Canada’s last Nazi denied Supreme Court appeal of revoked citizenship
In what is likely Canada’s final major court case over complicity in Nazi atrocities, the Supreme Court of Canada has refused to hear the last-ditch appeal of Helmut Oberlander, 95, who worked as a translator for a Nazi killing squad in Ukraine and Russia, lied to obtain Canadian citizenship, then had a successful post-war career as a real estate developer in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont.
This is the fourth time the government has tried to revoke his citizenship, after the Federal Court found in 2000 he entered
Canada fraudulently in 1954 by failing to disclosing his wartime past. The first time, for example, the revocation was overturned because the government failed to establish that the Einsatzkommando unit for which Oberlander worked had a “single, brutal purpose,” which would make even a translator complicit in its murders.
Oberlander’s case epitomized Canada’s difficulties prosecuting atrocities from the European theatre of the Second World War many decades after the fact, amid fears Canada had become a safe haven for aging Nazis.
Three times the decision to strip his citizenship was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeal, in 2001, 2007, and 2012.
With today’s denial of leave to appeal, and his Federal Court file already closed, there are no further legal avenues of appeal.
Canada can now move to deport him, as has been the policy with alleged Nazi war criminals since Canada stopped prosecuting those crimes criminally in the 1980s.
“We ought not think of those like Oberlander who enabled the Nazi machinery of genocide, as they are today, elderly, sickly and near death,” said Bernie Farber, former chief executive officer of the now defunct Canadian Jewish Congress who for many years represented Jewish community interests in the case against Oberlander. “We must remember them as they were 75 years ago, young, healthy brutes who willingly and continually terrorized innocent children, babies, men and women. They are not deserving of our sympathy.
An ethnic German who lived in the Soviet Union in what is now Ukraine when it was invaded by Nazi forces, Oberlander spoke German, Russian and Ukrainian.
Then a teenager, he was ordered by local authorities to report to German forces, who put him to work as a translator for Einsatzkommando 10a, known as Ek10a, one of the special police task forces that operated in eastern occupied territory during the Second World War. A judge in Oberlander’s case once described them as “mobile killing units” used by the Nazi SS for mass murder.