The hunt for Canada’s last Nazis – National | 24CA News

For Nazi hunter Abbee Corb, there are circumstances that stand out, just like the one she calls the “baby smasher.”

A criminologist with a PhD, Corb was looking for Nazis who had resettled in Canada when she got here throughout the file.

A witness assertion written in 1945 described how a younger Lithuanian girl named Klimaite had “smashed heads of Jewish children with rocks.”

A girl matching the suspect’s profile had moved to Canada after the conflict, and the professor tracked her to an deal with in Windsor, Ont.

Corb knocked on her door with an inventory of questions that amounted to at least one factor: did Klimaite have a darkish secret to admit?

The case is amongst a number of Corb is pursuing because the clock winds down on the trouble to convey Nazi conflict criminals to justice.

Only a handful of the Nazis suspected of coming to Canada with the post-war migration wave are nonetheless alive, and they’re nicely into their 90s.

But Corb believes they should be held to account, no matter their age. Even those that have died should be uncovered by way of the discharge of Canadian authorities data.

“We have to uncover the truth. We have to pursue this. We can’t throw it under the rug and pretend it didn’t happen.”

Hundreds of suspected Nazis have been investigated by the RCMP’s conflict crimes unit within the Nineties, however with little outcomes.

The paperwork from these circumstances has by no means been absolutely made public. While the Canadian authorities has proven little curiosity in launching any new circumstances towards Nazis, it’s beneath stress to at the very least unseal its data.

The difficulty resurfaced in September, when MPs unwittingly paid tribute to a 98-year-old mentioned to be Waffen SS member within the House of Commons.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized, and mentioned he would take into account releasing Canada’s Nazi conflict crimes information.

So far the federal government’s solely motion has been to additional declassify a examine ready for Canada’s 1987 Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals.

The gaffe in Parliament resurrected a painful lapse in Canada’s post-war historical past: the failure to maintain out or prosecute those that performed a task within the Holocaust.

In the many years following the conflict, Jewish teams alerted the federal government to the Nazis and collaborators who had slipped into Canada: an Auschwitz commander, a Gestapo member, troopers, and camp guards.

Their alleged crimes included torture, executions, massacres, liquidation of Jewish ghettoes and “participating in the extermination of Jews,” in keeping with authorities data.

Some of the allegations have been particular. One suspect was accused of “having two women hosed down overnight with cold water for acts of sabotage” in Austria. Both froze to dying.

Following the conflict, the Canadian authorities needed migrants with anti-communist credentials, and paid little consideration to their roles through the Holocaust, mentioned Toronto lawyer Mark Freiman.

Within just a few years, Canada steadily lifted its immigration bans on former members of the Nazi Party, German Army, SS and Waffen SS, opening the door for them.

“The Canadian government wasn’t picky in terms of looking at the possible Nazi past of immigrants from Eastern Europe,” mentioned Freiman, Ontario’s former deputy attorney-general and the son of Holocaust survivors.

“And in that number of immigrants,” he mentioned, “there were a distressing number of real Nazi sympathizers, Nazi collaborators, and in some cases, Nazi perpetrators.”

Among these present in Canada and accused of being Nazis was Helmut Rauca.

In an interview, Holocaust survivor Elly Gotz mentioned Rauca got here to the Jewish ghetto the place his household was imprisoned in Kaunus, Lithuania, and despatched 1000’s of Jews to their deaths.

After surviving the Dachau focus camp and transferring to Canada, Gotz found that Rauca was residing close by in Toronto. The RCMP approached Gotz’s mom to verify the previous Gestapo member’s id, he mentioned.

In 1983, the Canadian authorities despatched Rauca to Frankfurt to face trial for greater than 11,000 murders in Lithuania, however he died earlier than he was delivered to court docket.

“The track record of Canada on condemning the war criminals is poor, very poor,” mentioned Gotz, who’s now 95.

