Hitlerites USA and Canada: the old killers are free

How did the three thousand war criminals of the Third Reich manage to become citizens of the United States and Canada? Why do tens of millions of dollars spent on pensions to former Nazis? Why is the deportation of old murderers inhibited in the courts?

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In July, 2016, a wide public outcry caused a lawsuit Helmut Oberlander against deprivation of his citizenship and deportation from Canada. Note that the Simon Wiesenthal Center placed Helmut Oberlander in third place on the list of ten Nazi war criminalsscheduled for possible prosecution in 2016.

However, the Supreme Court of Canada 7 July indicated the federal government to reconsider its earlier decision to revoke Helmut Oberlander's Canadian citizenship. This is already the third stage of the state’s legal battle against the former Nazi - legal procedures against Oberlander have been dragging on for more than 20 years, since 1995.

Oberlander himself does not deny that he served from 1941 to 1943 in the SS Sonderkommando 10a, but states that, firstly, he was forced there, and secondly, he worked there only as a translator, and was also “responsible for the protection of products and cleaning officers' boots."

Bloody route

Helmut Oberlander was born in 1924 in the German colony of Halbstadt - now the town of Molochansk, north of Melitopol, Zaporozhye region of Ukraine. When Wehrmacht units entered the colony on October 5, 1941, Helmut was 17,5 years old. According to him, he was forcibly recruited as a translator to Sonderkommando 10a. Among young ethnic Germans (“Volksdeutsche”) in the city, pro-Nazi sentiments were very strong.

Continuing its bloody route through the Zaporizhzhya region, the 10 sunder team in mid-October 1941 shot the Jews of Melitopol. Immediately after that, a team of German executioners advanced eastward along the coast of the Azov Sea, where it shot over two thousand Mariupol Jews in two days 20-21 in October 1941 in October.

Brigade of murderers, in which Helmut Oberlander served, then went from the Don to the Kuban and Crimea, carrying out acts of mass murder of civilians everywhere - primarily Jews. More than 25 thousand Jews were exterminated in Kuban alone, including acts of genocide in Krasnodar, Anapa, Armavir and Novorossiysk.

In August, the 1942 sunder command 10 shot the Jews of Rostov-on-Don. Place of executions in Zmievsky beam outside the city became the largest burial site of Holocaust victims in Russia - 27 thousand killed.

Note that the Chief of the 10 Sonderkommando SS Standartenführer SS Heinz Zeetzen committed suicide in 1945 by swallowing a capsule with cyanide at the time of his arrest by the British police in Hamburg.

In 1954, Helmut Oberlander and his wife, Margaret, move to Canada, where he begins to engage in the construction business and real estate. In 1960, he becomes a Canadian citizen by hiding his service in the 10 sunder command. He now lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

CIA and Nazi pensions

How many former Nazis like Helmut Oberlander took refuge in North America after World War II? Experts call a terrible figure - 3000 war criminals of the Third Reich moved legally or semi-legally to the USA and Canada.

The United States became a haven for about 1000 people who held various positions in the Nazi party, the SS, police and concentration camps in the territories of Europe occupied by the Third Reich. how сообщает BBC, after the war, some of them were recruited to spy on the CIA line.

One of the most prominent figures on this list is the former SS Hauptsturmführer Otto von Bolsching, adjutant of Adolf Eichmann. Von Bolshving wrote instructions on inciting Jewish pogroms to rob and push Jews out of Germany, organized pogroms on Jews in Bucharest. He became a partner of the Dutch bank, through which the confiscation of property sent to destroy the Jews of Holland. On the eve of the defeat of the Reich, von Bolsching began working for American intelligence, and after the war he performed many CIA missions to combat communism in various countries.

In 1959, he received American citizenship, with the CIA giving false evidence that he was not a Nazi. Von Bolschwing rose to the post of vice president of a computer company in California and “timely” died in Sacramento in 1982, when the US government decided to look into his past.

Documents declassified in 2014 show that FBI Director Edgar Hoover not only allowed the ex-Nazis to be used as spies for the United States, but also noted evidence of their war crimes as "fake Soviet propaganda."

Shocking numbers reported in 2015 year New York Times: In the post-war decades, $ 133 million of pension contributions from the US government were paid to established Nazi criminals by at least 20,2. Moreover, $ 5,6 million was paid to former Nazis, who were subsequently deported from the United States.

Nazi collaborator Alexandras Lileikis, the chief of police of Vilnius, on whose hands the blood of tens of thousands of murdered Jews, went to Germany after the war, and then in 1955 to the United States, where he received American citizenship and lived in Norwood, Massachusetts. Lileikis was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1952. The CIA knew about Lileikis's involvement in the genocide of Jews, nevertheless, they helped him enter the United States.

