was disappointed, but not surprised. Whether to what extent the inclusion of this person in those proceedings of the House was malicious or simply incompetence. I have no idea. Given the history of this government, I’d say it was probably more to do with incompetence.
But I can’t say at this point that I had really strong reactions one way or the other to it. I guess my feeling was that once this came up, and then, once the issue of should names be released or files be released, I think as a historian, I guess that sort of piqued my interest more, or renewed my interest in something that I had written about basically 24 years ago. It’s a long time ago.
Ellin Bessner: When you wrote your book [Unauthorized Entry, U of T Press] and you got access to files that maybe the Deschenes report didn’t have, because your book came out 2000, a few years later. Can you speak to what you were able to get?
Howard Margolian: Certainly at the time that not only these members of what used to be the Ukrainian Waffen (14th) SS Division, but other people, particularly from Eastern Europe, after the Second World War, who were granted access, who maybe shouldn’t have been, the records that would have been available to RCMP Security screening officers at various visa vetting offices in Europe were pretty much limited to two main kinds of records: German records in Germany, of which there were plenty, and then also international refugee organization records now housed in Paris at their national archives
and my research on this subject led me to, in general, conclude, with some exceptions.that there were certainly efforts made– whether we were talking about individuals, or Larger groups, mass movements such as somewhere around a thousand of these 14th SS members–there were certainly efforts made to screen out people who would have been considered at that time undesirable. So people who had willingly volunteered, collaborated. People who had obviously who had committed crimes.
That that was the general conclusion I reached.
I guess we always we always do better with the benefit of hindsight, and I was fortunate in that when, in the 1990s, when I worked for a few years for the Department of Justice’s War Crimes unit, we got access to various archives, both in the former Soviet Union, but also in places like the Czech Republic, Poland. and Hungary, which were had formerly, the Eastern Bloc which which had fallen apart in effect.
And there were a lot of captured German records. The Red Army, as it moved West, liberating its own country and then going into the Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc, they certainly grabbed a lot of documents, anything that the Germans didn’t burn or shred, or whatever when they were retreating. The Soviet Army obviously got a hold of and took back with them and basically kept under wraps until really the collapse of the the Soviet bloc.
So when it came to people like these Ukrainians who were–some of whom, I have no doubt, in fact, I have some evidence.–were in auxiliary police units set up by the Germans when the Germans first got there, when they would try to apply to get a visa to come to Canada, we had a process. But that process would have run up against a wall. In the case of peoplenfrom what we now call, let’s say the Eastern Bloc, because the the German records would on them would have been sparse or non-existent, so the RCMP officers, the immigration officers at our various visa granting offices in Europe, would have probably gone, and, I know, did go to the German archives and try to get information on these people. But that became a fool’s errand. It was much easier to find detailed information on Germans who had lived in Germany joined German units…than it was on people who became in effect displaced persons in Europe after the war.
Ellin Bessner: Right. But go back to what I asked you. So when Alti Rodal (the author of the report for the Deschenes Commission) you said they ran up against the wall. But you had access because Communism had been over. The wall had fallen when you were researching. So you got stuff that they couldn’t get is what I’m trying to say.
Howard Margolian: Yes. Yeah. Exactly.
Ellin Bessner: So how did you come up with your number of 2,000 Nazi and other war criminals coming to Canada.
Howard Margolian: Actually, that is an estimate and it’s based on a pretty broad definition. So it’s not just war criminals. But it’s basically people who, even at very low levels, would have either voluntarily joined units that the Germans set up, often initially in an ad hoc manner, or who subsequently, after two years of German occupation, and being tired of kind of having to do forced labour, if they were offered the opportunity to join some kind of auxiliary police unit, they did so.
So that that’s where I came up with that number, and it is an estimate only. I’ve seen numbers as low as a thousand, and I’ve seen numbers as high as 5,000. I think you can probably negate both of those. But I’m assuming we’re here to talk about the Ukrainian Waffen 14th SS.
Ellin Bessner: How do we know who these people are that are in this list, that the Government had, that they’re not telling us?