Now a public speaker on the Holocaust, Gotz mentioned justice wanted to be carried out. “It’s necessary to teach society that you don’t get away with it.”

With allegations mounting that Nazis have been residing in Canada, the federal government fashioned a fee of inquiry in 1986, and gave courts the ability to prosecute conflict crimes.

A newly fashioned RCMP War Crimes Unit carried out over 1,500 investigations, however even again then, police have been backing off suspects deemed too aged for trial.

A 1990 doc on the “highest-ranking Nazi presently under investigation in Canada,” mentioned the case can be “recommended for closure, due to the advanced age of the subject (87 years old).”

The first to be charged was Imre Finta, accused of forcibly deporting 8,617 Jews from Hungary earlier than he arrived in Canada in 1948.

He was acquitted on the grounds that he was simply following orders, prompting the collapse of Canada’s conflict crimes prosecutions.

The authorities then tried a special tactic: revoking the citizenship of Nazis for mendacity about their previous once they entered Canada.

One of the primary targets was Helmut Oberlander, an alleged interpreter for the SS who got here to Canada within the Nineteen Fifties and lived in Waterloo, Ont.

Immigration officers spent greater than three many years making an attempt to rescind his citizenship. The case was nonetheless earlier than the courts in 2021 when he died on the age of 97.

He was one among a dozen accused Nazis focused by the Canadian authorities who died earlier than court docket or deportation proceedings have been accomplished, in keeping with authorities statistics obtained by Global News.

Only one was stripped of citizenship and efficiently deported. Two others left the nation voluntarily after shedding their citizenship, whereas one was extradited, the figures reveal.

That is all Canada has to point out for its struggle towards Nazis. Twenty-seven suspected Nazis have been taken to court docket. Not a single one was efficiently prosecuted and the overwhelming majority of investigations went nowhere — together with the “baby smasher case.”

Corb is aware of time is working out.

Determined to see the suspects face some type of reckoning, she has spent the previous 5 years digging up paperwork and knocking on doorways.

“I found a lot of them,” she mentioned.

Her efforts haven’t at all times been welcomed. She was instructed to “let sleeping Nazis lie.” But she is set.

“They should be held accountable, even after death,” she mentioned.

“Why is their privacy more important than the Holocaust survivors or the people who died?” she famous. “Don’t you think that basically they should be outed?”

Corb grew up surrounded by the Holocaust. Much of her household died in Poland. In Montreal, her accountant father helped survivors resettle.

Because he spoke a number of languages, he would meet Jews on the boats arriving from throughout the Atlantic and assist them with their paperwork.

Grateful to her father, they might drop in to go to him, and Corb spent her childhood listening to their tales, in addition to these of her family.

After ending college, she went to work as a researcher for Sol Litman, a journalist who pushed for Nazi conflict crimes investigations.

Litman, later the Canadian director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, got here to consider that Ottawa lacked enthusiasm for the problem.

“I can’t prove it, but I believe the government hopes these people will be dead and buried before they get around to prosecuting them,” he as soon as mentioned.

Littman died in 2017, however Corb carried on, constructing on his analysis to trace the final remaining suspects nonetheless alive in Canada.

Her analysis attracts upon data in Ottawa, Israel, the Vatican, and Moscow, and she or he has pushed for Canada to look into circumstances.

“We’ve had meetings with the war crimes department when we felt we had enough information for them to reopen files, and we were told no,” she mentioned.

Working with Freiman, who was the lawyer for the inquiry into the 1985 Air India bombings, Corb has additionally sought the discharge of RCMP information.

The response has been disappointing, marked by prolonged delays and disclosure of papers that had been closely blacked out.

It bothers her to assume Nazis may die having gotten away with it. She is aware of who they’re. Their names are in a database she has constructed.

“Concentration camp guard Treblinka,” reads the allegation tied to at least one title within the database, referring to the Nazi dying camp in Poland.

