Deschênes Commission

The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, often referred to as the Deschênes Commission, was established by the government of Canada in February 1985 to investigate claims that Canada had become a haven for Nazi war criminals. Headed by retired Quebec Superior Court judge Jules Deschênes, the commission delivered its report in December 1986 after almost two years of hearings.

In 1985, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney ordered an investigation into the presence of Nazi war criminals in Canada after a member of Parliament claimed infamous Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele might be in the country.[1]

The establishment of the commission put the Canadian Jewish community at odds with the Baltic- and Ukrainian-Canadian communities. The Baltic and Ukrainian groups objected to the use of evidence from the Soviet Union and other Iron Curtain countries.[1] and also objected to the selective mandate of the Commission, which made no effort to investigate the presence of a small number of Soviet war criminals - veterans of the NKVD, SMERSH and KGB - who were identified as being in Canada.

The commission compiled a list of 774 potential war criminals in Canada. 341 of them never landed or resided in Canada, 21 had landed in Canada but had left for another country, 86 had died in Canada, and 4 could not be located. The commission found prima facie evidence against 20 individuals; another 169 cases were not acted upon because of a lack of access to overseas evidence or time constraints.[1][lower-alpha 1] Late in 1986, the commission turned the names of the 20 people over to the government with recommendations on how to proceed in each case.

The commission also recommended changes to criminal and citizenship law. In June 1987, the House of Commons passed legislation that allowed for the prosecution of foreign war crimes in Canadian courts and the deportation of naturalized war criminals.[1]

Canadian prosecutors pressed charges against at least four men on allegations of participation in Holocaust war crimes. One case ended in acquittal; two cases were dropped when prosecutors had trouble obtaining overseas evidence; the fourth case was stayed due to the health of the defendant. Since 1998, courts have found that six men misrepresented their wartime activities and could have their citizenship revoked although this was not done because the evidence was circumstantial and insufficient. Another seven people subject to deportation or citizenship-revocation procedures have died.

In more recent years, the commission has been dismissed as excessive or criticized as motivated by foreign influence Olga Bertelsen of Emery-Riddle Aeronautical University (Prescott, Kansas) published an article undermining the claims made by the commission, and claiming that the Soviet KGB framed an innocent man, Ivan ("John") Demjanjuk, as part of a larger attempt (referred to as "Operation Payback") by the KGB to sow discord between Canadian Jews and Ukrainians. Bertelsen asserts that such forgeries were systematically applied by the KGB, termed "Operation Payback". The article initially appeared in an online edition to the journal, which preceded the publication of the print version by several months, and picked up early media attention for its claims that Nazi war criminal estimates have been 'grossly exaggerated'.[2] However, since its initial publication, the article has come under scrutiny by prominent parties such as the Wiesenthal Center and individual historians in academia watchdogs groups oriented towards addressing the claims of holocaust-denial groups,[3] specifically those associated with Ukrainian nationalist far-rightist interests frequently involved in academic debates around the Holocaust and named perpetrators.[3] Specific refutations of Bertelsen's were published by Holocaust history expert professors Efraim Zuroff and Per Anders Rudling, published in issue 34 of International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence (2021).[4] , stating: "This theory is based on [the] assertion that the primary document proving Dejmanjuk's service as an auxiliary with the SS (his ID from the Trawniki SS training camp) was a forgery, when in fact there has never been a single case in which a Nazi document provided to a German court trying a Nazi war crimes case has been discovered to be forged. Its veracity was confirmed, moreover, by multiple courts in three Western democracies -- Germany, Israel, and the United States."[4]