The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada (Deschênes Commission) Peggy Morton

The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada (Deschênes Commission) was established in February 1985 "to investigate the charge that a considerable number of Nazi war criminals had gained admittance to Canada through a variety of illegal or fraudulent means." Its report was released in December 1986. Established at a turning point when no force could act in the old way, the Deschênes Commission showed the utter refusal of the ruling circles to provide modern definitions. Instead it revealed the drive to reverse the verdict of the peoples following the anti-fascist victory that democracy could not permit the existence of fascism. The recommendations of the Commission were then used to enact police powers to permit arbitrary revocation of citizenship and deportation. Ostensibly to prevent the granting of citizenship to war criminals and/or to make its revocation easier, the Commission recommended amendments to the Citizenship Act and the Immigration Act. To the same end it also recommended that immigrant applicants be asked specific questions about their past military, para-military, political and civilian activities, and that a written, signed record of the applicant's answers be kept during her or his lifetime. All of this was to set the precedent that Canadian citizenship could be revoked and citizens deported. Such measures had been carried out before in Canada but required invoking the War Measures Act such as at the time of the Winnipeg General Strike. Section 10(1) of the Citizenship Act now states, "the Minister may revoke a person's citizenship or renunciation of citizenship if the Minister is satisfied on a balance of probabilities that the person has obtained, retained, renounced or resumed his or her citizenship by false representation or fraud or by knowingly concealing material circumstances." This power is completely arbitrary and subject to Ministerial prerogative or police powers. It was, for example, not used against cabinet minister Maryam Monsef when it was revealed that she was born in Iran, not in Afghanistan as stated on her application for refugee status, but has been used as grounds for deportation of other Canadian citizens. The parliamentary summary explains that the Deschênes Commission report states that in 1948, as the Cold War was intensifying, "the governments of the Commonwealth, including Canada, received a telegram dated 13 July 1948 from the British Commonwealth Relations Office. This proposed an end to Nazi war crimes trials in the British zone of Germany. 'Punishment of war crimes is more a matter of discouraging future generations than of meting out retribution to every guilty individual ... it is now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible.' Faced with the reality of a new and dangerous enemy, the western powers became reluctant to pursue the remnants of the old. Their limited security resources were re-deployed to uncover suspected Soviet agents and Communists, rather than to identify and track down Nazi war criminals. In Canadian immigration policy, which was rapidly liberalized after the war, the restrictions against the entry of ex-enemy aliens were systematically relaxed."[1] The report of the Deschênes Commission has nothing to say on the role of the Canadian state in admitting those who were suspected or known war criminals. The government did not publish the report of the Research Director and only a heavily redacted version has ever been available. The narrow terms of the public inquiry precluded investigating what the government knew about those it admitted. It did not inquire as to how, for example, all surviving members of the Waffen SS Galicien Division were "cleared" for immigration to Canada in direct violation of Canadian law at the time of their entry. The number of war criminals admitted to Canada is not known. The Deschênes Commission produced three lists of individuals containing the names of 883 old men. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre put the number of collaborationist Ukrainian Waffen SS members alone (members of voluntary divisions under the command of Nazi officers) admitted with British complicity to Canada in 1950 at 2,000. In all, 9,000 members of the Ukrainian Waffen SS went to the U.S., Britain, Canada and elsewhere. An official list with their names is contained in the National Archives in Britain but remains classified. In 1997 the CBS program 60 Minutes reported that about 1,000 SS men and Nazi collaborators were permitted to immigrate to Canada from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Approximately 2,000 German war criminals were identified as living in Canada and receiving "victim pensions" for war injuries. Following the Deschênes Commission, four individuals were eventually charged. The only case that came to trial, that of Imre Finta, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity resulted in acquittal. The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. This ended the prosecutions and the three remaining cases were dropped. Once the narrow limits of considering whether war crimes charges could be laid against a few individuals had been established, the Commission proceeded with this task in a manner guaranteed to avoid exposure of the reactionary Ukrainian organizations which had done such yeoman's service for the bourgeoisie and of the despicable role of Anglo-American imperialism and the Canadian state. The Commission held no hearings and collected no evidence outside Canada, i.e. where the crimes had been committed. Justice Deschênes established very narrow conditions for collection of evidence in the Soviet Union, and at the same time announced that he would not take part in the hearing of evidence abroad. The Soviet authorities were given an ultimatum as to how evidence would be collected in the Soviet Union. When the Soviet authorities took their time deciding how to respond to this request. Deschênes soon concluded that the response from the Soviet Union had "taken too long" and there was "no time" for hearing evidence abroad. Given these arbitrary decisions, it was not hard to eliminate the vast majority of suspected war criminals from the list. Everyone whose case required evidence to be collected outside of Canada was removed. All the members of the Waffen SS Galizien were summarily removed and it was declared that they had been cleared of war crimes at the time of their entry. And so it went. In the end one person was denaturalized and returned to Holland, one trial led to an acquittal, and the Crown dropped the charges on the rest of the cases it had begun.