For decades, the Canadian government has held more than a million pages of war-criminal investigation files secret, citing privacy laws and international agreements with foreign countries. Many Canadian organizations, including Jewish ones, have lobbied—unsuccessfully—for the government to release the names, which include many suspected Nazis.

It turns out, the names were already public. Jared McBride, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently led his students on a class project that discovered more than a thousand pages of historic Royal Canadian Mounted Police war crimes files—all freely available online.

These typed and handwritten files from the 1980s show suspects' names, locations, case numbers, alleged crimes, and the results of the Mounties' investigations, including collaboration with Israel, Germany and Soviet authorities. They appear to match the still-secret parts of Canada's official 1986 Deschênes Commission of Inquiry's records on alleged or actual Nazi war criminals who got into the country.

Not knowing about these publicly available documents, Jewish groups and some media outlets still have lawsuits pending to force Library and Archives Canada to release its war crimes holdings. But, as the UCLA students found out, the archives already released the RCMP documents five years ago. And nobody did anything with them—until now.

On today's episode of The CJN Daily, Jared McBride joins to to unpack what, and how, he and his students uncovered in this breakthrough moment for national justice.

Related links

• Hear B’nai Brith Canada’s former legal director, and a former war crimes investigator turned historian both weigh in on the importance of Canada releasing the names of suspected Nazi war criminals who entered the country, on The CJN Daily.
• Why Canada was reluctant to prosecute suspected Nazi war criminals who entered the country, in The CJN.
• Get the secret RCMP war crimes files officially released by Canada in Jan. 2020, after an Access to Information request. The files are all hosted now on the Canadian-based Investigative Journalism Foundation’s public database collection.

Credits

• Host and writer: Ellin Bessner (@ebessner)
• Production team: Zachary Judah Kauffman (producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Marc Weisblott (editorial director)
• Music: Dov Beck-Levine

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