CBS "60 Minutes" focuses on Canada's pursuit of war criminals (02/09/97)

CBS "60 Minutes" focuses on Canada's pursuit of war criminals

by Andrij Kudla Wynnyckyj
Toronto Press Bureau

TORONTO - "The traditional cold calm of Canada has been shattered by a meddling American." With these words, spoken by co-anchor Mike Wallace, CBS's "60 Minutes" popular weekly newsmagazine loudly caught up with a controversy simmering on this side of the border since late November.

The "60 Minutes" segment, aired on February 2 and titled "Canada's Dark Secret," looked into allegations made by Steve Rambam, a Brooklyn-based private detective, that Canada's efforts in pursuing alleged Nazi war criminals are inadequate, and that, in fact, the country is a safe haven for them.

The story first broke in a mid-November 1996 Jerusalem Post weekend magazine, and in Canada in the Montreal Gazette daily's November 22, 1996, issue.

Mr. Rambam, 39, had posed as Salvatore Romano, a professor of a fictitious university, St. Paul's University of the Americas in Belize, fabricating identification cards and even sweatshirts from the imaginary institution. Mr. Rambam told subjects that he was writing a thesis about police and army collaboration in the World War II.

With Jerusalem Post reporters Robert Sarner and Steve Leibowitz acting as his assistants in some cases, Mr. Rambam interviewed a number of suspected war criminals living in Canada and tricked them into providing apparent confessions of their crimes.

According to the original Gazette report, the private eye was given "a list of 157 suspected collaborators ... by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Yad Vashem, a Holocaust memorial in Israel." In a telephone interview conducted from Jerusalem on November 21, Mr. Rambam told the Gazette he had obtained confessions from 58 accused, seven of whom had admitted killing Jews. Twenty-five were said to be living in the Montreal area.

The report mentioned the graphic confession of Atanas Kenstavicius, who admitted participating in the murder of Jews from Svencionys, a region of Lithuania in which he acted as police chief during the Nazi occupation.

In a November 27, 1996, item in the Jerusalem Post, Messrs. Sarner and Leibowitz reported that Mr. Rambam "met 60 of the suspects" over the past two years.

It also reported that Canada's justice minister and attorney general, Allan Rock, reacted to the findings by saying, "I'd be surprised to learn that there were that many people that we've overlooked, given the efforts the government has taken over the last 10 or 15 years." He added that he wanted to study Mr. Rambam's report.

The Jerusalem Post article mentioned that the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) "welcomed the foreign attention to Ottawa's dubious record" in pursuing war criminals, while the Gazette quoted Irving Abella, former CJC president and currently chairman of its war crime committee, as saying that he found it incredible that "one person working with meager resources had little trouble tracking down and getting confessions from alleged Nazi war criminals, while for 50 years the Canadian government has done very little."

On November 26, 1996, the Toronto Star daily's Ottawa Bureau Chief David Vienneau reported that Mr. Rambam's investigation had been funded by the U.S.-based Jeff Weltman Foundation and an anonymous New York businessman. Mr. Rambam told the Star that he'd spoken to 25 suspected war criminals in the Toronto area.

The CBS's "Canada's Dark Secret" segment began by outlining Mr. Rambam's investigative effort, then focused on Mr. Kenstavicius, a resident of British Columbia until his death in mid-January at the age of 90, and aired his confession.

Next, Mr. Wallace related that Mr. Rambam was given a list of "a thousand" suspects by Efraim Zuroff, an official of the SWC's Jerusalem chapter. During the course of the program, both Mr. Wallace and Mr. Rambam assert that there are "thousands" and "hundreds" of suspected war criminals living in Canada.

However, it fell to Mr. Zuroff to make the program's most alarming and most generalized accusation. Prodded by Mr. Wallace to speak about "Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians," Mr. Zuroff said "In those areas, most of the Jews were murdered by the locals. They weren't shipped off to death camps in many cases."

Mr. Zuroff further alleged that "without [the local population's] willing, active and zealous collaboration, the Nazis could never have possibly murdered so many Jews as they did."