Howard Margolian: I haven’t seen the names. I never read the second the secret half of the Deschenes Commission report. What I did do particularly for my book was to try and research the unit, the 14th SS Because it was a part of a large movement of people who came in 1950, 1951 from Britain, although obviously their collaboration, whether voluntary or not, during the German occupation of Ukraine and Poland. They came from Eastern Europe.
I was interested in two things. I was interested in the large movements of people who came from that part of the world, because certainly lots did. And of course I was also interested in process.
My book, a lot of people have said, is is exceedingly boring, because, of course, it’s about bureaucratic processes. And I have to say when I was doing the research, even I was finding sometimes that it became a bit of a snooze. I mean, how many different visa application forms can you look at? Whether it’s the Oslo office or the Berlin office, or you know the Frankfurt office, or whatever before you say, ‘Oh, my God, what am I doing?’ But it was necessary to do that in order to try to understand the process.
Ellin Bessner: Okay. So people that have reviewed your book have said that you said Canada is making it out to be a bigger problem than it actually was because how many immigrants came through at that time? And what was the percentage of problematic ones? Is it is it fair to say that your book says it wasn’t so bad? That Canada didn’t let in as many as…
Howard Margolian: I mean,look. I guess you could make the argument that we shouldn’t have allowed any of them. But if you were going to have resumption of immigration from various parts of the world after the Second World War, you were going to have to have criteria and processes for evaluating applications by these people. Considering the numbers of people who came to Canada. And I wrote basically about the first roughly 10 years after the war. The number, even the number 2,000. And like I said, I was being a little more on the high side with that estimate, that given the amount of immigration, given how difficult it was to screen people particularly displaced persons from Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union, I concluded ultimately we really didn’t do that bad a job. Could we have done better? Yes.
And of course one of the mysteries, I guess, or at least one of the more open questions which certainly, even after 24 years after my book is, I don’t know the precise type of screening that these 14th SS men got. I know what happened to them when they were first captured, and then eventually, were allowed into Britain. I know what kind of screening they got there.
But as far as what the Canadians did? I know what the Minister of Immigration at the time promised. And I know what they were doing with similar people. Let’s say ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, who had also ended up in other Waffen SS units. I know I know what they did for them, but because I never saw the visa vetting files for this particular group of people, I can’t be a hundred [per cent sure] I had to infer that the Canadian authorities, the immigration and RCMP Authorities, basically screened them the same way that they would have screened people from other parts of the world who may may or may not have been collaborators with the Germans in their respective countries.
Ellin Bessner: What do you mean you didn’t see the files of the WAFFEN SS?
Howard Margolian: I did not see individual screening files on members of this 14th SS Division. And in fact, I actually got to see very few Waffen SS files. If you check my book you’ll see that there’s a record group at the National Archives. It’s RG 146. It’s basically CSIS, but at the time in the 1940’s it was the RCMP. I had to really go through hoops to get access to files. And I had to make formal access requests, even though I knew the archivist at the time very well. I had to make a formal request to get access to files of people who had been in other WAFFEN SS units who, we knew, had been rejected. These would not have been people who were allowed into the country. These were people who, we know, never got into the country. They may have been members of a Baltic SS unit or one of the Hungarian or Yugoslavian SS units. So I got to see a number of those.
And, by the way, when I got them, of course the names were blanked out. Because I was told at the time, and I suspect perhaps Mr. Goldstein can speak to this, I was told that at the time that the access to Information Act section 17, I think it is, which was about names. The Government could not release [these] even though these people, to my way of thinking the ones who are rejected from admission, why they have any expectation of privacy I do not know, but I was told by the archivist for CSIS that these names had to be kept confidential. I could not find out their names for I believe it was until 110 years after the date of their birth, or 20 years after the date of their death. Perhaps Mr. Goldstein could enlighten us on that.
Sam Goldstein: So. There is a public interest, or I should say, the section in the Information Act that Howard was referring to is safety of individuals, and so the Government or the head of the Institution, the Library and Archives may refuse to disclose any record requested if the disclosure could be reasonably be expected to threaten the safety of individuals.
