The study says that Canada effectively became a ”dumping ground” for former Nazis who had outlived their usefulness as United States intellengence sources in postwar Europe, and it quoted former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, then a senior Canadian Foreign Ministry official, as having complained to his superiors at the time that ”the Americans should take such people to the United States rather than unloading them on others.’‘
The study’s conclusions appeared to tally with the United States Justice Department’s disclosure in 1983 that American intelligence agencies in Europe knowingly employed and protected former Nazis, including Klaus Barbie, the former Gastapo chief of Lyons, recently convicted of war crimes in a French court. The United States investigation showed that American officials assisted some of the former Nazis in acquiring new identities that made it possible for them to leave Europe and settle elsewhere, notably in South America…
Mr. St. Laurent, who retired in 1957, was also depicted as having been ”personally involved” in communicating with purported Nazi war collaborators from Vichy France who settled in Quebec after being convicted in absentia in French courts.
CANADA RELEASE REPORT ON NAZIS
A study for a Canadian Government commission says people who would have been considered ”undesirable Nazi collaborators” were admitted to Canada as immigrants after World War II because of incomplete and misleading information supplied by United States intelligence officers.
The 560-page study, by Alti Rodal, an Oxford-trained historian living in Ottawa, was compiled for the Deschenes Commission. The Commission compiled an official report on war criminals in Canada that the Government published in March.
The Rodal study, based on secret documents and extensive interviews with officials, influenced the commission’s recommendation that immediate action be taken against 20 alleged Nazi war criminals living in Canada and that 218 other immigrants be subjected to further investigation. Legislation for War Crimes Trials
The Government introduced legislation, still pending, to allow for war crimes trials in Canada. But it ignored the commission’s recommendation that the Rodal study be published, too, and released it, heavily censored, only this week, after The Toronto Star petitioned for the document under Canada’s Access to Information Act.
The study says Government inquiries in recent years showed that in the early 1950’s United States intelligence officials pushed ”Eastern Europeans with false identities through the immigration stream to Canada.”
At the time, William Kelly, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer screening immigration applications in Germany, was said to have become suspicious about United States intentions when he noticed several applications ”all neatly typed and emanating from an address in the American zone of occupation.”
The study says that Canada effectively became a ”dumping ground” for former Nazis who had outlived their usefulness as United States intellengence sources in postwar Europe, and it quoted former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, then a senior Canadian Foreign Ministry official, as having complained to his superiors at the time that ”the Americans should take such people to the United States rather than unloading them on others.”
In fact, the study says, the immigration of Nazis continued for a decade after 1952, with those landed here being selected by a committee of Canadian and British intelligence officials who included H. A. R. (Kim) Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union after being unmasked as a spy. The study says that the committee was formally impaneled to select defectors from Soviet-occupied Europe for resettlement here, but operated in a fashion that avoided the issue of past Nazi associations.
The study’s conclusions appeared to tally with the United States Justice Department’s disclosure in 1983 that American intelligence agencies in Europe knowingly employed and protected former Nazis, including Klaus Barbie, the former Gastapo chief of Lyons, recently convicted of war crimes in a French court. The United States investigation showed that American officials assisted some of the former Nazis in acquiring new identities that made it possible for them to leave Europe and settle elsewhere, notably in South America.
Although it was Mrs. Rodal’s allegations about the role of United States intelligence agencies that made headlines here, her study also contained much that was embarrassing to the Canadian Government. Among those elements is the assertion that two alleged Nazi war criminals were admitted to Canada in 1983 because a German-born senior officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, along with other officers described by the study as having sympathies that ”inclined them towards leniency with regard to former Nazis,” destroyed documents relating the immigrants’ Nazi pasts.
As made public, the study offers no information about the identities or whereabouts of the alleged collaborators who entered Canada with the assistance of United States intelligence officers, or of the two men who immigrated here with Royal Canadian Mounted Police assistance in 1983. The Government, in censoring the document, said it did so to protect individuals and insure fair trials if any of them were brought to court.
Efforts to reach a Justice Department spokesman today were unsuccessful. A press spokesman at the Central Intelligence Agency was unaware of the commission report and said the agency would have no immediate comment. Former Prime Ministers
Some of the censorship involved passages dealing with two former prime ministers, Louis St. Laurent and Pierre Trudeau.
Mr. St. Laurent is depicted as having agreed to the resettlement in Canada in 1949 of a Nazi collaborator from Czechoslovakia, Karol Sidor, after a direct appeal from Pope Pius XII. Mr. Sidor, previously commander in chief of the Hlinka Guard, a Slovakian stormtrooper unit, had been reassigned to the Vatican as the delegate of Nazi-occupied Slovakia. The study quotes a letter from the Apostolic delegate in Canada telling the Canadian authorities that Mr. Sidor ”cannot settle down anywhere in Europe without undergoing serious inconveniences and vexations.”
Mr. St. Laurent, who retired in 1957, was also depicted as having been ”personally involved” in communicating with purported Nazi war collaborators from Vichy France who settled in Quebec after being convicted in absentia in French courts. Mrs. Rodal said the St. Laurent Cabinet passed a special measure to allow four collaborators to remain in Canada as ”political refugees,” and that Mr. St. Laurent acted to persuade another man, Count Jacques de Bernonville, to flee Canada before he was deported to France.
Adara Press 