Suspected Nazi war criminal Oberlander dies
Waterloo resident successfully fought deportation for decades
WATERLOO REGION—Helmut Oberlander of Waterloo, the last suspected Nazi war criminal in Canada, has died. He was 97.
When he died, Ottawa was in the final stages of trying to deport Oberlander, saying he would never have been allowed into Canada if immigration officials had known he was a member of Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen — the mobile death squads that killed 1.5 to 2 million people, mostly Jews, when Germany invaded the former Soviet Union in June 1941 — and he was complicit in crimes against humanity.
Oberlander died after successfully delaying every legal challenge mounted by the Department of Justice lawyers for decades. Ottawa spent millions of dollars since the 1980s to remove Oberlander from the country for concealing his membership in the Einsatzgruppen.
His lawyer, Ronald Poulton, shared a statement from the family on Thursday.
“Helmut Oberlander has passed away peacefully. In the end, he was surrounded by loved ones in his home. Notwithstanding the challenges in his life, he remained strong in his faith. He took comfort in his family and the support of many in his community. He gave generously to charity, supported his church, and was a loving family man. He will be dearly missed.”
Nazi hunters say justice has been denied. “To Canada’s great shame, justice was never served in this case,” Michael Levitt, president of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement.
“Oberlander was handed the privilege of dying peacefully by his family’s side as a free man, a reality denied to the millions of Holocaust victims who had their freedoms, dignity and lives taken away from them.”
Oberlander’s former lawyer took a different view. “I can say that Oberlander was one of the most honest, decent human beings that I have ever met,” said Eric Hafemann, who represented Oberlander for 15 years.
“It was an honour to represent him and assist him in what I consider to be one of the most disgraceful persecutions of an individual, in terms of judicial proceedings.”
Born Feb. 15, 1924, in the former Soviet Union at Halbstadt, Oberlander had one sister. His father, Johann, was a doctor; his mother, Lydia, a nurse.
The family history is rooted in a German Mennonite community that had lived there for 250 years. Oberlander was Volksdeutsche — ethnic Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe for generations. He grew up speaking Russian, Ukrainian and German.
The German-speaking families called his hometown Halbstadt while the Russianand Ukrainian-speaking families called it Molochansk. It is about 75 kilometres north of the Sea of Azov. When Ukraine became an independent country in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Oberlander’s hometown was part of the new country.
Germany military units moved through this area on the way to the oilfields of Baku on the Caspian Sea when Oberlander was 17. Oberlander joined the invading Germans. Oberlander long maintained he was conscripted.
He served as a decorated member of a mobile death squad, as a translator and was still a Waffen SS member in May 1944, when he was granted German citizenship.
He was part of Einsatzgruppe D, which was made up of several smaller units known as Sonderkommandos or Einsatzkommandos. Einsatzgruppen units started the mass murder that became the Holocaust.
Later, as an interpreter for the security and counter-intelligence units of the Waffen SS — the SD and SiPo, Oberlander was on the payroll of the Nazi party.
Oberlander was stripped of his Canadian citizenship four times. The last time he lost his citizenship was in 2017, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear more appeals from his lawyers. That paved the way for a deportation hearing before the Immigration Division of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.
Transcripts of interviews with several other members of EK 10a, conducted by West German investigators in the 1960s formed the main evidence against him. The transcripts make for gruesome reading and include first person accounts of mass executions.
When the Soviet Red Army broke the German siege at Stalingrad, German units retreated, including Oberlander’s. After getting his German citizenship, Oberlander surrendered in the British Sector at the end of the war.
He later worked on a farm, studied construction engineering, married and applied to come to Canada in 1953. Starting in April of 1953 every German had to list his occupations, addresses and military service for the previous 10 years. Oberlander concealed his voluntary membership in the Waffen SS, the Einsatzgruppen, the SD and SiPo.
“There is no doubt but for (Oberlander’s) misrepresentation to Canadian immigration authorities, he never would have obtained permanent residence or Canadian citizenship,” said Department of Justice lawyers in written arguments filed with the Immigration Division.
“That misrepresentation gave him the undeserved privilege of living a long life in Canada, something that the victims of EK 10a never had,” they said.
Oberlander and his wife Margaret arrived in Quebec City in May 1954. They settled among the large German community in Kitchener-Waterloo.
In 1958, he started Oberlander Construction Ltd., initially focusing on building school additions and gas stations, then houses.
Oberlander Construction prospered in the rapidly growing postwar economy. From houses, he branched into apartments, putting up about 1,000 rental units by the mid-1960s, when he shifted from construction to land development.
Oberlander’s firm was behind what was Waterloo’s most ambitious residential subdivision — Lakeshore Village.
He obtained Canadian citizenship in 1960.
While he became a community leader, the RCMP Security Service quietly built a file on Oberlander’s wartime activities. They opened a file on Oberlander in May 1963 when Foreign Affairs alerted the Mounties to press reports that described Oberlander’s participation in shooting Jews. At that time, the RCMP collected information on suspected war criminals, but it did not launch investigations.
By the early 1980s, Ottawa wanted to identify immigrants who had concealed their Nazi pasts to obtain visas, strip them of their citizenship and deport them. The RCMP opened more than 200 investigations.
Those investigations were interrupted by the appointment of the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in 1985 — the Deschenes Commission. It too concluded Oberlander should lose his citizenship and be deported for concealing his membership in the Einsatzgruppen.
Nobody had any idea this was happening to one of the most prominent members of the Kitchener-Waterloo community. The Deschenes Commission did not identify the people it investigated. The Waterloo Region Record obtained Oberlander’s files from the commission and the RCMP using the federal Access to Information Act.
Oberlander first hired lawyers in the fall of 1986 and sent them to a closed-door Deschenes Commission hearing in Toronto. In March 1987 the commission’s final report included Oberlander among 29 cases flagged for special attention because
While Oberlander became a community leader here, the RCMP Security Service quietly built a file on his wartime activities
of the seriousness of the allegations and the availability of evidence.
Only a small circle of people connected to the commission knew about Oberlander’s past, and it stayed that way for another eight years. During that time, Ottawa tried to prosecute four Nazi war criminals in Canada but failed to win a conviction. In 1995 it adopted the strategy of citizenship revocation and deportation. That’s when Ottawa publicly announced it was going after Oberlander.
“I will fight this case until death do us part, or until I run out of money and have to put a mortgage on my house — whatever comes first,” he said in a May 2000 interview with a reporter from The Record.
In September this year, Oberlander’s lawyers argued for temporary or permanent stays in the proceedings in his deportation hearing citing his health. The Immigration Division member hearing his case reserved her decision.
Oberlander was predeceased by his wife. They had two daughters.
“He evaded justice in the end, not completely, but substantially,” said Eli Rosenbaum, a U.S. prosecutor who has hunted Nazi war criminals. “It’s most unfortunate that it consumed 26 years of litigation so that he could ultimately die in Canada.”
Rosenbaum questioned Oberlander in 1995 at Oberlander’s resort home in Florida. He persuaded Oberlander to return voluntarily to Canada or face deportation from the U.S.
From Jerusalem, Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said it’s a stain on Canada that Oberlander died before he could be deported to Germany.
“It’s an absolute outrage that this guy lived in Canada untouched, unpunished for decades. He was a member of one of the worst death squads in the history of the Holocaust,” said Zuroff, Holocaust historian and chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
“Canada, I think, feels it has a reputation as one of the countries which takes human rights issues seriously. And this is one human rights issue that they totally blew. And it’s a shame.”