The death of former Einsatzgruppe D operative
Helmut Oberlander at his home in Waterloo, Ontario, late last month ignominiously ended one of the most frustrating and infuriating episodes in the belated postwar efforts of English-speaking democracies to take legal action against Nazi war criminals and collaborators who had immigrated to these democracies under false pretenses.
Unlike the situation in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, where the trials of Holocaust perpetrators began relatively shortly after the end of World War II, the English-speaking democracies realized only decades later that all of them – with the exception of South Africa, which was hermetically closed to immigration during the postwar period – had failed miserably in screening refugees from Eastern Europe, thousands of whom had committed Holocaust crimes.
(In other cases, the Western allies knowingly overlooked the Nazi past of German scientists, engineers and technicians who had worked on the production of V-2 rockets, and a number of individuals who were considered as spy potential behind the Iron Curtain.)
Thus initially in the US in the mid-1970s, and several years later, in Canada, Australia, and Great Britain, and even later in New Zealand, the authorities were confronted by this problem.
The US chose to prosecute these individuals for immigration and naturalization violations since they could not put them on trial for their World War II crimes, which were committed outside the US and whose victims were not American citizens.
A Nazi armband with a swastika displayed in the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The punishment in these cases was the loss of citizenship, if it had been obtained, which was true in most cases, and deportation or extradition.
Canada in 1987, Australia in 1989, and Great Britain in 1991 all passed special laws in their parliaments to allow criminal prosecution of World War II crimes.
From the beginning of this process, all three countries faced many obstacles, but the manner in which the issue was dealt with in Canada was particularly flawed, and in that respect Oberlander’s death at home in Waterloo was predictable.