[2] The Commission falsely asserted that war crimes charges against the Ukrainian Waffen SS division were first registered in 1950, when in fact they were first received on October 23, 1947. This is an important error, since in 1947, after being held for two years as prisoners of war, the status of members of the SS Galizien was changed to displaced persons, paving the way for their immigration to Britain and Canada. Further, only those who had been forcibly conscripted were exempt at any time under Canadian law, while the members of the Waffen SS Galizien called themselves volunteers. Thus to suggest that they or any other Nazi collaborators were exonerated by the Commission is just one more falsification of history. The reactionary Canadian organizations made virulent objections to the Commission on the basis that Canadians of Ukrainian origin were under attack. This was the cover used to shield both the Canadian state and the reactionary Ukrainian "leaders" it had sponsored and to maintain the claim that they "represented" all Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) was cobbled together by government fiat while at the same time the cultural, political and defence organizations established by the workers and farmers through their own efforts were criminalized, their leaders jailed without charges, their halls and printing presses seized and turned over to the made-in-Ottawa UCC. It was this state-sponsored and organized UCC which had been so insistent that the members of the SS Galizien and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) leaders be permitted to immigrate to Canada in the face of strong protest at the time from many Canadian organizations, and the organization of veterans of the Waffen SS Galizien remained a member of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.[3] The investigation of Nazi war criminals in Canada was an exercise in disinformation. Since the Commission's report, previously classified CIA documents now available leave no doubt that U.S. imperialism and Britain knew exactly who they were dealing with. U.S. imperialism saw the reactionary and fascist Ukrainian organizations as an intelligence asset and a source for recruitment of saboteurs and terrorists to be used in a coming war against the Soviet Union. A massive disinformation campaign was needed and a massive disinformation campaign was carried out. In the service of the Cold War, war criminals, ex-Nazis and collaborators were reborn as "victims of communism." Now added to the Nazi propaganda of millions of deaths in the Ukraine, invented by the Hearst newspaper empire, was the propaganda of the "wholesale slaughter" of people repatriated to their homelands, especially to the Soviet Union. The "victims of communism," had to be "saved." How many people displaced by the war or forced into slave labour by the Nazis in Germany and the occupied countries became the victims of such propaganda will never be known. The aim was to terrorize the people as to the fate which supposedly awaited them under Soviet rule should they return to their villages and homelands. It must never be forgotten that at the time of the Second World War these so-called "victims of communism" perpetrated the most heinous crimes against the people in the name of fighting "Jewish Bolshevism." Their aim was to preserve the outmoded social, political and economic order over which they ruled and to re-establish their lost power and privileges within the Czarist autocracy and other similar regimes within the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire. Not for one minute is there any acknowledgement of the many crimes committed by these "victims of communism" and their heirs. To suggest that they were exonerated by the Deschênes Commission has no relation to the facts. The parliamentary summary on the Commission stated: "The public hearings of the Commission had many highlights, but the most emotional aspect of the hearings and public debate outside the hearings seemed to pit the Canadian Jewish community against the Canadian East European and Baltic communities. The latter were afraid that the inquiry would become a witch hunt against their members who had revolted against Soviet tyranny during the war to the point of allying themselves with the Nazis." In 1986, John Sopinka, then legal counsel for the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and later a Supreme Court Justice, went before the Commission to state: "It is my submission that there is no evidence that Ukrainians were in any general way the allies of Nazi Germany during World War II. Far from being the allies of Nazi Germany, Ukrainians found themselves in the unenviable position of having to battle both Nazi and Soviet repression." Such slanders against the Ukrainian people are being repeated today. The truth is that an estimated 4.5-5 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army while many more fought as partisans. Ukraine suffered proportionally the most deaths at the hands of the Nazis of any nation. The undeniable fact is that in the face of this heroic resistance, the Ukrainian Nationalist organizations of Western Ukraine swore allegiance to Hitler, and proclaimed that their "independence" required the establishment of a new fascist order in Europe, and the ethnic cleansing of all lands which would form part of their "independent Ukraine." Notes 1. Library of Parliament, Grant Purves, "War Criminals, The Deschênes Commission," Political and Social Affairs Division, Revised 16 October 1998. 2. Ibid. 3. Wsevolod W. Isajiw, Yuri Boshyk, Roman Senkus, Ed., The Refugee Experience: Ukrainian Displaced Persons After World War II, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, University of Alberta, 1992 (contains a detailed account of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee's efforts to bring the SS Galicien to Canada despite being prohibited under Canadian law.) Tottle, Douglas, Fraud Famine and Fascism, Progress Books, 1987 states that, "In 1946, Ukrainian Canadian Committee President Wasyl Kushnir visited the SS-men in Rimini, some of whom were still dressed in their Nazi uniforms. Upon Kushnir's return to Canada, the UCC lobbied to secure their entry into Canada. This was seemingly difficult -- SS members were barred from entry. Appearing before the Senate's Standing Committee on Immigration and Labour, Kushnir was asked if military men were among the displaced persons under discussion. Kushnir replied in the negative, supporting Senator David's claim that the SS-men were workmen by adding that they had been forcibly deported." The SS Galicia Division has been accused of killing many Polish, Ukrainian and Yugoslav partisans who fought to liberate their countries from Nazi German occupation. The Soviet Red Army crushed the unit in the battle of Brody in 1944; it was rebranded as the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army before surrendering to the allied forces in 1945. In 1947 thousands of members of the SS Galicia were allowed to immigrate to Canada, the U.S. and Britain. They have their own memorial in Oakville, Ontario. (Based on an article in FIRE!, CPC(M-L) discussion journal, 2010) (TML Weekly No. 9, March 18, 2017)