B’nai Brith Canada is taking the federal government to court over its refusal to fully disclose a decades-old report detailing how Nazi fugitives were allowed into Canada after the Second World War.
“History still needs to be fully told,” the organization wrote in its Federal Court application.
Blacklock's Reporter says the lawsuit accuses Library and Archives Canada of “unreasonably and unlawfully” withholding information under the Access To Information Act. Researchers are seeking an uncensored version of the Rodal Report, a 613-page document authored in 1986 by historian Alti Rodal for the Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes, led by Québec Court of Appeal Justice Jules Deschênes.
“The Rodal Report provides a key window into the history of the immigration of Nazi war criminals to Canada and Canada’s response,” B’nai Brith stated. Government lawyers have yet to file a statement of defence.
The group is also demanding the release of “all materials and communications with any foreign state” regarding the Nazi blacklist, as well as any internal government or parliamentary records related to the report.
A censored version of the document was made public on February 1, 2024, following renewed calls to release Holocaust-related records. The disclosure came after the 2023 Commons tribute to Yaroslav Hunka, a former member of the Waffen SS, which the Nuremberg Tribunal classified as a criminal organization.
The Rodal Report revealed that large numbers of Nazi collaborators and suspected war criminals entered Canada after 1945.
“There can be little doubt that war criminals could have and are likely to have come to Canada in significant numbers in the postwar years,” it stated.
According to the report, at least 98 known Nazi Party members and 738 German prisoners of war were permitted to stay in Canada, with some SS-affiliated individuals finding work in lumber camps.
The RCMP even advised screening officers in 1948 to disregard SS tattoos.
Between 1946 and 1967, Canada admitted 620,000 immigrants from European countries where participation in war crimes was widespread.
“It would be rash to assume that significant numbers of war criminals and Nazi collaborators did not enter Canada,” the report concluded.
