Immigration Security Policy - Nazis, Fascists and Collaborators
A look inside the Security Panel's discussions in 1952.
In May 1952, Canada’s Security Panel discussed a memorandum titled “Immigration Security Policy - Nazis, Fascists and Collaborators.”
This document, and a handful of related records, are buried in a large release package of Security Panel documents requested by someone else in 2013. That release package was one of a series of old release packages uploaded to Canada Declassified in 2022. Recent headlines reminded me of these documents, and so I pulled them out into a small collection here.
It is an interesting snapshot. It reveals some uncertainty and disagreement about guidelines for immigration, and also gives a sense of how officials were seeking to sort through the internal history of Nazi Germany.
In the spring of 1952, both the RCMP and the Department of Citizenship and Immigration pressed the Security Panel to revisit Canadian policy toward these groups of Second World War-era villains, and to make recommendations. This seems to have come up, partially, because the Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Colonel Laval Fortier, was “personally interested in the problem of collaborators.” (There is a very confused discussion of collaborators on the last page of this document, here; I’m not going to write about it today.) But the RCMP clearly had changes to Canadian policy in mind, too.
By this time, former membership in the Nazi Party did not exclude someone from immigrating to Canada. But there were types of Nazis that were banned on security grounds. Members of the SS, “most members” of the Waffen-SS, the Sicherheitsdienst (S.D., the SS’s intelligence agency), the Gestapo, members of the Abwehr (the German military intelligence service), and “other important and dangerous Nazis when identified” were not permitted to immigrate to Canada.
In the 1952 discussion, the Security Panel agreed that members of the SS, S.D., and Gestapo should still be excluded, but they suggested defining more clearly the “other important and dangerous Nazis,” as well as a specific exclusion of Germans “employed in a concentration camps or believed to have been associated in any way with atrocities.”
Intriguingly, the RCMP argued that members of the Abwehr - German military intelligence - should no longer be automatically excluded. The RCMP liaison officer in London made the case this way:
It is unclear to me whether this RCMP suggestion was connected to any specific interest the RCMP had in former Abwehr officers, or whether this was simply the result of the logic presented in the note.
The documents from this period also lay out the policy for excluding non-German Waffen-SS members, based on a particular date of membership: January 1, 1943.
Policy at this time seems to have been informed by archival research. An RCMP officer had been studying the massive collection of Nazi records assembled in the Berlin Document Centre, and written a lengthy paper on the subject.
I wonder if someone could find a copy of Bye’s paper?
Based on his research, the Panel considered a new, more complex set of criteria for considering which Waffen-SS members would be rejected, with attention to nationality, age, and the time they joined up.
The RCMP liaison officer, writing from London, also noted that Canadian policy did not ban immigration of former members of the Sturm Abteilung (SA). On this matter, the liaison officer from London wrote to say that membership in the Sturm Abteilung (SA) before 1934, but not after, should be reason enough for rejection.
When the Security Panel considered these views, George Glazebrook of the Department of External Affairs agreed that SA membership should be grounds for rejection, but recommended a stricter timeline: Anyone who joined the SA before 1939 should be excluded from Canada.
It is worth noting why Glazebrook rejected the idea of allowing former Abwehr members to immigrate on security grounds. He warned that Abwehr officers, “skilled in clandestine operations, might be persuaded to apply these skills to the detriment of Canada.” This was the Security Panel after all, and its job was to consider security concerns. But did Glazebrook have particular concerns about who might do the persuading here?
R. G. Robertson’s interjection points to the limits of considering these issues from a security perspective alone. Robertson was then Assistant Secretary to Cabinet, and chair of this Security Panel Sub-Committee. He argued that these issues were not only security matters but raised “moral, social and political considerations.”
Indeed…
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This has been a busy and eventful fall at UofT. This means fewer posts recently, although I am expecting to start writing more for Canada Declassified soon. It is difficult to convey the level of engagement and excitement on campus. It seems like students and classes and events are all back as if it were fall 2019 — except it is all a little bit different this time around because we all are grateful for the level of “normality” (if there ever is such a thing!) on campus.
It has been a busy fall for me, too:
In September, I visited the University of Manitoba to speak to the Canadian International Council branch about Canadian national security policy in historical perspective.
Just before Thanksgiving, I visited Global Affairs Canada in Ottawa to participate in an excellent roundtable discussion titled “Engaging Historians in Policy Formulation.”
Last week, I spoke to members of the Canada’s National History Society about NATO’s past, present and future.
Next week is the Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project event “Accessing Historic Records on Intelligence and International Affairs,” at Library and Archives Canada.
In early November, the Canadian Association of Security and Intelligence Studies will host its annual symposium at the Canadian War Museum. This year’s symposium is titled “The Future of Intelligence in a Post-Truth World.” Check it out!