Nazi War Criminal Loses Canada Citizenship
A Nazi-era war-crimes suspect has lost an appeal to keep his Canadian citizenship.
In a ruling made public on Jan. 22, Canada’s Federal Court rejected the claim of Helmut Oberlander, 90, that he served Nazi Germany under duress. The court’s verdict upheld an earlier government decision.
Oberlander failed to show that he had made any effort to leave the Einsatzkommando Nazi death squad where he was an interpreter, the court ruled.
“There was no evidence that he was mistreated and no evidence that he sought to be relieved of his duties. He served the Nazi cause for three or four years [and] surrendered at the end of the war,” the court found, adding that Oberlander “has never expressed any remorse for being a member of [the death squad] or indicated that he found the activities of the organization abhorrent. There is no evidence that what he did for the organization was inconsistent with his will.”
The Canadian government launched its case against Oberlander in 1995, when it alleged he had failed to disclose his wartime past when he became a Canadian in 1960. In 2000, a judge ruled that Oberlander had lied about his wartime service to gain citizenship.
The Canadian cabinet stripped Oberlander of his citizenship twice, but both times, court rulings restored it. The government removed his citizenship a third time in 2012, which this month’s court ruling upheld.
Oberlander, who lives in Waterloo, Ontario, was a member of a mobile death squad that is estimated to have murdered more than 23,000 people, mostly Jews, in the Soviet Union during the Second World War.
He claimed to have been a low-level interpreter and that he would have been shot had he tried to escape. The court rejected that claim.
Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre called on Ottawa “to immediately commence deportation proceedings against Oberlander.”
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