So I’m not exactly sure how disclosing some of the names of the people who are surely passed away by now could threaten their personal safety. But I think I think the conversation that that you’re having with Howard is quite interesting in many ways, because the bigger point I get from it that history is nuanced. It’s not simply black and white. There’s lots of grey. and I had said in a earlier interview with you, Ellin, that it’s important to release these documents because it tells the story of Canada and our participation in a world event and our participation in what happens afterwards. World War II: the greatest threat to world security were Nazis. After World War II was over, the greatest threat were Communists. And so, who were the greatest haters of Communists and fighters of Communists? Nazis. And that’s why, in part, we let people in. We were not sure how much we’d let people in. But we weren’t so concerned as a country to be worried about whether they were Nazis or not, because all we knew that they were going to be allies with us to fight Communism.
Ellin Bessner: Howard’s book, maybe you want to jump in on, this is not exactly how your book saw it.
Howard Margolian: I was not concerned with the admission or denial of admission of Communists, but it was inevitable going through the mountain of immigration files that I went through, including policy files, including process files and some individual files. What I found was that in the late 1940s, while there were very specific criteria set for how immigration officers should approach an applicant who the searches on which revealed some form of Nazi party official affiliation, or some form of SS affiliation, or even just German, regular German armed forces affiliation, there was really none of that
for Communists.
In fact, I found one document from 1948, where there’s a legal opinion from the Department of Justice to the Immigration branch, which basically says ‘Unlike Nazis, we actually can’t really stop Communists from coming in, because we have no criteria with which to base it on.
If you looked at as I did at the way after the Second World War, when the Immigration Department is revamping and restarting. It’s actually at that time still called the Immigration Branch, they’re restarting immigration, or they’re at least thinking about it. People who had German Nazis collaborators, collaborators from France, other countries, there there is a great deal of information on, and really almost manuals full of of telling immigration officers: this is how you deal with somebody from there. If you can find out that they work for such and such a collaborationist police unit, or such and such, or they were in the SS and initially in the case of the Waffen SS, whether they were from Germany, or, as these people were, from Ukraine (non-Germans), it was pretty much a blanket ban.
I didn’t know if, Ellin, you were going to ask me this, but since you haven’t yet, I’ll say it anyways. One of the interesting things was that while there was a tremendous amount of pressure exerted on the Canadian government, beginning really in 1947, and continuing until
the government makes the decision that ‘Yes, we’ll let in a certain number of these 14th SS people’, despite this incredible pressure coming from various Ukrainian Canadian organizations, that was ultimately not what changed the policy.
What happened was the Canadian government was working through internally, coming nearer and nearer to a peace treaty with what became West Germany which eventually happened in 1951. And were thinking of relaxing some of the restrictions, the ban on particularly, not so much Germans from Germany, but ethnic Germans who may have served in the German armed forces, or in other more odious units, let’s say. and so they were coming up with processes and revamping some of the criteria to allow that. And this happens before, while the Canadian Government is basically telling the Ukrainian Canadian organizations to go jump in a lake, stop bugging us about this. We’re not letting them in.
But once they once they open the door a crack for non-German members of the Waffen SS from other countries it was inevitable – whether it was right or not I’m not commenting on– but it was inevitable that they were going to have to do the same with the 14th SS. It became part of the process.
Also I have a question, and it’s really more of political question. I, as a historian, I have to say I’m really not interested in getting names. The names to me are meaningless as a historian. What I would be much more interested in is seeing the visa vetting files on all 950 or 1,000. or however, many were allowed in of these 14th SS Division people, because I think that would speak to what Mr. Goldstein just mentioned before. What’s the history of this? Did the Government do a reasonable job at screening these people when they, when they ultimately granted them admission, or did they not?
I was able with some groups to say ‘Yes, they did’, but because I never got to see the files on THESE people. I have no real way of knowing if the Government’s assurances given, including in the House of Commons, that oh, ‘Yes, these fellows will be subjected to the most stringent kinds of screening we can do’. I would be interested, as a historian, to see that, than to find out the names of people who, as Mr. Goldstein rightly points out, are mostly dead now. To me, releasing the names without having context to it, particularly that context, why were they allowed in? Did they lie on their visa application forms, and it was simply, as I have suggested, impossible for the Canadian government to always challenge the lie?
