1987: A LOOK BACK: The hunt for Nazis (12/27/87)

1987: A LOOK BACK

The hunt for Nazis

This was the year the Canadian government began taking action on the more than 200 suspected Nazi war criminals believed living in Canada.

After receiving a report from Quebec Superior Court Justice Jules Deschenes - the head of a two-year, $3-million commission of inquiry on war criminals - Ottawa moved quickly to introduce legislation that would make it easier to prosecute Nazi war criminals in Canada. The bill also tightened up border regulations to prevent people who have committed war crimes in other countries from coming to Canada.

When the bill came before the House of Commons, it was met with some stiff opposition from two Ukrainian members of Parliament, who said it did not go far enough in protecting the rights of innocent individuals. Nevertheless, the law was proclaimed in November.

Later in the year, Justice Minister Ramon Hnatyshyn established a joint Royal Canadian Mounted Police-Justice Department team of 40 investigators to continue the work of the Deschenes Commission. The unit, which has been described by critics as a copy of the controversial U.S. Office of Special Investigations, has a mandate to collect more evidence on the more than 200 suspects identified in the Deschenes report, including some 20 serious cases that warrant immediate action.

Published reports in November said the Justice Department was close to signing a protocol of agreement with the Soviet Union that would admit Canadian investigations behind the Iron Curtain to collect evidence and testimony against suspected Nazi war criminals living in Canada. The proposed agreement is said to include six safeguards for gathering evidence established by Judge Deschenes.

The year was a stormy one for Ukrainian-Jewish relations in Canada. Politicians and community leaders voiced concerns that relations between the two communities deteriorated to an all-time low since the commission was established in 1985. Many said they hoped the tensions would come to an end with the release of the commission's report.

The general feeling of Ukrainian Canadians was summed up by Michael Maryn, a Vancouver lawyer and vice-president of the Vancouver Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Association. "I feel partially vindicated," Mr. Maryn said, "but I think that the harm that was done was permanent. I think we were put on the defensive unnecessarily as a community by persons like (Canadian Nazi hunter) Sol Littman and various aspects of the media."

But the year brought relief to one group of Ukrainian Canadians: the Brotherhood of Veterans of the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army (also known as the Galicia Division). The estimated 600 members of the group still alive feared they might be linked by the Deschenes Commission to Nazi activities. In the end, they were fully exonerated by the probe.

Before the year was up, the Ukrainian Canadian Committee announced that it would begin collecting names of suspected Soviet war criminals living in Canada, including perpetrators of the Great Famine in Ukraine. John Gregorovich, the head of the group's Civil Liberties Commission, told a May convention of Ukrainian professionals that the names will be forwarded to the federal Justice Department for further investigation.

Meanwhile, in the United States Attorney General Edwin Meese III finally agreed to meet with representatives of national organizations critical of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting arm, the Office of Special Investigations. The meeting took place on March 5 with representatives of the Coalition for Constitutional Justice and Security, Estonian American National Council, Americans for Due Process, American Latvian Association, Lithuanian American Community and the Ukrainian National Association. The delegation told the attorney general that deportations to the USSR are totally unacceptable, regardless of a deportee's innocence or guilt, because this creates the impression that the U.S. recognizes the legitimacy of the Soviet legal system. They also expressed hope that legislation allowing for prosecution of war criminals in the U.S. would soon be enacted.

Mr. Meese told the delegation that he would appoint a special liaison person from the Justice Department to meet with East Europeans about their concerns and then report back to him. To date, no liaison person has been named.

The delegation later released a statement calling for U.S. trials for war criminals and pointing out that, as it stands now, a U.S. court ruling on a civil case could, in effect, sentence a defendant to death. Later in the year, the CCJS sent letters to its supporters, suggesting that they contact their senators and representatives to urge them to support the idea of criminal trials in this country of those suspected of committing crimes against humanity during Word War II.

There were a number of developments in cases of accused Nazi war criminals. In March, a federal judge blocked the deportation of Leonid Petkiewytsch who, he said, was wrongly accused of persecuting Jews in a Nazi slave labor camp. Judge O. John Brahos declared that the Cincinnati man was "equally a victim of the time" and had been forced to work as a guard at the Kiel-Hasse forced labor camp. "The Nazi government's reign of terror infected all levels of life, both in Germany and in the occupied territories," the judge said.

In April the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Juozas Kungys, a Clifton, N.J., man appealing a lower court order stripping him of U.S. citizenship for lying about his date and place of birth. The OSI contends that Mr. Kungys participated in atrocities against Jews and others during World War II. However, when a federal district court found that the prosecution had not proved its war crimes case against Mr. Kungys, the OSI challenged the defendant's citizenship, stating that it had been fraudulently obtained because he had lied about his background. Thus, the issue was no longer a question of the defendant's complicity in war crimes, but of misrepresenting biographical data. The Court of Appeals denaturalized Mr. Kungys.

At issue in this landmark case before the Supreme Court is the materiality of misrepresentations, that is, whether they are reason enough to strip Mr. Kungys of his citizenship. The Supreme Court in October asked for reargument of certain aspects of the case, but the Supreme Court has not yet rendered its decision in the Kungys case.

As regards the case of a Long Island man, Karl Linnas, who was found guilty of lying about his wartime activities, the defendant was deported on April 20 to the USSR, where he faced a death sentence handed down in absentia in 1962. The verdict and sentence had been announced in the Soviet press even before the war crimes trial had begun. Mr. Linnas's lawyer had argued that at issue in the case was the unreliability of Soviet-source evidence. Mr. Linnas died on July 2 in a Leningrad hospital, where he had been moved from a jail in Tallinn when he took ill. Mr. Linnas's daughter told the press that Soviet authorities had decided before her father's death to commute the death sentence, but that the commutation was not announced publicly.

Another denaturalized American suspected of war crimes who was deported to the USSR, Feodor Fedorenko, was executed, according to a TASS report of July 27. The execution was the result of a death sentence handed down in 1986.

In Australia, where a special commission looking into the presence of Nazi war criminals in that country had issued its report in November 1986, the government was studying the recommendations - including the establishment of an OSI-type body to seek out and prosecute war criminals. The government then set up a special task force for this purpose.

In November the Australian Parliament passed new laws to prosecute war criminals living the country. The laws would allow witnesses from East European countries to be brought to Australia to testify. Attorney General Lionel Bowen described the War Crimes Amendment Bill as "unique and the best in the world."

He said the government's task force was now investigating a list of 70 suspected war criminals who entered Australia after World War II.

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