Hunting down the Nazis

By Tharuka Dissanaike

Having sought refuge in post World War II Canada , Rauca believed he was safe from German prosecutors. But Canada's large Jewish community, keen on justice for his past crimes even at this late stage, sought the Nazi out.

It was Sri Lankan-born lawyer, Ajith Amerasinghe then a Counsel in Canada's Department of Justice, who handled Rauca's extradition in1982. Mr. Amerasinghe painstakingly put together a successful case against the 73-year old Rauca. His search for evidence and witnesses took him to Germany, where there had been a warrant for Rauca's arrest from the early 1950s, Israel, where many eyewitnesses of his crimes lived and Moscow to obtain documents from Lithuania.

At that time Mr. Amerasinghe was working as a federal prosecutor in the Ontario Regional Office of the Canadian Department of Justice. This is the largest regional office of the department with a lawyer-force of 210. Mr. Amerasinghe was chiefly involved in criminal prosecution work, which included drug/ narcotic charges, income tax prosecutions and customs and excise frauds.

An old Royalist, Mr. Amerasinghe graduated from the Peradeniya Law Faculty, qualified as an advocate and practised for nine years in Colombo.

He left for further studies to England in 1973.The very next year he moved to Canada and has worked there ever since.

Mr. Amerasinghe was called to the Ontario Bar in 1976. He then worked for the Ontario Securities Commission, which regulates securities trading in Ontario. In 1977, he began working for the Justice Department. "Rauca's case was the first ever case in Canada involving a war criminal," said Mr. Amerasinghe, presently visiting relatives in Sri Lanka.

"Rauca escaped to Canada in 1951 and for 30 years lived an ordinary life despite his arrest warrant back home. After his extradition hearing in 1982, Rauca was extradited to Germany where he was imprisoned pending trial, but died while in prison.

"Many war criminals were tried in situ by the occupying forces in 1948. But many more escaped to South America, United States, Australia and Canada where they continued to live safely, far from the battlefields of the Second World War. Soon after the war, the Communists became the enemy, and the Allies gathered their forces against communist countries. In a bid not to alienate West Germany, Britain secretly asked Commonwealth countries and their allies to halt prosecutions of war criminals. Therefore, for a long time western countries had no interest in prosecuting or extraditing war criminals who sought refuge in these nations."

But in the early eighties public consciousness awoke to the fact that many Nazis and Nazi collaborators had escaped justice and were living in relative luxury. The Jewish lobby was also gaining momentum- active Jewish organisations were seeking out war criminals and reporting them to the high echelons of government.

In 1987, the Canadian government decided to bring in new legislation that would enable Canadian Courts to try war crimes committed during the Second World War. Mr. Amerasinghe was called to Ottawa, the national capital of Canada, to set up a new unit to prosecute war criminals. Mr. Amerasinghe headed a small team of lawyers and historians working out of Ottawa exclusively handling war crimes from 1987 to 1996.

He continued to live in Toronto, since his children were being educated there, opting to commute to Ottawa (an hour's plane ride) every week. But the new unit soon faced problems bringing war criminals to justice- 40 years after their crimes, in a country far from the location of their deeds.

"Canadian courts hear serious criminal cases by jury. It was difficult to convince a jury of an old man's guilt. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence, a jury acquitted Imre Finta, a Hungarian concentration camp commander, whose case was the first such prosecution handled by the Unit," said Mr. Amerasinghe.

This controversial trial was followed by several other failed attempts by Mr. Amerasinghe's colleagues to bring more war criminals to justice. 

Finally the government questioned the viability of trying international war criminals in Canada and decided to abandon the criminal prosecution route and adopt a civil remedy- to take away their citizenship and deport them to their own countries. "All these cases included extensive travel. Many of the suspects came from western Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Czech and Slovak Republics, the Baltic countries and Yugoslavia. I was a frequent visitor to Russia and negotiated with the KGB to open their files on certain suspects for our perusal. I was one of the first people from the west to have access to KGB files. 

"The well-documented, thoroughly researched volumes on various war-time investigations were immensely useful to our own work. Sometimes each document went into 10,000 hand-written pages bound in 40 or 50 volumes."

"I was also an eyewitness to the break up of the former Soviet Union. As each state established its own government we had to negotiate fresh agreements with them, to investigate war crimes and criminals," Mr. Amerasinghe recalls. The experience of the United States, which began denaturalising and deporting war criminals in the late '70s was of immense help in Canadian trials, said Mr. Amerasinghe, who flew often to the States to glean information from the American Office of Special Investigations.

But Mr. Amerasinghe does not see these cases continuing beyond the next couple of years. "Many Nazi war criminals are dead or are too senile. Eyewitnesses are also elderly, with health problems, loss of memory and vision."

The War Crimes Unit has now been streamlined to deal with modern war criminals- of the Vietnam War era onwards. It deals with those who have sought political asylum or refugee status in Canada or those who have simply migrated to Canada. 

Mr. Amerasinghe meanwhile, left the War Crimes Unit in 1996 and moved back to Toronto where he pursues tax prosecutions, civil litigation and class action cases. He has been a Senior General Counsel since 1989, which is the highest rank for a working lawyer in Canada.

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