“Played an active part in the murder of the Jews of Ignalina,” reads one other entry, a couple of city in Lithuania.

Some of the entries checklist residence addresses of the suspects, together with a person from Amherstburg, Ont., who was investigated by the RCMP for killings.

When she visited his home in 2020, he had moved, however a neighbour recalled the previous man who instructed tales concerning the conflict. No costs have been ever laid.

One entry in Corb’s database is a couple of girl with the maiden title Klimaite. The description of the conflict crimes for which she was investigated is direct.

“Murdered Jewish babies,” it says.

At the Yad Vashem Holocaust archives in Israel, researcher Sima Velkovich placed on surgical gloves earlier than selecting up a doc dated 1945.

Hand-written in Yiddish, it was signed by Dine-Zise Flom, who had escaped Nazi mass killings in Raseiniai, a small metropolis in central Lithuania.

Her testimony described how Jews have been despatched to a ghetto exterior of city. “Two cars with Germans arrived in the camp,” in keeping with a translation of Flom’s assertion.

After the Germans consulted with the Lithuanian camp commander, the Jewish males have been rounded up, compelled to dig their very own mass grave and shot.

Their garments have been despatched again to the camp to be laundered by the ladies, who realized the fates of their family members once they acknowledged the clothes.

Weeks later, the ladies and kids have been loaded onto vehicles and brought to the identical pit the lads had dug. Flom slipped away and watched from a hay barn as the ladies have been delivered to the “brink of the pit” and shot.

“Laying in the barn I could well see two women standing at the pit, small children’s heads being hit with heavy stones, or one head at the other child’s head,” she wrote.

“One of the women was the student Klimaite.”

The assertion was collected by Leyb Koniuchowsky, a Lithuanian engineer who took it upon himself to assemble the testimonies of survivors.

In 1989, Koniuchowsky donated his papers to Yad Vashem, the archive at Israeli’s hilltop memorial to victims.

Velkovich mentioned the papers have been significantly useful as a result of Koniuchowsky took the statements in 1944 and 1945, when reminiscences have been contemporary.

“It’s very, very important information for us,” she mentioned, including the Koniuchowsky papers have been the premise of a lot analysis and investigation.

The Koniuchowsky information additionally named names, which might show key to the hunt for Nazis in Canada.

Efraim Zuroff, the highest nazi-hunter on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, discovered Flom’s assertion whereas digging by way of the Koniuchowsky assortment.

Moved by the assertion about witnessing child killings, he searched the title Klimaite in immigration databanks and located two sisters who have been doable matches.

The eldest, Joana, was born in 1923, making her 18 on the time Flom noticed the “student” collaborator commit infanticide. She additionally listed her occupation as “student.”

Her hometown was not removed from Raseiniei, and she or he had arrived in Halifax in 1948, aboard the ship SS Marine Marlin, which introduced troopers and refugees to North America following the conflict.

Klimaite traveled west to Winnipeg, the place she married a Lithuanian-born veterinarian earlier than transferring to Ontario.

In 1991, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre forwarded its findings to the Department of Justice, which despatched them to the RCMP, which opened File No. 90WC-22483.

The investigation into the “murder of Jewish babies” was launched beneath a bit of the Criminal Code regarding conflict crimes dedicated exterior Canada.

The goal was to find out if she was “guilty of war crimes/crimes against humanity and to ensure her entry into Canada was not through fraudulent means.”

But the components of the police file launched to Corb beneath the Access to Information Act include errors, contradictions and gaps — beginning with Klimaite’s citizenship certificates, which was deemed “practically illegible.”

The police file additionally referred to the “murder of Jewish babies at Taseiniai,” misspelling a key element — the city the place the killings had occurred.

The investigators initially believed the Klimaite sisters have been seven months aside in age, which led police to conclude they “cannot be sisters.” In reality, Joana was two years and 7 months older.

