By Lucas Lelardoux Oliger
Right up through the 1970s, Canada seemed to display a tolerance for harboring and welcoming Nazi war criminals.
A greater awareness of their war crimes seemed to take place in the 1980s and 1990s, notably as a result of activism on behalf of victims of Nazi atrocities. In 1985 the federal Deschênes Commission looked into claims that Canada had become a haven for Nazi war criminals. This Commission made a lot of mistakes, like not incriminating the division Yaroslav Hunka fought with, for example.
It took the Hunka scandal, when this Waffen-SS was applauded before the House of Commons as a hero, to get the Prime Minister to consider giving the public access to all the Deschênes Commsission’s documents.
One weird case was that of the economist Adalbert Lallier, who divided his time between Montreal and the Eastern Townships. At the end of the 1990s, he confessed to his Waffen-SS past. Hungarian by birth, he claimed to have been forced into joining. He also claimed to have been eyewitness to the murder of seven Jews when he was stationed in Camp Theresienstadt, situated in current-day Czechia.
He was very different than other ex-Nazis in hiding. He wanted to talk about his war experiences, expressed his wish to be forgiven. He had obtained a visa from the Canadian consul-general in Salzburg “because I was Christian and against the Bolsheviks,” all the while maintaining that “only Jews and Communists are undesirables.” He enthusiastically participated in the trial of Julius Veil, the SS officer responsible for the massacre of the seven Jews.
Despite his speeches, the memorials he had built and the books he wrote, a lot of people couldn’t hide their malaise with Lallier. He spent the last 20 years of his life seeking to be forgiven. But in reality, only victims can forgive.
However, numerous important Quebec Jewish groups supported Lallier in his efforts. He often spoke to children about his past, to keep alive the memory of those dark days.
No one could really figure out Lallier’s real intentions or his sincerity. Undeniably he broke his silence, what philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” Arendt’s adage refers to “evil” being present in everyday, indifferent events, like a routine. It is often too easy to see torturers and war criminals as monsters. In a majority of cases, they are ordinary human beings who act according to the situations they are put into.
As Justin Trudeau put it, the Hunka Affair was “embarrassing” for Canada. A substantial number of Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War, for ideological reasons. That doesn’t excuse the oppression the USSR engaged in. The Holodomor genocide, famines of the pre-war Stalinist era that killed millions, impelled a section of the Ukrainian population to see Germany as a liberator.
The dictatorship of Vladimir Putin has tried to justify its invasion of the Ukraine as “denazification”. This is done using a caricature version of history. But if Canada had better considered its relationship with Nazism, couldn’t it have avoided giving Putin such a big propaganda tool?
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