On November 16, 1955, Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Laval Fortier placed a confidential memorandum before his minister, Jack Pickersgill, recommending that Canada officially end its automatic immigration ban against veterans of the Nazi SS. The war in Europe had been over for a decade, Fortier argued, Ottawa was actively seeking normalized diplomatic relations with West Germany, and prospective recruits claimed they had been coerced into uniform. Alongside Fortier’s recommendation to admit applicants on their individual merits, Pickersgill penned five words in the margin: “I concur. Please go ahead.”
The directive, documented in research director Alti Rodal’s 1986 report for the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, completed a seven-year bureaucratic dismantling of Canada’s postwar security screening apparatus. Between 1948 and 1955, federal security panels systematically narrowed the list of disqualified European military formations. By the time the Security Sub-Panel finished rewriting the rules in late 1955, only concentration camp guards, Gestapo officers, and major war criminals remained subject to automatic exclusion.
For forty years, the operational mechanics of that decision remained classified in Privy Council Office and Justice Department vaults. The historical record reveals neither a sudden policy breakdown nor a rogue departmental initiative, but a calculated administrative realignment driven by three competing pressures: an urgent domestic appetite for European immigrant labour, diplomatic coordination with NATO allies who had already relaxed their own vetting bars, and an RCMP security branch almost wholly consumed by Soviet espionage.
The Cold War Pivot and the Labour Shortage
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Canadian immigration policy toward former enemy nationals was uncompromising. Under early postwar cabinet orders, enemy aliens were broadly inadmissible, and immigration officers stationed in occupied Europe were instructed to reject anyone who had served in the German armed forces or belonged to fascist political parties.
That barrier eroded almost immediately against economic and geopolitical realities. By 1947, Canadian resource industries, railway companies, and agricultural associations were lobbying Ottawa for hundreds of thousands of European workers to fuel the country’s postwar industrial boom. At the same time, the defection of Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko in Ottawa in September 1945 abruptly reoriented Canadian security priorities. Within the Privy Council Office and the RCMP Directorate of Security and Intelligence, the primary threat was no longer defeated fascism, but communist subversion and Soviet intelligence infiltration.
To handle screening in displaced persons camps across Germany, Austria, and Italy, Ottawa established Stage B security vetting, staffed by RCMP officers seconded to overseas immigration posts. The operational reality facing these officers was impossible from the outset. Stationed in temporary field offices in Karlsruhe, Munich, and Rome, a handful of Canadian interrogators faced tens of thousands of displaced persons and refugees seeking passage to North America.
Stage B interrogators possessed no independent investigative apparatus in Europe. They were forced to evaluate applicants through brief personal interviews lasting only a few minutes. For documentary verification, they relied on Allied registries, chief among them the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects (CROWCASS), compiled by Allied authorities in Paris. But CROWCASS was plagued by clerical errors, incomplete records, and duplicate entries, and Allied authorities largely wound down its maintenance in 1948.
As displaced persons passed through processing centres, many destroyed their military paybooks or acquired clean identity papers from municipal registries in chaotic borderlands. In the absence of hard documentary evidence, RCMP officers had to take an applicant’s sworn statements at face value.
The Incremental Rollback, 1948 to 1951
The dismantling of Canada’s exclusionary screening guidelines occurred in stages, each justified by administrative precedent or geopolitical pragmatism.
The first major breach occurred in 1948, when Ottawa relaxed immigration restrictions for veterans of the Baltic Waffen-SS divisions. Latvian and Estonian units had been mobilized by the German military following the 1941 invasion of the Baltic states. Canadian authorities accepted the argument that these soldiers were anti-Soviet conscripts fighting to liberate their homelands from Russian occupation, rather than ideological adherents of National Socialism. Membership in the Baltic Waffen-SS ceased to be an automatic bar to landing in Canada.
In May 1950, the federal cabinet eliminated the blanket prohibition against former members of the Wehrmacht, the regular German armed forces. German veterans who had served as rank-and-file soldiers or non-commissioned officers were declared admissible, provided they had not joined the Nazi Party prior to 1937 or committed specific war crimes.
