Hunka scandal spurs renewed calls for disclosure of alleged war criminal investigation records

Jewish groups say the federal government must disclose more information from investigations into alleged war criminals who entered Canada after the Second World War, in a push that was re-energized after Parliament honoured a man who was revealed to have fought for a Nazi unit.

"When it comes to remembering the victims, we've done a lot. But when it comes to remembering the murderers, we've done very little," David Matas, senior legal counsel for B'nai Brith Canada, said in an interview on Rosemary Barton Live that aired Sunday.

"If we're really going to learn from the past, we have to find the lessons that can be learned from what the murderers did and how they escaped justice. And right now, we're not able to fully learn that lesson because of the failure to disclose the records," Matas told CBC chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton.

Jewish groups and Holocaust researchers have long opposed the continued secrecy of parts of a report released by the Deschênes Commission in December 1986, following nearly two years of hearings. The commission was looking into claims that Canada was playing host to Nazi war criminals, who were escaping accountability for acts during the Second World War.

Much of the report was never released, including a list of 240 alleged Nazi war criminals who might have been living in Canada.

"It's now time for Ottawa to not only release the unredacted files related to the Deschênes Commission, but to also address the stark reality that there are still former Nazis with blood on their hands living in Canada," Michael Levitt, president of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement earlier this week.

The push to release more information from the commission, as well as how Canada navigated the question of immigration by those with Nazi ties, has received renewed attention after parliamentarians in Ottawa gave two standing ovations on Sept. 22 to Yaroslav Hunka, without knowing that he had fought for a Nazi SS unit while a Ukrainian soldier.

Hunka, 98, was in the House of Commons on the invitation of Speaker Anthony Rota, who was presiding over a visit to Parliament by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The backlash eventually led to Rota's resignation and an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on behalf of Parliament. Canada also sent an apology to Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian delegation through diplomatic channels, he said.

The commission determined that the unit Hunka fought for could not be indicted for war crimes as a group. Historians, though, have said the unit was involved in several massacres, including of Polish civilians. Critics of the commission have accused it of whitewashing the unit, while the Waffen-SS in its entirety was declared a criminal organization during the Nuremberg trials after the war.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller said this week that releasing additional documents or declassifying more is something that Canada "could possibly examine again."

"If we want to avoid reiteration of the mistakes of the past ... we have to remember the past. And we can't remember the past until we know the past, and we can't know the past until we get the records," B'nai Brith Canada's Matas said.

Irwin Cotler, Canada's Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, told Barton that the Hunka incident pointed to a broader issue.

"There's a larger issue here of how did the Nazi war criminals get in and how were they able to avoid any accountability all this time," Cotler, a former Liberal justice minister, said, adding that there are also real-world consequences.

"We have both the historical truth and the contemporary situation, where we don't want to allow Putin's Russia to weaponize the situation and support his false 'de-Nazification' claim regarding the Ukraine," he said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who oversaw the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.