Damned mirror: Canada declassified documents about CIA involvement in hiding Nazis
The Canadian authorities have partially lifted the secrecy stamp from a 40‑year-old document that sheds light on how people involved in the crimes of the Nazi regime entered the country after World War II. It states that the transfer of dozens of accomplices of the Third Reich to Canada was carried out with the direct participation of the CIA. It is noteworthy that this information became available to the public at the height of the crisis in relations between the British dominion and the United States. Details can be found in the Izvestia article.
It is known whose Nazi
This is a fragment of a report by historian Alti Rodal, prepared in 1985-1986 for the commission investigating the activities of war criminals in Canada, chaired by former Quebec judge Jules Deschamps. This commission was created against the background of a wave of publications in the media at the time, which reported that Canada had become a haven for former Nazis.
The declassified materials reveal previously unknown details: American intelligence agencies, primarily the CIA, actually facilitated the relocation to Canada of dozens of people suspected of having ties to the Third Reich. In some cases, they were assisted with obtaining fake identity documents and provided with "clean" recommendations for Canadian visa officers. The key role in these processes was played by the Department of Research and Resettlement of the US Army in Europe (USAREUR), which, according to Rodal's conclusions, served as a cover for the operations of the CIA and other American agencies.
The unedited sections of the document contain direct evidence of the scale of this practice, which further undermines the long-standing myth of the alleged strict checks on migrants arriving in the country (it is important to recall that from 1941 to 1968, the population of Canada almost doubled under the influence of an unprecedented migration storm). One of these sections says that American intelligence officers could purposefully help immigrants with a Nazi past. At the same time, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP, the official name of the country's federal police), although it blocked individual applications, had neither full access nor a specific idea of the number of those who did enter the country with the support of the United States.
In a 1954 memorandum, the Commissioner of the RCMP separately noted the high probability that other people had passed through the immigration flow using forged documents prepared by the CIA. In other words, the Central Intelligence Agency deliberately misled its allies by posing as people with anti-Soviet views and not mentioning how they practiced these views.
Of course, this approach has also been applied far beyond Canada. At the height of the Cold War, in 1976, the files of Operation Bloodstone (including the well-known Paperclip and Alsos programs) were declassified, in which the CIA used the Nazis and their European collaborators in the fight against communists in Latin America and the Warsaw Pact countries, including the USSR. One of them was, for example, Klaus Barbie, aka the "butcher of Lyon", an SS Hauptsturmfuhrer who later worked for American counterintelligence and participated in the hunt for Ernesto Che Guevara in Bolivia.
People in black are free to enter
It is important to note that the initiative to rescue fugitive Nazis in Canada did not belong (and could not belong) exclusively to the American special services. Their British colleagues actively assisted them in resolving bureaucratic and technical nuances. Moreover, much was happening through official and public channels. For example, in 1950, the Government of the United Kingdom appealed to the countries of the British Commonwealth to accept 9,000 soldiers of the Galicia division for resettlement, stressing that none of them were "infected with Nazi views." The loyalty shown by the then Prime Minister of the country, Louis Saint Laurent, to the relocation of collaborators is also well known.
View of the prison building adjacent to the courtroom, Nuremberg
It should also be noted that even after being discovered, fugitive Nazis in Canada rarely received retribution. For example, this happened to Vladimir Katryuk, one of the leaders of the massacre of civilians in the Belarusian village of Khatyn in March 1943. In total, since the Nuremberg trials, the Canadian authorities have prosecuted only four people for war crimes, but none of these cases have resulted in a conviction.
The consequence that became the cause
On the one hand, this situation is explained by the significant influence exerted on domestic political processes by the Ukrainian diaspora, which, according to approximate data, numbers about 1.4 million people (or 4% of the population). At the same time, the political views that are widespread within this community are not a secret to anyone in Canada.
Of course, the most important catalyst for the publication of previously classified information was the scandal of 2023 around Vladimir Zelensky's visit to Canada. At that time, the country's parliament received a standing ovation from 98-year-old Yaroslav Gunko, a "veteran" of the 14th SS Volunteer Division Galicia. The media uproar was so great that Justin Trudeau, who was then Prime Minister of Canada, had to publicly apologize, and the speaker of the country's House of Representatives, Anthony Rota, publicly called Gunko a "hero" and thanked him "for his service," was forced to resign.
Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Anthony Rota
On the other hand, the publication of the declassified materials, albeit incomplete, highlights not only the internal but also the external pressure exerted on Canadian politics. For a long time, the authorities refused to release the full version of the Deschenes Commission's report. Back in September, the government did it again. In response to a request from the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith, which had been pushing for publication for many years, the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade stated that the recordings "could harm US-Canadian relations at a time of ongoing tension."
As a result, the opening of access to secret files became possible after the decision of the federal court. The judge who accepted him, Simon Fothergill, pointed out that a study commissioned by the Deschenes Commission in 1986 concluded that "insufficient security controls led to the fact that many perpetrators of Nazi war crimes entered Canada." Moreover, he agreed with the statement that the country's Government had not sought to bring such war criminals to justice for decades.
Historians disagree on whether the publication of these data will somehow advance the process of uncovering the truth about Canada's post-war history. After all, both then and now, the search for "Russian agents" for the country's authorities seems to be a more important process than the persecution of the bearers of Nazi ideology.
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