There were twenty eight Nazi war crimes court cases in Canada. In chronological order of commencement of proceedings, the cases were these. 

 

1. Albert Helmut Rauca. He was responsible for 11,500 deaths in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1941.

 

2. Imre Finta. He was a key official in the rounding up of the Jews of Szeged, Hungary in 1944 and sending them off to Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp, and to Strasshof, a Nazi concentration camp.

 

3. Jacob Luitjens. He served in two Nazi auxiliary organizations during World War II responsible for rounding up Jews and resistance fighters in the Netherlands.

 

4. Michael Pawlowski. He was charged with murdering 410 Jews and 80 non-Jewish Poles in what was then Byelorussia in 1942.

 

5. Stephen Reistetter. He was charged with shipping 3000 Jews from Slovakia to a ghetto in Poland in April and May 1942. Most of the 3,000 were taken a few months later from the Polish ghetto to the death camp Treblinka. 

 

6. Arthur Rudolph. He employed slave labour in the production of V-2 rockets for the Nazis during World War II.

 

7. Radislav Grujicic. He was accused of conspiring with German occupying forces in Belgrade Yugoslavia in the persecution of communists during World War II. 

 

8. Konrad Kalej. He was company commander of a Latvian auxiliary police unit at Salaspils slave labour camp in which there were public executions, starvation and torture, as well as prisoners killed for attempting to escape.

 

9.  Helmut Oberlander. He was an interpreter for Einsatzkommando 10a, a unit that systematically carried out mass executions of civilians, particularly Jews, in the occupied Soviet Union.

  

10. Erich Tobiass. He was accused of having concealed his participation in the execution of Jews in Latvia. 

 

11. Johann Dueck. He was a member of the Selidovo district police in German occupied Ukraine between 1941 and 1943, accused of collaborating with the occupying forces by executing Jews, Red Army prisoners of war and by rounding up youths for deportation for forced labour in Germany.

 

12. Joseph Nemsila. He was accused of commanding a unit that had deported Jews to Auschwitz and killed Slovak civilians.

 

13. Peteris Vitols.  In late fall of 1941, he was part of the Waffen SS and a police battalion in Latvia.

 

14. Antanas Kenstavicius. He had supervised the massacres of thousands of Jews when he was stationed as police chief in Svencionilla, Lithuania between 1941 44. 

 

15. Wasily Bogutin. He had collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces in the town of Selidovo, Ukraine and, as an auxiliary police officer, was personally and directly involved in effecting the roundup of young persons for forced labour in Germany.

 

16.  Vladimir Katriuk. He was a member in the Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118 and participated in its activities in Belarus, including anti-partisan operations.

 

17. Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary. He was accused of involvement, while a member of the Royal Hungarian Police in 1944, in the confinement of thousands of Jews and their subsequent deportation to death camps.

 

18. Serge Kisluk.  He voluntary collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces in Poland in 1940 and 1941; he was a member in the  auxiliary police unit under Nazi command in Ukraine from late 1941 until February 1943.  The Court also found that he participated in the beating of an elderly Jewish victim and the killing of a young Jewish woman in March of 1943. 

 

19. Eduards Podins. He was an employee at a concentration camp, Valmiera, during World War II in Latvia.

 

20. Mamertas Roland Maciukas. He was a member in a Lithuanian police battalion killing unit which murdered about 50,000 Jews in Byelorussia during the War.

 

21. Michael Baumgartner. He was a guard at the Stutthof and Sachsenhausen concentration camps during World War II.

 

22. Wasyl Odynsky. He was a guard at the SS forced labour camps of Trawniki and Poniatowa.

 

23. Ludwig Nebel. He was a member of the SA, the SS and the Nazi Party. Following the Nazi occupation of Austria, he held various positions in both the SS and the Gendarmerie unit, reaching the level of Hauptmannschaftsfuhrer in the Stanislau region of Galicia, then Poland, now Ukraine.

 

24. Jacob Fast. He was part of the political section of the Nazi auxiliary police in Zaporozhye, Ukraine.  All of the auxiliary police participated in the rounding up and killing of the Jews of Zaporozhye.  The political section was responsible for the arrest, imprisonment, torture and deportation of prisoners to concentration camps in Poland and Germany.

 

25. Walter Obodzinsky. He was an accomplice in the perpetration of atrocities committed during the German occupation of Belarus.  Holocaust survivor Sidney Itzkowitz witnessed Obodzinsky participate in the shooting death of Itzkowitz's father. 

 

26. Michael Seifert. He was guilty of various crimes committed while he was a guard at a German police transit camp in northern Italy.

 

27. Jura Skomatczuk. He served as a guard in the German concentration camp system after training at the SS Trawniki training camp in 1943.

 

28. Josef Furman.  He served in the German concentration camp system after training at the SS Trawniki training camp in 1943. 

 

Of the 28 cases the Government of Canada removed seven - Rauca, Luitjens, Seifert, Rudolph, Kalejs, Maciukas and Czisik Czatery.  Two of these seven were extraditions - Rauca and Seifert - and five were deportations. 

 

Of the five deportations, three initially had status in Canada which was removed, and two - Kalejs and Rudolph - did not have status in Canada and were merely attempting entry.  Of the three who had status in Canada, two did not contest the proceedings against them. 

 

The government lost four cases on the merits - Finta, Podins, Vitols and Dueck.  They lost one case on procedural grounds, Pawlowski. The Government won two cases in Court but decided that the two could stay in Canada anyways - Katriuk and Odynsky. 

 

That leaves fourteen.  These fourteen cases terminated prematurely because of death or illness.  In one case - Reistetter, the cause was the death of witnesses.  In another case - Grujicic, the cause was illness of the person concerned. 

 

In twelve cases, the cause was the death of the person concerned - Fast, Bogutin, Tobiass, Nemsila, Kenstavicius, Kisluk, Baumgartner, Nebel, Obodzinsky, Skomatczuk, Furman and Oberlander.  Though none of these twelve were removed, nine - Fast, Bogutin, Nemsila, Kisluk, Baumgartner, Obodzinsky, Skomatczuk, Furman and Oberlander - had lost in court before death. 

 

Of the twenty eight cases, the Government was successful in court in eighteen and failed in five.  Five others were terminated by death or illness before a court decision favouring one side or the other.

 

Each of these cases has its own story, many of them outrageous in the manner in which they were handled, not only procedurally, but substantively. The case of Imre Finta is an example of the problems the cases presented.

 

The evidence against Finta was overwhelming and unanswered. Yet Finta was acquitted.  His acquittal was upheld both by the Ontario Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada. 

 

In reasoning subsequently repudiated by the Court in the case of the Rwandan Mugesera, the Supreme Court of Canada held that the defences which were put to the jury were properly put, because there was evidence led at the trial which gave an air of reality to his defences. The evidence which gave an air of reality to his defences, were, according to the Courts, "the Jewish sentiment in favour of the Allied forces", "the general publicly stated belief in newspapers in Hungary that the Jews were subversive and disloyal to the war efforts of Hungary." and "the universal public expression in the newspapers cited by one of the witnesses of approval of the deportation of Hungarian Jews." Yet this evidence is unadulterated racial prejudice.

 

Once a defence is put to the jury, the jury may legally acquit based on that defence. So, the acquittal of Finta was upheld.

 

Many of these cases presented similar horror stories.  The Nazi war crimes experience in Canada was valuable primarily as providing lessons in what should not be done in bringing mass murderers to justice.  

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David Matas is senior honorary counsel to B'nai Brith Canada