Or did the Canadian government basically say, ‘You know what? We’re not going to devote a lot of resources to these people. According to the British and according to the Ukrainian Canadian community, these are mostly, you know, good guys who just kind of got swept up in,you know, and were recruited, often not voluntarily.’ That would have been their argument. I would beg to differ, so I would like to know the answer to that more than I would want a thousand names.
Ellin Bessner: I’m going to bring you in, Sam. You want to answer him about the names are not important. It’s the context. I think you guys want the names, too.
Sam Goldstein: I think the important point that Howard’s making on the big level is the fact that history is nuanced. It’s not black and white. There’s a lot of grey in it, and the comments he making are interesting because we have to know what happened in Canada. We have to know what it’s a Canadian story. It’s a Canadian story about what we did after World War 2.
And it’s important to know what we did, and to put our actions into context with what other people [did] you know. One version of why we accepted these Nazi war criminals and collaborators was because at the time during World War, World War 2, the greatest threat to national security, everyone’s security in Canada, were Nazis after the war. That wasn’t the issue. Nazism had been defeated, and the greater threat to our nation and to the world was Communism. And we have a specific example where I understand, I believe it’s in Alti Rodal’s narrative of what happened to the historical narrative was that Canada let in the Yugoslavian Nazi, who would then knew the language of what was Yugoslavia, knew the language, and was able to spy on Yugoslavian Communists. as a reason for for letting him in. And so it’s an important story to tell about our own country that we need to know. And Howard’s incredible detailed knowledge of the ins and outs of what happened sort of goes to show that we have to assess what our participation during the war was, and after the war, and how we fit into the whole sort of current of world history. And how do we assess our leaders at the time? Because the only way to assess a Prime Minister’s or elected official’s status in the pantheon of Canadian history, so to speak, is to go back and look at their actions. And we have to know what happened at the time. We don’t. And in order to do that, we have to have the context and the history to properly judge them. That’s another reason why we need to get these information. But the names are important, too. It would lead to, I think, the other legal aspects of getting information that Howard is looking at, and for sure getting hold of the other documents like the screening process, or are just as important to tell that full story of history.
But I think what I want to focus on mostly in getting the word out. is these documents are important for Canada and for all Canadians. It’s not just the Jewish community interest that I think that we have here. It’s a much more larger historical interest.
Ellin Bessner: What do you make of the fact that it’s divided the community and the Canadian broader, non-Jewish community is also divided on it. The Holocaust survivors want it, you guys want it. The Ukrainian Canadians said they would sue and go to court and try to block it. Why is it so important? Why is it all these years later, like, who cares.
Sam Goldstein: Well, I don’t think it’s divine the community as much as I simply think the community understands the importance it is to know what our history is…and I’ve spoken to many Ukrainians, and they, too, understand that this is an important historical record that will tell the history of Canada. It’s unfortunate that our government, primarily Trudeau’s government, plays a domestic politics and tries to pit community groups against community groups. I think what has to be good for the Jewish community has to be good for Canada at large.
Ellin Bessner: Well, the whole argument was, and Howard. I want to hear about this from you, that right now Canada is an ally of Ukraine, and as soon as these names would be released, then it gives fodder to [Russian president Vladimir] Putin in modern day conflicts to say, ‘You see, you see? Ukrainians WERE Nazis. We’re right to denazify Ukraine.’ So there’s a more modern war at stake here. This is the argument I’ve been hearing.
Sam Goldstein: I’m sorry. I think you could walk and chew gum at the same time. I think you could be critical of countries, and both be supportive of them at the same time. So I don’t see that they’re mutually exclusive again,
Ellin Bessner: Howard, in your book. I want to go back, you mentioned that there were very tight restrictions on the actual German Nazi members. And you said that just earlier. Do we know how many really bad people were? And I’m putting “bad” in quotation marks. You said you didn’t see the files for Waffen. But you saw other files? Right? Can we like actually pinpoint? How many came here.
Howard Margolian: Bad is a very subjective word….One of the documents which was from the at the time, 1950, after the then Minister of Immigration came out and said, ‘Well, if they meet other admission criteria, we may let some of these 14th SS people in, the Canadian Jewish Congress was not happy with this, and they responded essentially by writing to the then Minister of Immigration and saying: “Really, what’s the point in screening if you’re just going to screen individuals without accepting the totality of the evidence against this division?”
