“Rat line” to Canada. SS tattoo as identification.

Photo: Gravestones in the Ukrainian cemetery in Oakville (Ontario) bearing the lion emblem of the Waffen-SS Division “Galicia” -- Image via junge Welt

By Susann Witt-Stahl, junge Welt, 28 January 2026. Translation by Helmut-Harry Loewen.

Efforts to come to terms with Canada's past as a haven for Ukrainian Nazi collaborators continue to be blocked. A secret list of more than seven hundred suspected Nazi perpetrators who found refuge in Canada after the Second World War remains under lock and key. This was decided last Friday by Caroline Maynard, the Canadian government's information commissioner. The list, which was compiled forty years ago by a commission of inquiry into war criminals in Canada headed by retired judge Jules Deschênes from Quebec, is held at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), the country's national library in Ottawa.

In the summer of 2024, LAC officials approached selected individuals and organisations to ask whether the list should be made public, including members of Canada's Ukrainian community, which has a troubled history, given that many of its members are said to be on this list. The graves and monuments adorned with unambiguous symbolism, for example at the Ukrainian Cemetery of St. Volodymyr in Oakville, Ontario, bear witness to the fact that these are likely to be mainly former members of the Waffen-SS Division “Galicia,” but also other fascists who had joined the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the Holocaust. By contrast, representatives of victims' groups and historians were not consulted by LAC. The outcome of the consultation and the decision was thus predictable. The release of the list was denied on the grounds, among other things, that the Russian government could use it for its war propaganda against Ukraine.

The Globe and Mail newspaper, which sought access to the list under Canada's Freedom of Information Act, requested a review, pointing out that most, if not all, of the individuals listed were deceased. LAC countered with a warning that disclosure would “significantly weaken the defence of a foreign state allied with Canada.” Canada's relations with this state and its allies would be damaged, according to a statement accompanying Caroline Maynard’s repeated refusal to release the list.

“It is high time that the facts about the perpetrators of genocide and war crimes by the Nazis, who escaped justice and were allowed to live comfortable, protected lives in our country, came to light,” commented Jaime Kirzner Roberts of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, who had previously described the Canadian government's behaviour as “shameful.” Scholars such as Per Rudling are also critical of the government's remarkably restrictive handling of the archival material.

This can be explained by Canada's complicit behaviour, which, at the instigation of Great Britain, offered Nazis a “nearly blissful refuge” in the post-war period, according to a 1997 article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Emigrants from Europe only had to “show their SS tattoos,” the agency quotes historian Irving Abella as saying, “to prove you were an anti-communist.”

Today, their political descendants and lobby organisations are an influential force in the politics of Canada, which was then as now governed by the Liberal Party. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), considered the official representative of the world's largest Ukrainian diaspora with around 1.3 million people, is dominated by supporters of the radical Bandera wing of the OUN (OUN-B). Not least, the enormous influence of the UCC is likely to have ensured that the construction of the Roman Shukhevych Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in Edmonton, named after the commander of the Wehrmacht battalion Nachtigall and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the OUN-B, was funded with public money. In Ukrainian cultural centres and other institutions, open antisemites such as Yaroslav Stetsko, Stepan Bandera's former right-hand man and successor, are openly revered.

Original article: Susann Witt-Stahl, »Rattenlinie« nach Kanada. SS-Tattoo als Ausweis. Die Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit Kanadas als Zufluchthafen für ukrainische Nazikollaborateure wird weiter blockiert. Junge Welt, 28.01.2026