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….
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. Continue reading
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