Now, if you’ll recall Mr. Goldstein, Sam, just talked about history as nuanced.And the history of this particular division is nuanced. If you take the position that anyone who ever served in an SS unit in this case the armed SS, or military SS, Waffen SS, if you take the position that just by doing that they should automatically and for all time have not been granted admission to Canada, then, okay, that’s a position. I don’t even happen to agree with that. But that’s a position. It’s not nuanced. It’s a position we are taking. The position that there is nothing that can mitigate their service for 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, whatever it was, in this unit, even if we later found out that a particular individual, that all he did was stand guard at a training camp for this division for 3 years. I’m exaggerating for purposes of making a point. And what I found..is one case, because it was a large number of people who were to be admitted. in fairly short order, this was a very interesting test case of Canada’s attempts to screen out Nazis.
And what I found when I researched this…was I had the advantage of being able to go into some pretty arcane documentation about the precursors to this particular Division. Some of the auxiliary police units. Some of the reports of these units as to what they were doing, and it was pretty clear to me, and it’s why I said in my book that I think that when the Deschenes Commission…sort of basically gave this division a relatively clean bill of health…they didn’t have access to the documentation that I subsequently got access to.
I found that, yes, there were criminal elements, certainly, in the precursor units to this division, and even the division itself, although…there wasn’t a whole lot of time. The division was formed in 1943. They did some training. The 2 training camps that they were trained at were both near, in one case in Poland, near forced labour camps. In another case in Czechoslovakia, at that time, they were near Flossenburg concentration camp. I couldn’t find direct evidence of the 14th SS’s involvement in those labour camps or in Flossenburg concentration camp, but it would not have been unusual for people who were training to possibly have done some duty in one of these places.
Certainly there was evidence and this was almost exclusively found in Eastern European archives, captured German records in Eastern European and Russian archives, that in the case of anti-partisan operations, that some elements…took part in some pretty horrible atrocities against civilians.
But it’s a mixed bag. Part of the problem, of course, is that the Division had about 14,000 [men] I think, at full strength. It goes into battle in July 1944. It’s almost wiped out. About 3,000 escape either being killed or captured by the Red Army. And they are then the nucleus of its second incarnation. And so it’s entirely possible that since about 75% of the division was effectively wiped out, and since those people probably didn’t come to Canada, it’s entirely possible that yes, there were criminal elements who were subsequently killed in combat or taken prisoner by the Red Army. So that’s the nuance I’m talking about, and that’s why I guess you might be hearing why I am somewhat reluctant to simply release names, because if you release names without their files, what you’re basically saying is, well, it’s a Waffen SS unit, we should not have allowed any of these people come in, regardless of their individual behaviour. And I guess that’s the kind of nuance that I think Sam is talking about, and it’s certainly the kind of nuance I attempted in my book.
I would be more interested to know, of the 1,000, did we let in 150 or 200, and I’m guessing here. who may have had prior service in auxiliary police units which had committed one form or another of what we would call atrocities or war crimes? I guess that’s where I’m standing on this. I mean, if they want to release the names, if they if they get the names great, I just I just think it doesn’t really advance our knowledge of our country’s history.
Ellin Bessner: Well, I think they want everything they want. All the files from the Department of Justice. They want part 2, the fully unredacted part 2 [of Deschenes.] And they also want the names and the files that the Department of Justice had for years, and the RCMP.
Howard Margolian: I should point out that Alti Rodal in her report, did do a sample of lower ranking officers in the 14th SS. I think she had something in excess of 200 people that the government had some kind of a file on. What was in the file I don’t know. I did record that she had in effect said “Yeah, 218”. Her own research revealed that only 12 of the 218 that files that she saw have actually indicated there had been prior auxiliary police service, which again, is a pretty small number. But given what happened to the division, it’s almost complete destruction in the summer of 1944, that may be reasonable.
Ellin Bessner: Let’s say the numbers are 900 or a thousand, we’re just talking the 14th Division. But what about the broader number of who got in? So who are the rest?
