The Deschenes Commission
But is the Walus case a single slipup in Simon Wiesenthal's otherwise blemish-free career? No,
other slipups can be found - in one instance a batch of 6,000 others. Simon Wiesenthal kicked
the ball into play with the accusation that Canada harbored "several hundred" war criminals
(Toronto Star, May 19, 1971). The Jewish Defense League caught the ball, found it soft and
inflated it to "maybe 1,000" (Globe and Mail, July 5, 1983) before tossing it to Edward
Greenspan. Edward Greenspan mustered enough hot air to inflate it to 2,000 (Globe and Mail,
November 21, 1983) before tossing it to Sol Littman whose lung capacity was able to raise it to
3,000 (Toronto Star, November 8, 1984). The ball, distended beyond recognition, was tossed back
to Wiesenthal who boldly puffed it up to 6,000 (New York Daily News, May 16, 1986) and then made
the mistake of trying to kick it - but poof! The ball burst!
Judge Jules Deschenes writing the report for Canada's Commission on War Criminals first
certifies that the ball had indeed reached the record-breaking 6,000 Canadian war criminals:
The Commission has ascertained from the New York Daily News that this figure is
correct and is not the result of a printing error. (Jules Deschenes,
Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, 1986, p. 247)
But now the big ball was gone, and all that was left was the deflated pigskin which Mr.
Wiesenthal lamely flopped on the Commission's table - a list of 217 names (which in other places
becomes a list of 218 or 219 names). The list was focussed on Ukrainians - Mr. Wiesenthal's
Vienna Documentation Center Annual Report for 1984 claimed that "218 former Ukrainian officers
of Hitler's S.S. (elite guard), which ran death camps in Eastern Europe, are living in Canada."
Upon subjecting the deflated ball to close and prolonged scrutiny, Judge Deschenes, arrived at
the following conclusions:
Between 1971 and 1986, public statements by outside interveners concerning
alleged war criminals residing in Canada have spread increasingly large and
grossly exaggerated figures as to their estimated number ... [among them] the
figure of 6,000 ventured in 1986 by Mr. Simon Wiesenthal.... (p. 249)
The high level reached by some of those figures, together with the wide
discrepancy between them, contributed to create both revulsion and
interrogation. (p. 245)
It was obvious that the list of 217 officers of the Galicia Division furnished
by Mr. Wiesenthal was nearly totally useless and put the Canadian government,
through the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and this Commission, to a
considerable amount of purposeless work. (p. 258)
The Commission has tried repeatedly to obtain the incriminating evidence
allegedly in Mr. Wiesenthal's possession, through various oral and written
communications with Mr. Wiesenthal himself and with his solicitor, Mr. Martin
Mendelsohn of Washington, D.C., but to no avail: telephone calls, letters, even
a meeting in New York between Mr. Wiesenthal and Commission Counsel on 1
November 1985 followed up by further direct communications, have succeeded in
bringing no positive results, outside of promises. (p. 257)
From the conclusions of the Deschenes Commission alone, 60 Minutes might have decided that Simon
Wiesenthal is not the kind of person whose pronouncements may be aired without verification.
Had any Ukrainian come to 60 Minutes carrying such a load of hatred toward Jews as Simon
Wiesenthal carries toward Ukrainians, and displaying - or rather flaunting - such credentials of
unreliability, 60 Minutes would never have given him air time, or if it did, it would be only to
excoriate him. Instead of exposing Mr. Wiesenthal, 60 Minutes has joined him in portraying a
world filled with Nazis, and so has lent support to a witch hunt more hysterical than Joe
McCarthy's sniffing out of Communists in the 50's. Consider the following excerpts from cases
submitted to the Deschenes commission for investigation as suspected Nazi war criminals, and see
if you don't agree. In the Commission report, all of the following cases end with the words,
"On the basis of the foregoing, it is recommended that the file on the subject be closed." The
selection is not intended to be representative, as the overwhelming number of cases are simply
dismissed for lack of evidence - but rather is a sample of cases that upon casual browsing stand
out as being particularly comical, pathetic, or alarming depending upon one's mood. The sample,
furthermore, is far from exhaustive - a vastly greater number of similarly striking cases abound
within the Commission report:
CASE NO. 73. This individual was brought to the attention of the Commission by
Mr. Sol Littman. Mr. Littman made no particular allegation against the
subject, but referred to information obtained from a particular individual as
the source of the subject's name. Mr. Littman further indicated that the
subject resided at an unspecified address in Canada and had been the object of
