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Podcast: North Star with Ellin Bessner
Episode: Ottawa reopens study of releasing Nazi war criminal files after omitting Holocaust experts
Description: After the debacle in 2023, when Parliamentarians gave a standing ovation to an elderly Ukrainian Waffen SS veteran, pressure mounted on Ottawa to speed up publishing the names of long-classified files containing the identities of hundreds of suspected Nazi war criminals welcomed by Canada after the Second World War. The files were prepared in the 1980s for the so-called Deschenes Commission, which studied Canada’s postwar immigration screening problems, especially when it came to former soldiers from Nazi-occupied Europe.
It was believed the government would publish them in May 2024, to help commemorate Jewish Heritage Month. But that didn’t happen. In J...