One month later, in June 1950, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent’s Cabinet addressed the status of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, known as the Galician Division, composed primarily of ethnic Ukrainians recruited in Galicia in 1943. After the German surrender, approximately 8,000 soldiers from the division were held in British internment camps in Rimini, Italy, and later transferred to the United Kingdom.
Facing intense domestic representations from Ukrainian-Canadian community groups and assurances from the British Foreign Office that the men had been screened and cleared of war crimes, Cabinet approved their entry in principle. In January 1951, Cabinet reaffirmed that members of the Galician Division should not be rejected simply because of their military service, establishing that individual cases would be processed unless individual criminal conduct was proven.
By July 1951, the pressure to broaden the applicant pool reached the wider Waffen-SS. The Canadian Christian Council for Resettlement of Refugees (CCCRR), an influential coalition of church-based sponsorship agencies that played a dominant role in selecting and transporting European immigrants, lobbied Ottawa heavily to remove bars against ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) who had served in SS formations.
The government yielded by creating a chronological dividing line: any applicant who joined the Waffen-SS after January 1, 1943, was presumed to have been forcibly conscripted rather than a volunteer, and was therefore admissible. This cutoff created an administrative fiction, as German archives later demonstrated that tens of thousands of Volksdeutsche had volunteered well into 1943 and 1944. Nevertheless, it provided immigration officers with a clear procedural basis to clear thousands of previously blocked files.
The October 1955 Security Sub-Panel Order
By 1955, even the January 1943 conscription cutoff was seen by immigration officials as an annoying bureaucratic impediment. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration was under sustained pressure from West German authorities, who regularly protested Canada’s continuing refusal to admit German veterans as an arbitrary insult to a newly sovereign partner and NATO ally.
Within Ottawa’s diplomatic and security apparatus, a sharp debate broke out. Charles Ritchie, Canada’s Ambassador in Bonn, warned External Affairs headquarters that removing remaining restrictions on SS veterans would provoke deep political outrage in both Canada and West Germany, where the legacy of Nazi atrocities was painfully fresh.
Ritchie’s cautions were countered by officials within External Affairs and Citizenship and Immigration. J. George of External Affairs’ European Division argued that keeping restrictions on German veterans in 1955 was untenable, noting that Canada’s closest allies, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia, had already abandoned automatic bars in favor of case-by-case processing. From the field, Canadian immigration officer P. Robillard reported from Germany that hundreds of former SS men had already managed to enter Canada under various administrative exemptions, rendering the formal ban both hypocritical and unenforceable.
The decisive move occurred on October 18, 1955, when the federal Security Sub-Panel convened in Ottawa. The Sub-Panel, an interdepartmental committee consisting of senior officials from the Privy Council Office, External Affairs, Citizenship and Immigration, and the RCMP, formally considered a memorandum reviewing wartime German organizations.
The committee took an extraordinary step. Without seeking approval from full Cabinet or the plenary Security Panel, the Sub-Panel approved a policy shift that went far beyond what the CCCRR lobby had requested. Automatic exclusion was removed not only for the Waffen-SS, but also for the Allgemeine-SS (the General SS), the SA (the Nazi stormtroopers), the Abwehr (military intelligence), and the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the SS security and intelligence service that had run the mobile Einsatzgruppen killing squads in Eastern Europe and was designated a criminal organization at the Nuremberg Trials).
Under the new rules, membership in these organizations was no longer a cause for automatic rejection. Applications would be evaluated on their individual merits under close relative and meritorious employment categories. Automatic rejection was retained for only three categories: former members of the Gestapo, concentration camp guards, and individuals classified as major offenders under Allied Control Council Directive No. 38.
When Deputy Minister Laval Fortier submitted the decision to Jack Pickersgill on November 16, he framed it as a sensible normalization of international relations with Germany. Pickersgill’s five-word endorsement closed the file without a single minute of parliamentary debate.
Overruling the RCMP and the Family Sponsorship Loophole
The implementation of the November 1955 decision created immediate friction on the ground. In Europe, RCMP Stage B screening officers balked at being asked to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable SS veterans. The RCMP argued that security officers should not bear the onus of deciding which former SS officers possessed merit, and field interrogators temporarily froze processing while awaiting clarified instructions.