The program then shifted to Dr. Abella, a history professor at Toronto's York University, who praised Mr. Rambam's resourcefulness in unmasking war criminals living in Canada and decried the unwillingness of Canada's government to tackle the problem. Prof. Abella recalled that former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had told him that he was "bringing Old World antagonisms" to the country, and expressed a fear that proceeding against war criminals could exacerbate tensions between East Europeans and Jews in Canada.

John Sims, a member of the Canadian Justice Department's war crimes investigation unit, was shown announcing that "1997 is going to be an important year, in which I think progress is going to be made."

In introducing Mr. Sims, Mr. Wallace asserted that Canada had deported "just one" suspected war criminal. Since the early 1980s, Ottawa has expelled three: Helmut Rauca (extradited in 1982), Arthur Rudolph (expelled in 1991) and Jacob Lutjens (deported in 1992).

Much of the rest of "Canada's Dark Secret" showed Mr. Wallace attempting to interview suspected Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing unit) translator Helmut Oberlander (subject to deportation proceedings since January 1995), and various footage gathered by Canadian news agencies on accused war criminals.

No mention was made of Johann Dueck, a Scarborough, Ontario, resident who stands accused of killing civilians during his tenure as a deputy police chief in eastern Ukraine.

Potential deportee Josef Nemsila (accused of killing civilians in Slovakia) is shown saying, "They will never change." A surprised reporter asks "Who? Who will never change?" Mr. Nemsila rejoins, "The Jews."

The "Canada's Dark Secret" segment closed with an additional allegation, proffered by Mr. Wallace, that investigators were looking into charges that the German government is paying pensions to SS veterans while stalling on compensation to Holocaust victims.

On February 3, the day after the airing of the CBS war crimes feature, Canadian Justice Minister Rock defended his government's commitment to the pursuit of war criminals. In a press release issued that day, Minister Rock is quoted as saying, "We are determined to deny safe haven in Canada to war criminals."

Minister Rock added "We have also been extremely active in dealing with modern war criminals, having intervened in hundreds of immigration cases in order to deny present-day war criminals refugee status in Canada."

Talking points posted on the Justice Ministry's website indicated that "Canada has done more than most countries, including France, England, Australia and New Zealand to attempt to bring war criminals to justice; this government has a record of solid achievement in taking action to bring suspected war criminals before the courts."

On February 5, Canadian Justice Department officials confirmed that legal proceedings had already been initiated against all of the men accused of war crimes mentioned by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Rambam in the course of the "Dark Secrets" segment.

On February 3, CBC-TV's talk show "Ralph Benmergui Live" engaged the topic of whether Canada should deport accused war criminals. Speaking from Washington, Eli Rosenbaum, an official of the U.S. Department of Justice, said that in some sense Canada's record on pursuing war criminals is not as strong as his country's (49 deported from the U.S. versus three from Canada) but that Ottawa had "made a valiant attempt, early on, to bring criminal prosecutions, something that was not possible for us under our Constitution."

Mr. Rosenbaum was guarded also about the results of Mr. Rambam's investigation. "I think time will show how many confessions really were obtained and what contribution that effort makes to the pursuit of justice," the U.S. official said.

Bernie Farber, a CJC director, also participated in the discussion, saying that the pursuit of war criminals "is not an ethnic issue. Those people who would make it one are doing it a terrible disservice."

John Gregorovich, chairman of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, phoned in to the program to reaffirm the UCCLA's position favoring prosecution of war criminals in Canada, and opposing deportation. Mr. Gregorovich said the Supreme Court's 1990 decision to acquit Imre Finta based on the "following orders" defense was not, in his opinion, a reason not to pursue criminal proceedings against other accused.

In response to the CBS program, on February 3 Ukrainian Canadian Congress President Oleh Romaniw fired off a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien expressing his community's "serious concern about allegations made that there are Nazi war criminals hiding in Canada."

Mr. Romaniw reiterated support for a "made in Canada" solution of prosecuting war criminals in Canada rather than deporting them.

The UCC president also emphasized that it is "critical ... for the government of Canada to reject as malicious and disingenuous all attempts to portray our country as a haven for war criminals of any sort," adding that Ukrainian Canadians "want to keep our legal system unpolluted by misinformation of the sort that the '60 Minutes' program was laced with."

The full text of the UCC letter appears on page 5.

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