Jon Liedtke joins 610 CKTB’s Gene Valaitis for his regular weekly segment, Liedtke’s Got a Take!
Jon Liedtke discusses released unredacted documents revealing post-WWII US intelligence smuggled Nazi collaborators into Canada. Liedtke criticizes Ottawa’s 40-year cover-up as institutional self-preservation, highlights the stark contrast in treatment between Jewish refugees and war criminals, and demands full disclosure.
Transcript (Gemini Generated):
Gene Valaitis: Right now, though, it is time for another episode of Liedtke’s Got a Take with Jon Liedtke. Good morning, Jon.
Jon Liedtke: Good morning, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: I’ve mentioned on the show before that my dad is a Holocaust survivor. The Nazis put him in a concentration camp, but he was one of the lucky ones. Now, the CIA sneaked Nazis into Canada, and I don’t care if they’re 97 or 102, they should be prosecuted.
And the US Army acting on behalf of the CIA bypassed Canadian vetting using things like fake biographies to resettle Nazis, collaborators, and war criminals in Canada. Now, Jon, last month we talked about the federal judge ordering Ottawa to unseal these secret post-World War II Nazi files. Ottawa gave up on its appeal, and the documents were finally released. What I want to know is your opinion. Why was Ottawa fighting for 40 years to keep this hidden?
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, Gene, reading these new unredacted pages, honestly, it makes me queasy. We’re not talking about low-level clerks here. We are talking about Nazis and Nazi collaborators and war criminals, as you said—the most vile scum in human history.
Now, we know Crown lawyers spent four decades claiming in court that keeping this blacked out was necessary to protect operational methods and preserve trust with our Five Eyes intelligence partners, but the unredacted text proves that it wasn’t national security; it was institutional self-preservation.
The documents reveal undeniable proof that the US Army and the CIA, using the USAREUR—which is the US Army Europe and Africa Resettlement and Research Division, I believe is the name for it, regardless—they ran a covert pipeline that created fake biographies to slip former Axis personnel past Canadian screeners at immigration. Ottawa didn’t protect Five Eyes secrets; they were protecting government agencies from total public embarrassment.
Gene Valaitis: Now, the report mentions that the US military admitted these people who had criminal records. So, how did American intelligence get them past Canadian border checks back in the late 1950s?
Jon Liedtke: Well, Gene, there’s this great thing that you can use to get people to believe things that aren’t true, and it’s called lying. They lied and they cheated the vetting process.
Now, listen, historians will say the Cold War—which is when this was all happening under—was chaotic post-World War II, anti-Soviet intelligence was the top priority, and early CIA officers subordinated border vetting to recruit informants against Moscow. Fine, and we understand Cold War realpolitik, but look at how they did it.
US officers directly admitted to Canadian officials that their pipeline included assets with records of, quote, “moral turpitude,” the legal term for Nazi collaborators. American handlers walked these guys past Canadian visa officers, handed over fake paper records, and assured the screeners that there were no security concerns. And new records from our RCMP that came from 1954 showed that our police caught 35 of them living here, rejected 52 more, and warned that Ottawa had far larger numbers that had most likely used fake papers to slip through undetected.
Gene Valaitis: You know, for decades, federal lawyers claimed in court that releasing this information—and I don’t know where they even got this theory from—releasing this information would destroy modern Canadian-US diplomatic relations. Does Washington even care? I don’t buy that for a second.
Jon Liedtke: Well, these records have been out for a couple of weeks. This file has been one that you and I have been tracking now for a number of months, and has Washington even said a word about it since these papers came out? No, of course not. They’ve got actual things to deal with rather than the issues of the past. And, you know, their reputation right now, quite frankly, is not going to be sullied because of things that happened a couple of decades ago—well, more than a couple of decades ago—regarding past Nazis. Unfortunately, I think it should be sullied, but there’s a lot going on in the world.
And look, government legal teams always defend executive privilege, and they’re always going to claim that releasing the files would set a dangerous precedent under the law, but in reality, the diplomatic harm argument was pure PR shielding for domestic audiences. Ottawa was managing communications, protecting its own reputation, and over the last few decades, they’ve basically evolved into a national crisis management PR firm whose only client is itself. Functioning government is just a happy byproduct; the real purpose is taxation to make sure the comms department stays open.