The CIA also tried to prevent the US Department of Justice from investigating its past, for fear of disclosing secret information about its espionage activities. Nevertheless, the US Department of Justice has established the personal involvement of Leileykis in the genocide of the Jews of Lithuania. The old executioner was deprived of American citizenship. Lileikis was deported from the United States to Lithuania in 1996, lived there unconvicted, and died in Vilnius at the age of 93 in 2000 years.

From guarding concentration camps and ghettos to retirement in the USA

Volksdeutsche from Lithuania Hans Lipsiswho served in the Auschwitz death camp in the ranks of the Waffen-SS, from the 1950-s quietly lived in Chicago. He was exposed only in the 1983 year and expelled from the USA to Germany. At the 2014 trial of the year in Stuttgart, he was declared unsuitable for health reasons, so the 97-year-old SS officer is now living out his days in Germany at liberty.

From the staff of the same concentration camp was and Oscar Groening - “Auschwitz accountant” who, along with three hundred other concentration camp employees, was acquitted of war crimes in 1947. It later became known that he escaped criminal prosecution due to interference from US intelligence agencies who wanted to use former Nazis to build West Germany during the Cold War with the USSR.

Only in July 2015, a German court found 94-year-old Oskar Gröning guilty of complicity in the murder of 300 thousand Jews and sentenced him to three and a half years in prison. We must give Groening his due: he repented of his crimes and publicly spoke out against Holocaust deniers. “I was in Auschwitz, saw the gas chambers and heard the screams of the dying, I sorted the valuables of the dead. All I want is to ask for forgiveness from God and the Jewish people,” said Oscar Gröning.

Some Hitlerite criminals who settled after the war in the United States were able to avoid a harsh sentence. So, ethnic Russian Mikhail Gorshkov, a native of Estonia and serving in the Gestapo in Belarus, responsible for the extermination of thousands of Jews in the city of Slutsk, was deprived of US citizenship in 2002 year. After that, he just flew from Florida to Estonia, where he died at 90.

The US federal authorities launched a legal mechanism for the deportation of a Detroit suburb resident in 2014. Ivana Kalymuna (aka John or Yves Kalymon) - an employee of the Ukrainian auxiliary police of Lviv, which, on the orders of the Germans, guarded the Jewish ghetto and participated in the extermination of more than 120 thousand Jews of Lvov. But Ivan Kalymon died before deportation at the age of 93.

To see a living guard at the Travniki and Treblinka concentration camps in New York, it’s enough to drive the 20 minutes by subway from Manhattan to the Queens area where the 93-year-old resides Yakiv Paliy, a native of the village of Pyadiki, Kolomyia district of what is now the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine. If Treblinka “specialized” in the mass extermination of the Jews of Poland, then the camp Herbalists It was also an SS training base for training guards and punitive police for other camps. Travniki graduates took part in the suppression of the uprising of the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw in the spring of 1943.

A federal court decided to deport Yakiv Paliya back in 2004, but he still lives in New York: none of the three countries - neither Germany, nor Poland, nor Ukraine - wants to host the elderly concentration camp guard.

Another ex-guard of the Nazi concentration camps Gross-Rosen and Sachsenhausen as part of the SS Death's Head division still lives in the town of West Chester, Pennsylvania. This is a 92 year old Theodore (Fedor) Shekhinsky - native of the village of Malyniv, Sambir district, Lviv region. He was deprived of his American citizenship back in 2000, followed by years of appeals. It was only in 2011 that a judge ordered his deportation from the United States for complicity in the murders of Jews in Lviv. But Shekhinsky continues to live in America - like Yakiva Palia, no country in the world wants to accept him.

The only case in the history of depriving a Jew of American citizenship for complicity in the crimes of Nazism was in February 1988, when the court made such a decision on the case Jacob Tannenbaum - Kapo (barracks elder) of the Görlitz/Gross-Rosen concentration camp, who beat other Jewish prisoners. A year later, Tannenbaum died, having avoided deportation from the United States.

Over the past decades, the United States has deprived 64 of US citizenship of former Nazis, of whom 53 people were deported from the country. By According to at 2016 year, in the United States, investigations are under way in relation to almost 250 former war criminals of the Hitler era, who still live in America. All work on the identification and punishment of ex-Nazis in the United States is engaged in "Office of Special Investigations" United States Department of Justice.

In Canada The situation with the ex-Nazis was even more outrageous than in the United States. Nearly 2000 war criminals took refuge in Canada after the Second World War. For forty years no one touched them at all. It was only in 1985 that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney created the Deschene Commission to investigate the question: how did the Nazis manage to emigrate to the “Land of the Maple Leaf”?

