Unauthorized Entry: The Truth about Nazi War Criminals in Canada, 1946-1956 (review)

Canada is hardly the only country shocked to have discovered Nazi murderers in the midst of its citizens. Countries as far afield as Australia or as seemingly immune as Israel have been wracked by scandals surrounding the Nazi perpetrators and collaborators living quietly in their suburbs. ¹ Yet in few countries has there been more—or more public—soul-searching regarding allegations of official complicity or negligence in allowing Nazi criminals into the country. In 1986, an official commission of inquiry, the so-called Deschenes Commission, received a report from historian Alti Rodal. This report, together with Reginald Whitaker's 1987 book, Double Standard: The Secret History of Canadian Immigration, created the impression that after the war large numbers of Nazi criminals and collaborators had found safe haven in Canada as a result of government incompetence, indifference, or anticommunist hysteria. ²

In his impressively researched book Unauthorized Entry, Howard Margolian challenges this view. "Despite its systemic shortcomings and the problems of corruption or sabotage that cropped up from time to time," he argues, "Canada's postwar system of immigration screening was a well-administered, good-faith effort to prevent the entry of subversives and other undesirables," including Nazis (p. 111). While Canada's effort was not perfect, Margolian contends, it was remarkably effective and probably the best that was possible under the circumstances.

Margolian's is primarily a bureaucratic story. He focuses on the mid- to upper-level actors in the Department of Mines and Resources, in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, and in the Department of External Affairs who set postwar immigration policy; he also looks at the lower-level bureaucrats and Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers who implemented that policy. He traces Canadian immigration policy and screening procedures in great detail over a ten-year period, and on the basis of an impressive command of the archival sources.

In this period, Canada faced two fundamental challenges with respect to immigration from Europe. On the one hand, there was the moral, political, and economic imperative to help resolve Europe's pressing postwar refugee crisis, as well as to address Canada's own increasingly severe labor shortages. On the other hand, security concerns were posed by the presence in the immigrant pool of possible Nazi offenders as well as potential communists. Yet Cold War concerns about communist infiltration never seriously impaired the screening process with regard to Nazis. "Notwithstanding the years of tinkering to which the Second World War-related rejection criteria were subjected, Canada persevered in its efforts to deny Hitler's henchmen safe haven well into the 1950s" (p. 184).

Indeed, the key dilemma facing Canadian officials in formulating screening criteria that would keep out Nazi criminals while overall immigration policy liberalized was not the terms of the screening process itself, as much as the lack of adequate corroborating evidence for statements made by prospective immigrants in their application papers. This was particularly true for potential immigrants from Eastern Europe, where the fall of the iron curtain had prevented adequate cooperation between local and Canadian officials. Thus if, as Margolian contends, roughly 2,000 Nazi criminals and collaborators (out of a total of 1.5 million immigrants during the period 1946-56) slipped through Canada's immigration screening net, this was due less to negligence, incompetence, or malice than to the trying circumstances of the time (p. 3). This situation was merely exacerbated as immigration rates increased and, consequently, the time available for screening decreased. In this respect, Margolian's book can be said to point to a fundamental dilemma for liberal societies. Citing Superintendent G.B. McClellan of the Mounties, he notes: "Mass immigration and good security just cannot go side by side. You can have mass immigration with mediocre security, or good security and a trickle of immigration" (p. 319...