‘Hate Law’ Trial--Painful Reminder for Canada : Wartime Treatment of Jews, Possible Harboring of Nazis Are Touchy Subjects

Every day for the past month, Ernst Zundel, wearing a blue construction helmet and accompanied by half a dozen bodyguards also wearing hard hats, has walked into a courthouse here to face charges of violating Canada’s so-called hate law.

Zundel, a 45-year-old publisher who loudly professes a love for Germany, is specifically accused of publishing two books which argue that Nazi Germany never exterminated millions of Jews. He is being prosecuted under a 1970 law that makes it a crime, punishable by up to two years in prison, to issue “a statement or tale known to be false and likely to cause mischief to the public interest in social and racial tolerance.”

At the same time that a Canadian court is giving Zundel a forum to proclaim his theory that the World War II genocide of European Jewry was a hoax created by Zionists to force West Germany to pay reparations to Israel, the federal government in Ottawa is trying to deal with charges that Canada is still harboring war criminals allowed into the country in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Crisis for Mulroney

The five-month-old government of Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was handed its first crisis early this month, when it was disclosed that government documents indicate that Nazis and their collaborators were allowed into Canada after World War II, partly because they cooperated with Allied intelligence units.

Those same documents, according to the Toronto Star, also show that Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, applied for a Canadian visa while in Argentina in 1962. It is not known what happened after that application was filed--in the name of Joseph Menke, an alias used by Mengele--but no one in the Canadian government has publicly ruled out the possibility that he got into this country.

The newspaper’s disclosure of the documents’ existence set off a major debate in Parliament and resulted in the establishment of a federal commission to investigate the possibility that there may still be Nazi war criminals living in Canada. A report is expected by year’s end.

The Zundel trial and the disclosure of the documents on war criminals, while not related incidents, are painful reminders of the contradictions and ironies that mark Canada’s treatment of Jews.

One of the ironies is that the law Zundel is accused of violating was enacted partly to compensate for the Canadian history of pervasive, if quiet, anti-Semitism that excluded Jews from elite social and business circles.

This attitude was personified by longtime Prime Minister William Mackenzie King, who said of Adolf Hitler in 1938 that he “will rank some day with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people and if he is only careful may yet be the deliverer of Europe.”

‘None Is Too Many’

Mackenzie King was not alone. It is reported that during World War II a senior civil servant, when asked how many Jewish immigrants would be admitted to Canada, answered, “None is too many.”

As it turned out, Canada accepted only 5,000 Jewish war refugees from 1938 to 1948, a figure even lower than the official quota, although the nation’s official policy was to encourage immigration to fill up the sparsely populated countryside.

In the same period, the United States admitted more than 200,000 Jewish refugees, and Argentina, with a population a little larger than Canada’s, accepted 50,000. Even tiny, impoverished Bolivia welcomed 14,000 Jews.

Nazi officials and collaborators, however, may have found sanctuary in Canada, according to Jewish organizations and some government officials here.

Sol Littman, head of the Canadian division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, a major repository of information on war criminals still at large, estimates that up to 3,000 alleged war criminals entered Canada after the war. In an interview, he said that as many as 2,000 are still in the country because of the government’s unwillingness to take any serious action against them--at least until now.

“The Canadian government has been playing games with the extradition of wanted war criminals for some time,” Littman said. “On the whole . . . until today, the Canadian government’s efforts have been directed largely at blunting any requests for extradition of war criminals from Canada.”

One Nazi Extradited

To date, Canada has not tried anyone for war crimes, and only one man has been extradited on related charges. Helmut Albert Rauca, a onetime master sergeant in the Gestapo, was sent to West Germany in 1982 after being accused of murdering 11,584 Lithuanian Jews. He died before the trial began.

Unlike past Canadian governments, which ignored the issue of war criminals, the Mulroney government appears willing to deal with the question and has appointed Superior Court Justice Jules Deschenes, a highly regarded Quebec jurist, to head the investigative commission.

But in announcing the creation of the panel Feb. 7, Justice Minister John Crosbie denied that large numbers of Nazis are in Canada and said, “There’s no more than 30 or 40.”

Crosbie acknowledged that many organizations do not accept that figure, “so by having this commissioner--a jurist of great reputation and ability--this should put this matter to rest.”

Regardless of the number, Crosbie said, the existence of any Nazi war criminals in Canada is a matter of concern. “The government is concerned that we are not harboring within our midst some of the individuals guilty of committing the horrible Nazi war crimes of World War II,” he said. “These individuals must be brought to justice.”

At the same time, Crosbie declined to make public the files and reports of past inquiries into the matter, including documents written by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police dealing with Mengele and other accused war criminals. He said such information will be made available to the Deschenes Commission.

Littman said the investigation was a welcome development, but “we would have preferred (that) the government simply opened their files and let the public see for themselves what Canada’s past role was.”

Fears of Anti-Semitism

Meanwhile, what the public is seeing in the Zundel case is an attempt by Canada to prevent the spread of the type of ideas that contributed to the Nazi extermination policy. The government charges that Zundel’s thesis about the Holocaust is demonstrably false and could lead to anti-Semitism.

Zundel, who apparently wears a construction hard hat for protection from hostile crowds outside the courthouse, has not testified or spoken to the press about the trial. But the tactics of his attorney have been to present witnesses who contend that the concentration camps were not equipped for mass murder and that there are no records to prove that genocide was an official policy of Hitler’s Germany.

Zundel’s lawyer, Douglas Christie, indicated in his opening argument that he will press the view that his client truly believes that the Holocaust was a hoax and therefore did not publish anything “known to be false,” as set out in the “hate law.”

Although they do not support this approach and condemn Zundel’s views, civil liberties advocates are uneasy because they believe that the “hate law” is vague and has the potential to punish the expression of unpopular ideas, a concern reflected in the government’s rare use of the statute.

The uncomfortable position of civil liberty groups is sharpened because Canada’s constitutional guarantees of free expression are more limited than the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and remain untested.

Some Jews are also concerned, although they refuse to be identified for fear of seeming to support Zundel. They worry that the trial raises the possibility that people too young to recall the war will accept the validity of Zundel’s arguments. They also say it trivializes the horror of genocide, insults the survivors of the death camps and desecrates the memories of those murdered.

Disagreement Among Jews

But not all Jews agree. Rabbi Stuart Rosenberg, an internationally recognized theologian and author who heads a Toronto congregation, said in an interview that he understands such worries.

“You always take the chance” of giving credence to ideas like Zundel’s by putting him on trial, Rosenberg said, but the public needs to know that such views exist and what the government’s position is. “Now that (the trial) is here, it is good for the government to take the position that Zundel is lying and that we’re on the right side,” he said.

Other Jewish leaders expressed concern privately that Zundel might be acquitted on grounds that the charges are too vague and that the law infringes on freedom of expression.

A stronger case, they argue, is coming later this year when James Keegstra, an Alberta high school teacher and mayor of the city of Eckville, will be tried for violating the hate law by teaching in his classes that the Holocaust never happened and that Jews are conspiring to rule the world and to destroy Christianity.

“They should have just concentrated on the Keegstra case,” said one official of a Jewish organization, who said that hate-mongering in a public school is a clearer threat to racial tolerance.

There is also concern here that the publicity over the Zundel case will lead to an increase in anti-Semitic violence.

Since the trial began, several instances of vandalism have been reported against Jewish institutions and property, including the destruction by arson of a synagogue in British Columbia and two attacks on a Jewish funeral chapel in Vancouver.