As a result of the commission’s work, in 1987 Canadian courts received the right to deal with war criminals of the past, but then for nine years not a single (!) conviction was made against the Nazis in Canadian courts. Ten attempts by Canadian authorities to revoke citizenship and deport former Nazis in the 1990s ended in disgraceful fiasco - old killers, with good lawyers, won lawsuits against the state. Two veteran executioners left Canada of their own free will, the rest died on their own in old age.

Translator for the penalty

It is unlikely that the Canadian trial of Helmut Oberlander in July 2016 was familiar with the materials of the 1963 Soviet trial of Russian police officers who took part in the execution of the Jews of Rostov as part of the same Sonderkommando 10a in which Helmut Oberlander served. It’s a pity, because from there Canadians could learn a lot of important things, including about the role of translators in this punitive detachment.

Here is a quote from evidence Rostov policeman Mikhail Eskov: “Two stood on both sides of the gas chamber, and I and three others began to force the arrested to undress faster. Some resisted, they had to be pushed by force, others could not undress - then we tore off their clothes and pushed them into the gas chamber. Dr. Hertz at that time stood on a dais and enjoyed the terrible picture of destruction with a satisfied smile. Sometimes he would say something to the translator and laugh loudly.”

Of evidence another policeman, Valentin Skripkin, about the execution of the Jews of Rostov: “Fedorov’s platoon was ordered to go on an operation. A German officer appeared and explained through an interpreter: to load onto the buses. The translator was in a German uniform, but without shoulder straps, a local German was a Volksdeutsche... Nearby there was a deep sand quarry. Near this quarry (policemen) They were placed in a semicircle - the German officer was in command, the translator was translating...”

Thus, we see that the status of an interpreter in the 10 sondercommand implied not only personal presence during mass executions, but also the implementation of coordination-binding work between SS officers and their collaborators. The translators saw, knew and were fully aware that they were conducting their work not in the field of linguistics, but transmitting to the performers specific orders for the physical destruction of the civilian population.

An important legal principle distinguishes Canadian justice from modern German judicial practice: in German courts there is no longer required evidence of direct participation in the killings in the death camps, and therefore a person who worked as a warden or just a cook in the SS punitive divisions can be recognized as an accomplice to the killings. This new line of German legal reasoning allowed 11 to initiate criminal proceedings against former employees of the staff of Auschwitz and Majdanek.

But, as can be seen from the latest decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in the case of Helmut Oberlander, Canadian justice wants evidence of the young translator’s personal participation in the murders. What would have been sufficient for a court sentence in Germany - Oberlander's three-year service in the SS Sonderkommando 10a - turns out to be insufficient for Ottawa.

Nazi Hunter: 25 000 euros for information

Historian Dr. Yuri Radchenko, a specialist on the Holocaust in Ukraine and the role of the local police in the extermination of Jews, told the portal ForumDaily interesting data about Ivane Yuryive - another Ukrainian “Volksdeutsche”, who also served in this particular Sonderkommando 10a, including as a translator.

Born in 1893 in Galicia, Ivan Yuriv became one of the very first members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) since its inception in 1929 year. After the split of the OUN in 1940, he joined the OUN faction of Miller. At the beginning of the war of Germany against the USSR, Yuryiv managed to somehow prove his German roots.

Yuriev received the title of Untersturmführer SS and was sent to the Sonderkommando 10a. In this punitive division, he held various positions: he was a translator, commander of an advanced team when he entered the German colony of Speer in southern Ukraine and commander of a rear team in Mariupol. According to some reports, he advanced to the post of deputy commander of the entire Sonderkommando 10.

After the war, Yuriev moved to Canada, where he lived quietly for decades in Toronto. “There is no doubt that he is a murderer. If he had lived longer, Yuryiv would definitely have been convicted as a war criminal,” says Dr. Yuri Radchenko.

Dr. Efraim Zuroff — the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for the Search for Nazi Criminals, commented specifically for the portal ForumDaily Canadian court decision in the Helmut Oberlander case: “This is yet another refusal by Canadians to rid their country of Nazi war criminals and collaborators who gained admission to Canada by posing as innocent refugees fleeing communism. And this happens even though in Canada the law (about deportation) it is enough just to prove that he lied about his service with the Nazis.”

Recall that the Simon Wiesenthal Center offers a reward of 25 000 euros for information about every hiding Nazi criminal in any country in the world.

Nati Leipziger — The 88-year-old Toronto resident and former head of the Canadian Union of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants said in the Helmut Oberlander case: “Let us tell the government on behalf of both victims and survivors that there is no statute of limitations on bringing the perpetrator to justice.” .

Leipziger, who accompanied Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland on July 10, 2016, said: “The few survivors still bear the pain of losing their loved ones. They remember the brutality of Einsatzkommando 10a and the murder of tens of thousands of people. Do not increase our suffering by inaction.”

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