Howard Margolian: Well, they not only might have been, the case of Ukrainian collaborators, they would have probably been people who served in auxiliary police units. Rhere was a training camp for SS Guards called Travnicki in Poland, and a lot of Ukrainians, including, by the way, John Demyanyuk, the famous or infamous one, ended up, and they really didn’t do much in the way of rounding up Jews. Occasionally they did. They were sent into the Warsaw Ghetto, and on April 19th [1943]they were unceremoniously thrown out by poorly armed Jews shooting at them from buildings and rooftops.
But they were primarily camp guards, so they would have been sent to various, including Sobibor, Treblinka, or more forced labourcamps, places like Flossenburg and and others. So they would have been collaborators who could have tried, as displaced persons, to get into Canada after the war. The Germans set up all kinds of auxiliary police units in most of the territories they occupied in the Baltic States. For example, I worked on one particular case, in the war crimes unit, of an individual who came to Canada after the war, who was actually an ethnic German who lived in Poland. And he was for a year in a kind of an auxiliary police unit set up by the German occupation authorities in Western Poland.They they would run the gamut. There were a few French collaborators. There was this individual that Sam Goldstein referred to, a Yugoslavian who had been a member of the Security police apparatus in German occupied Yugoslavia. We even allowed a few lower level German scientists to come here. In most cases, yeah, they probably had some criminality or some taint on their hands, but the degree to which they did is, of course, that then becomes a question of what can you find on them as individuals? Because if you’re going to make an immigration policy based on, we at first weren’t gonna let anybody who had the word SS after their name, or even Waffen SS, or Nazi Party, for that matter, even if somebody was a lawyer in Germany, and joined the Nazi party because he thought it would be good for his career, or something.
We had criteria, and at first they were very stringent, and over time they gradually, and I would emphasize the word, gradually they were opened up, or, if you want to say, weakened a little bit, made somewhat less restrictive.
But these people would have come from all over German German occupied Europe. And yes, the 900 plus who, you know, were in the 14th SS are certainly included in that 2,000 number, but that leaves at least another 1,000 from places like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Slovakia. Poland.
There was a smaller group of people, Poles, who came right after the war and were supposed to be temporarily admitted. I believe many of them were able eventually to get permanent status. They were actually screened quite well, according to my research, and they were basically Poles, often of ethnic German origin, who were conscripted into the German armed forces late in the war. I mean, a lot of this does happen later in the war when the Germans are losing and they are trying to replenish dwindling manpower. They’re taking anybody who will happily join them, and if people won’t happily join them sometimes they’re forcing them to join them…Tugoslavian gentleman that Sam referred to is somewhat higher level, but the ones that whose files I saw tended to be pretty much at the lowest level, some kind of an auxiliary policeman. These were not people who, you know, went up the ladder of the Nazi hierarchy.
Ellin Bessner: Lower level didn’t murder Jews or other things?
Howard Margolian: Well, they did. I mean, I saw documentation from some countries where you kind of all you needed to do was put 2 and 2 together. You’d see a German police report on what let’s say a Baltic auxiliary police unit from Lithuania. And they would write, you didn’t know for sure, but they would write how many bullets this 120 man unit had expended. And then if you marry that to the fact that on that day there was a mass execution of Jews near Riga, Latvia, or wherever or somewhere in Lithuania, you could kind of draw a reasonable assumption. Yeah, these guys were involved. It doesn’t say, they were there shooting Jews, but I mean, what else were they doing?
Howard Margolian: We probably these low level kinds of killers, some of them, some of the people we let in would have been people like this. Absolutely. In large measure, this was not deliberate malfeasance on the part of the Canadian government. I don’t even think it was incompetence. If somebody was in a displaced persons camp after the war they usually were screened even to be allowed to stay in, not by Canadians, but by people overseas in Europe, whether they were British or American, or whatever they would have been screened. Some would have been rejected. But exactly what information the international refugee organization which was sponsoring these people would have had on them, of course you’d have to look at their individual file, and all that the Canadians could do is then ask for that. If this person then came to a Canadian visa vetting office and said,”I want to go to Canada” as an individual. I’m not talking now about the 14th SS…and the Canadian RCMP screening officer would probably ask a bunch of questions. If that person passed that, then the RCMP officer would then check out his answers by trying to get whatever documentation he could…The problem with the process came with what do you do when there isn’t that kind of documentation?