The witness is variously referred to within the information as Flom, Flaum and Flaun. In one doc, investigators referred to as her assertion “very detailed and precise,” however in one other dismissed it as “very vague and non-specific.”

“The allegation provides a last name only and no other information to confirm the Canadian is the subject of the allegation,” in keeping with the RCMP file.

The RCMP speculated Klimaite’s sister might need been the killer, or that “even both” might have been concerned.

But police couldn’t discover the sister in Canada, thought she might need gone to the U.S., and deemed her a decrease precedence than Klimaite, whose case they believed had “potential.”

Neither might the RCMP discover any hint of the witness Flom. They initially thought she had moved to Israel however seem to have confused her location with that of the witness assertion.

A Department of Justice historian was despatched to Lithuania to look into a number of circumstances, however didn’t examine the Raseiniai child killings.

“Unfortunately, due to time constraints and higher priority files, no new information on this file was surfaced,” the file learn.

The RCMP famous the Klimaite present in Canada was born in Kazlu Ruda, which it mentioned was 150 kilometres from Raseiniai.

That would have been “a long distance during that time,” learn an 1993 entry within the RCMP investigation report.

Elsewhere, police famous the cities have been “pretty far away,” however the precise distance is 96 kilometres.

“Nothing has been done on this file,” police wrote in 1994.

Calling the allegations “extremely weak at best,” police wrote there was “little chance” of proving them, and don’t seem to have pursued the case any additional.

Five kilometers exterior Raseiniai, a Star of David product of rocks framed in wooden lays on the grass. It’s all that’s left of the Lithuanian city’s Jewish inhabitants.

Before the Second World War, greater than a 3rd of Raseiniai’s roughly 5,000 residents have been Jews. Today, not a single one stays, a neighborhood historian mentioned.

Located halfway between Berlin and Moscow, Raseiniai was the scene of fierce tank battles between the Nazi and Soviet forces that left it obliterated.

When the Nazis took over in 1941, they put Jews to work clearing the particles, however banned then from strolling on pavement, sitting on benches and utilizing transportation, mentioned historian Lina Kantautiene.

The mass killings started on July 29, 1941, she mentioned. About 300 males have been rounded up, compelled to dig their very own mass grave and executed by gunfire.

Most of the remaining males have been killed on Aug. 5, and on the finish of the month, the ladies and kids have been taken to the identical pits and shot.

Kantautiene mentioned when her father introduced her to the positioning of the killings when she was a lady, it was described as a mass grave for Soviet residents.

Only later did she uncover the reality, that it was the place Jews have been massacred.

A museum worker and the writer of Raseiniai Region Jews: Their Lives and Fates, Kantautiene mentioned she was conscious of the “baby smasher” allegations.

She mentioned she had learn concerning the witness who mentioned she had seen a Lithuanian excessive school-aged scholar named Klimaite taking part within the killings.

“The witness says that she was very cruel and she was beating children,” Kantautiene mentioned in an interview on the Raseiniai museum.

Kantautiene mentioned she tried to seek out anybody by that title who match the outline, however no one matched, nor might locals recall her.

“I know from other sources that there was such a person called Klimaite, but from what I know, she is not of Raseiniai origin,” she added.

“From what I know she is more from the southwest Lithuania. To sum up, I cannot confirm or deny that Klimaite was involved in the events of the Holocaust in our district.”

When Corb knocked on Joana Klimaite’s door, the Lithuanian-born Canadian was a 98-year-old widow.

The home was on a nook lot in Windsor. Klimaite and her husband purchased it in 1968 for $7,250, in keeping with property data.

“I was going to ask her if she was the Joana Klimaite who was in Raseiniai in the year in question,” Corb mentioned.

She additionally needed to know if she knew the witness Dina Flaum. “Then I would have taken it from there.”

But no one answered. Corb left her card and spoke to the lady’s daughter, who mentioned she was unaware of any household secrets and techniques.