Gene Valaitis: When you look at how Canada treated Jewish refugees during the Holocaust compared to how we treated these former Nazis and collaborators, I mean, how do you even make sense of that moral contrast?
Jon Liedtke: I can’t make sense of it, Gene. I mean, it’s a massive moral shame, the way that Canada treated Jewish refugees during the Holocaust and how we treated former Nazis and collaborators after World War II.
Some will argue Canada was facing massive industrial labor shortages, and our screening officers were overwhelmed by millions of displaced persons coming. But you can’t explain away the hypocrisy. Canada was home to “none is too many” when it came to saving Jewish victims fleeing the Holocaust under Prime Minister King. Then, almost immediately after the war, we turned around and, either willingly or looking the other way, allowed actual Waffen-SS members, executioners, and collaborators in through the front door under bulk labor schemes. This is the biggest scandal in Canadian history, and I don’t think anything else comes close.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah, and, you know, it’s all about awareness. And I don’t hear a lot of this being reported in the mainstream media. It’s another reason why—I know that you’re an advocate for the Jewish community and have been for a long, long time—but it’s not just Jews. It’s people like my dad, who was a Catholic, for example.
And I realize it was a different time; it was back in the mid-’50s, and Americans and Canadians have been friends ever since—er, Trump. But looking at how American intelligence operated on Canadian soil during the Cold War, what does this tell you about Canada’s standing at the time? Pretty weak.
Jon Liedtke: Yeah, I mean, I think it says that Canada’s standing at the time, how we were treated by the United States and US intelligence, was that we were viewed and we acted as a compliant satellite state.
Now, look, defenders of past post-war foreign policy, they can say that Canada was a willing, sovereign co-architect of Western security like NATO and NORAD, for sure, and we made strategic trade-offs to fight Soviet aggression. But when foreign intelligence agencies can fabricate documents, lie to our immigration officers, and resettle war criminals in our cities, that’s not an equal partner; that’s a vassal state being used how Washington chooses.
So whether Canadian officials were completely duped or gave a wink-wink, nudge-nudge behind closed doors, we weren’t the ones driving the bus; we were along for the ride, and then we spent 70 years helping hide the ride from our own citizens.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. You know, my position on this has been clear whenever we talk about this. I don’t care if you’re 89 now or if you’re 102. If you were responsible for the death of one person in the Second World War, you should be tried and sent to jail. And whenever I say that, some people say, “Well, he’s an old man, he’s in a wheelchair, we should just forget.” No! We can never forget.
So, the policy report is out, but part two of the report, the master list containing the names of over 800 suspected Nazis, collaborators, and war criminals who may still be alive in Canada, is still hidden by Ottawa! I mean, what should we be telling the Mark Carney government today?
Jon Liedtke: Gene, I’d be saying today to the Mark Carney government, release the list of the 800 suspected Nazis, collaborators, and war criminals that have been hidden by our government in Canada that were let into the country. Declassify the list today; today is the earliest that you can do it at this point.
And Gene, I’d say do it for people like you and for your father, and of course, for the Jewish community and for everyone who was wronged by the Nazis. We all have the right to know who these people were in our country.
And the government’s go-to excuse on not releasing it has always been privacy laws and due process, arguing that releasing unvetted lists of raw intelligence could unfairly stain the reputation of families or descendants of deceased individuals, but so much time has passed. I mean, we are talking about, quite frankly, things that happened 80 years ago, and we should know what the actual truth of all of this actually is.
So, sunlight is the best disinfectant. We don’t need to have protection from our own history; Canadians deserve the full, unvarnished truth about what happened in our country. And if we’re not willing to release what we’ve done before and covered up before, how can we actually have faith that the same isn’t occurring today?
Gene Valaitis: Exactly. Exactly. How do we get the list released?
Jon Liedtke: I think that we just keep up the public pressure on it. You know, there’s going to be continual court challenges of it right now, but I think the biggest thing is that we know that the United States, the CIA, had direct involvement in this, so I think that the challenge will be moving across the border and into the United States court systems, trying to get more information declassified on their side of the border, because undoubtedly, they’ve got files too, Gene.
Gene Valaitis: Yeah. Great take today, appreciate it, talk to you tomorrow.
Jon Liedtke: Thank you, Gene, looking forward to it.
Gene Valaitis: There he goes, Jon Liedtke with Liedtke’s Got a Take.
This aired on 610 CKTB
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