To unblock the pipeline, Fortier took the initiative. He approached the RCMP to review immigration applications that had been rejected on security grounds between 1953 and 1955, seeking to clear them under the new relaxed criteria. Priority reviews were granted to cases sponsored by the CCCRR.
At the same time, existing immigration regulations provided a massive procedural avenue that bypassed security screening entirely. Under Canadian regulations in the mid-1950s, any permanent resident in Canada who had been cleared for security could sponsor spouses, parents, and children of any age or marital status without those relatives undergoing Stage B security screening. Furthermore, there was no minimum residency requirement before a newcomer could file a sponsorship petition.
Archival records examined by the Deschênes Commission in the Pickersgill papers confirmed that numerous German applicants repeatedly rejected by the RCMP in previous years were quietly admitted to Canada in 1956 through family sponsorship.
Where the RCMP did maintain its objections, the system gave final authority to the minister. In April 1956, formal instructions were issued to Canadian visa officers abroad:
“When after rejection on security grounds, the Minister decides to grant entry, the Immigration officer may issue the visa immediately upon receipt of this information, without further reference to the RCMP.”
While this administrative apparatus was operating behind closed doors, the government maintained a completely different public posture. When questioned by journalists in 1955 about whether former Nazis were entering the country, Pickersgill publicly claimed that the Immigration Branch conducted exhaustive investigations to ensure no prospective immigrant had belonged to the SS or fascist organizations, or collaborated with the enemy.
The sensitivity of the policy became clear in December 1955, when a Social Democratic member of the West German Bundestag wrote to Ottawa inquiring about reports that former SS officers were being admitted to Canada. The inquiry caused consternation at a Security Sub-Panel meeting on December 21, because Ottawa had not yet even informed its own overseas visa posts of the policy change. Officials worried about being publicly embarrassed in the West German parliament before their own administrative machinery was in place.
The Paper Trail That Outlasted the Secrecy
The relaxation of security screening was not an act of ideological sympathy. It was the product of institutional priorities steadily shifting over a decade. In the eyes of Ottawa’s postwar mandarins, the geopolitical imperative of anchoring West Germany into the Western alliance, combined with the pressing domestic demand for industrial labour, outweighed the retrospective vetting of events that had occurred in Eastern Europe ten years earlier.
The RCMP Stage B units were never equipped or instructed to function as a war crimes investigation bureau. Their primary mandate was to detect Soviet agents and domestic subversives. Once Cabinet and the Security Sub-Panel determined that wartime service in the SS or collaborator police units did not automatically indicate a threat to the contemporary security of Canada, the bureaucratic machinery adapted accordingly.
The consequences of those administrative decisions remained largely hidden until 1985, when public allegations that Nazi war criminals were living undisturbed across Canada forced the Mulroney government to appoint the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals under Justice Jules Deschênes. When historian Alti Rodal examined the classified departmental registries, she found the complete paper trail: the interdepartmental debates, the Stage B cables, the CCCRR lobbying briefs, and the handwritten notations in the margins of ministerial memos.
The documents demonstrate that Canada’s postwar entry policies were not undermined by forged passports or porous borders. The barrier was taken down in Ottawa, one memorandum at a time, by civil servants and ministers who decided that the past had expired.
Hansard Files spent days extracting and verifying the 618-page declassified Deschênes Commission historical study, correlating Cabinet Security Sub-Panel minutes, overseas Stage B screening cables, and confidential ministerial correspondence. We do the primary-source research so Canadians do not have to rely on secondhand talking points.
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Source Documents
Rodal, A. (1986, September). Nazi War Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present. Prepared for the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals. Ottawa: Department of Justice / Library and Archives Canada (Accession e011865749).
Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals. (1986, December 30). Report of the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals (Jules Deschênes, Commissioner). Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada.
Allied Control Council. (1946, October 12). Directive No. 38: The Arrest and Punishment of War Criminals, Nazis and Militarists and the Denazification, Demilitarization and Concentration of Suspect Persons. Berlin: Allied Control Authority.
The hierarchy of privileging European migration to this continent, regardless of whether they have already participated in genocidal acts, seems so on-brand for the Domionion of Canada.
https://r.flora.ca/p/canadian-democracy