Helmut Oberlander (15 February 1924 – 20 September 2021) was a naturalized Canadian citizen who was a member of the Einsatzgruppen death squads of Nazi Germany in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II.
[2][3] Beginning in 1994, the Government of Canada made several attempts to revoke Oberlander's citizenship on the basis of his misrepresenting his involvement with Nazi war crimes.
[13] Oberlander was born on 15 February 1924 in Halbstadt, or Molochna Colony, a Russian Mennonite settlement in what is now Zaporizhzhia Oblast in Ukraine, in 1924.
The Federal Court of Canada characterized the group (Einsatzguppe D) as one of several death squads, responsible for killing more than two million people, most of whom were civilians and largely Jewish.
[16] Oberlander immigrated to Canada with his wife Margaret in 1954, where he ran a successful construction business and lived in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario.
[14] In 1970, he lied to West German war crimes investigators, claiming not to have heard of Einsatzkommando 10a and that he was unaware of any executions of Jews by his unit.
[14] His was among 29 cases selected for "special attention" by a Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals because of "the seriousness of the allegations and the availability of evidence.
However, less than two weeks later, officials from the Office of Special Investigations approached him and threatened him with deportation charges if he remained in the United States.
The German Canadian Congress and the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association lobbied against this, arguing there was "no compelling evidence that there are any such people hiding in Canada,"[18] and Andrew Telegdi, who was Oberlander's Member of Parliament, and who was at the time parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Citizenship of Immigration, resigned from that position in objection to this decision.
Consequently, in order to deport Oberlander for trial, the government must first prove that he was a willing participant in death squad activities due to a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that guilt by association is not sufficient grounds to be considered a war criminal.
[26] On 25 April 2019, the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed Oberlander's motion to have his case re-opened because of an alleged bias by Justice Michael Phelan in 2008.