Ellin Bessner: Very clear, and you also said they lied.
Howard Margolian: Well, yes The system wasn’t perfect…The right questions were being asked. And if they’re if they lied, and if the records indicated, the records check indicated that they lied, they were not allowed in. Just, I would say, just given the volume, particularly the numbers of people, the tens of thousands of people who we did allow in, who were international refugee organization sponsored people from Eastern Europe. I think we actually did a pretty good job.
Ellin Bessner: It’s time to write Volume 2 about what’s happened in the last 25 years. Now that you can get all this stuff and all these names. You should be able, I mean, I know you’re retired. But there you go. This is a this is a project that’s begging to be written.
Howard Margolian: There aren’t really Nazi war crimes prosecutions going on anymore. I think Germany last year did prosecute somebody. But I mean, basically the these have stopped because there’s almost none of these people left alive, and if they are alive they’re 98 years old, and probably not capable of standing any kind of trial. I mean, it seems to me one of the things, whether it’s the Jewish community, or Ukrainian community, or Latvians, or whoever, or just interested parties, one of the things they might want to do is see to what extent they can get access to the actual war crimes files of the war crimes unit of which I had was a member for a few years. I don’t know. I suspect those will be kept under wraps for a long time, but I think if you don’t try to you’ll never know what might be released and what might not.
Ellin Bessner: I know the whole ask has always been for all the files. David Matus [B’nai Birth’s senior legal advisor] has wanted these 900, or whatever the number is plus the Department of Justice files, plus whatever the RCMP has. They want everything. So we know what Canadian history was like, and what we can learn from it, as opposed to for prosecution, because that you said that ship has sailed.
So do you know names? Are some of names in your book?
Howard Margolian: Yeah, there’s a couple of places. Let’s say it was from some archive in Poland, the State archives, or whatever, and there was an individual mentioned. But part of the agreement was that, and this is me as a private researcher, that I would not disclose the full name. so I would do something like M. Dot, and then the 1st name A with a you know, just a blank.
Ellin Bessner: Your book doesn’t have names.
Howard Margolian: In other cases I really didn’t see names. And, in fact, as I said, with those CSIS records, I actually got access to some reasonable number of files on members of SS units that were denied entry to Canada. But when I got the files the names were, as you say, were blacked out.
And certainly in the case of the this mass movement of a thousand or so 14th SS division people, the names are still hidden. Not to belabour this. But if all that ever gets released is the names to me it’s almost a meaningless exercise without without the context of what did the Canadian Government know about?
What did that, for example, this Yaroslav Hunka, the guy who got the standing ovation, right? What did they know about him? He obviously got in. We know he was a member of the 14th SS. I think he was pretty young when he was recruited for the 14th SS. So I don’t know whether he would have been able to have also been in an auxiliary police unit in 1941, 1942, before the division was formed.
Maybe not, because maybe he’s just too young but it would be interesting to know. But like I said, if okay, so we know his name, but I don’t know anything more about him, except that he was in this division.
Ellin Bessner: Right. So the names aren’t going to tell us how how much of a criminal they were.
Howard Margolian: Parts of it was, he said it was Section 17 of the Access to Information Act. It seems to me that probably at least some of those names now could be released, either, because, you know, the people have been dead more than 20 years, and I’m sure many of them have. I mean if you were born in 1920, and you joined up this division when you were in your early twenties. Well, you know, even if you lived a nice, full life in Canada. You might have died in 2000 or 2001, and that’s more than 20 years past the person’s date of death. And so yeah, why not release those names?
Ellin Bessner: Well, I hope we get some before our lifetime, too, because I would like to know, too, as a historian myself.
It’s really been an honour chatting with you. I really appreciate you taking this time out.
Howard Margolian: Yeah, well, thank you very much. Yeah.
Sam Goldstein: Thank you Howard for chatting.
Credits
- Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
- Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer)
- Music: Dov Beck-Levine
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