Canada Knowingly Admitted SS Members After World War II - Jewish Telegraphic Agency
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The Canadian government, with British complicity, admitted more than 2,000 members of a notorious Ukrainian Waffen-SS division in 1950, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has charged. In a related case, the CBS news program “60 Minutes” reported that about 1,000 SS men and Nazi collaborators, mainly from the Baltic states, immigrated to Canada about the same […]

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The Wiesenthal Center’s dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier, and its Canadian representative, Sol Littman, outlined the case of the 2,000 SS veterans at a news conference Monday after returning from Ottawa.

They spoke about their meeting with Canadian Solicitor General Herb Gray, the Cabinet minister in charge of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “Mr. Gray seemed genuinely disturbed by the material we presented and promised to investigate the charges,” Hier said.

Littman, who has been investigating the Nazi presence in Canada since 1980, said the 14th Volunteer Waffen‐SS Grenadier Division, also known as the Galicia Division, was made up mainly of Ukrainians who had served with [Axis] police battalions and death squads.

The surviving 9,000 members of the division surrendered to the British army at the end of the war, and eventually were brought to England.

In 1950, Britain appealed to Commonwealth countries to admit them. Canada agreed to take 2,000, after receiving assurances from London that their backgrounds had been investigated and that they had been cleared of any complicity in war crimes.

But according to recently released British documents and interviews with officials who conducted the investigations at the time, the Ukrainians were not screened, partly because none of the interrogators could speak their language, Littman said.

The 2,000 settled in major Canadian cities, and it is estimated that about half of them are still alive.

One of the ways of getting into Canada during the postwar period “was by showing the SS tattoo,” Canadian historian Irving Abella told “60 Minutes” interviewer Mike Wallace. “This proved that you were an anti‐Communist.”

Events that happened today (October 12):

1891: Prince Fumimaro Konoe, Axis head of state who presided over Imperial Japan’s invasion of mainland China, was unkind enough to exist.
1936: The Fascists formed the 65th Infantry Division of Grenadiers.
1937: Francisco Franco issued a decree declaring null and void all purchases of mining rights in Spain since the beginning of the Civil War.
1943: In accord with Berlin, Madrid formally announced the dissolution of the Blue Division.
1944: The Axis occupation of Athens ended. (On the other hand, the Germans of the SS‐Police advanced slowly in Val d’Ossola and were practically stationary in Finero, at the end of Val Cannobina.)
1957: Lev Rebet, leader of the OUN‐z, died.
1973: Peter Aufschnaiter, Fascist mountaineer, departed from the world.