Corb’s makes an attempt to get Klimaite’s RCMP file have been equally irritating. The authorities would solely launch a few of the data from its investigation, and in 2022 the lady died at age 99.

The data made public to date are inconclusive. Klimaite’s household mentioned they have been unaware of any RCMP investigation. She might have shared solely a reputation and background with the accused Lithuanian Nazi collaborator.

If so, another person might have gotten away with it, however both means, to Corb the case appeared “another government failure,” by which a correct investigation by no means occurred.

“The police utterly failed,” mentioned Corb, an extremism professional who has labored for Canadian police forces as a civilian advisor.

“They didn’t pursue things properly,” she mentioned. “And in some cases, from what I understand, they were told to stop investigating.”

Global News tracked down two of the retired RCMP officers whose names seem on the “baby smasher” investigation paperwork. One didn’t return messages. The different mentioned he couldn’t recall the case.

The federal authorities’s Library and Archives Canada has the file however has not absolutely launched it as a consequence of privateness considerations, she mentioned.

For the final 5 years, Freiman has been serving to Corb use the Access to Information Act to get the information and others prefer it.

The outcomes have been underwhelming; the federal government has responded with delays and by claiming it could’t absolutely launch the supplies as a consequence of secrecy and privateness.

In 2022, the Information Commissioner of Canada ordered the RCMP to course of Corb’s 2019 request for data on 4 Nazi conflict crime circumstances, together with that of Klimaite.

The RCMP responded in 2022, releasing a whole lot of pages of police paperwork from which essential info equivalent to names had been eliminated.

Freiman argued that opening up Canada’s vault of data might assist convey the “remaining few surviving perpetrators and collaborators to justice, or at least to make public what they did.”

He mentioned he was equally to see what the data revealed concerning the authorities’s insurance policies, choices, actions and inaction.

While Canadian legislation protects the disclosure of personal and private info, Freiman mentioned it additionally gives exceptions, notably public curiosity.

He mentioned there was a public curiosity in documenting the Holocaust, significantly at a time when it’s slipping from collective reminiscence.

“We’re already in an age of so-called Holocaust revisionism, where people deny that anything happened and deny that things were as bad as they were claimed to be, that this is all exaggeration and didn’t happen,” he mentioned.

At the identical time, the phrases Holocaust and genocide are getting used inappropriately, which has emptied them of their true that means, he mentioned.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, of which Canada was a founding member, has inspired nations to open up their data.

It calls on member states to “interpret their privacy legislation in a way that favors disclosure,” significantly when conflict crimes are concerned, he mentioned.

“This has been drawn to the attention of the custodians of records again and again. And rather than even answer as to why it is that anyone’s privacy would trump this very real public interest, we get silence.”

“I don’t understand how you can balance the rights of a deceased person against the rights of people to know the truth.”

“My experience is that the government is singularly, and to my mind curiously, focused on not divulging anything,” Freiman mentioned in an interview.

Just one of many information he’s looking for with Corb considerations Rauca, the accused Gestapo member who resettled in Canada regardless of being implicated in 11,000 deaths in Lithuania.

The authorities responded to Corb’s Access to Information request in September 2023, claiming it wanted 5 years to course of the data as a result of it needed to seek the advice of international governments.

Even then, the Department of Justice wrote, it nonetheless may not launch the 1,444 pages, and mentioned her request can be deserted except she agreed to the timeline.

Corb’s database of residing suspects is shrinking, and the world has moved on to new atrocities that, for a Nazi hunter, appear all too acquainted.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israelis, the synagogue Corb attended in Montreal has been firebombed, and the Toronto college her daughter attended was closed for a bomb risk.

She is aware of her hunt is all the way down to its closing days, however the different is to simply accept that those that commit horrific atrocities can transfer to Canada and by no means be held to account.

“Look what’s going on in the world,” she mentioned. “We keep saying never again, but it’s happening every single day.”

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca