Seifert's last stand?

Editorial

Michael Seifert's lawyer will make a further attempt to run out the clock on the delayed extradition of the Nazi guard known as the Beast of Bolzano.

In 2000, Seifert, a Vancouver resident, was found guilty in absentia of nine counts of murder when he served as an SS guard at a prison camp in Bolzano, in northern Italy. Seifert claims he was an inmate, not a guard, but testimony at the Italian trial painted a picture of a power-drunk Nazi given to grotesque sadism.

A Canadian federal court judge ruled that Seifert misrepresented himself when he entered Canada in 1951, not divulging the fact that he was a guard at Bolzano or that he originated from Ukraine.

Every step of the way through this process, Seifert and his lawyer, Doug Christie, have found additional recourses to delay the delivery of justice. Now that the Supreme Court of Canada has refused to hear Seifert's appeal, and given that the only other potential recourse is direct intervention by the minister of justice, a course taken and rejected under the former Liberal government, Seifert's lawyer is at a loss to conceive of new ways to delay action.

Still, the execution of justice is no sure thing. If Seifert were to be extradited, his would be only the second case in Canada of an extradition of a Nazi war criminal. The last was Albert Rauca, who in 1983 was extradited to West Germany from Canada to face trial for the murder of more than 11,500 Jews in Lithuania. A number of other cases have been wending their way through the labyrinthine Canadian justice system, but every one of these has successfully delayed extradition to date.

Canada has a reputation as a tolerant nation, but tolerance of war criminals is not a reputation of which we should be proud. Seifert is one of numerous notorious Nazi-era accused living in Canada, including Helmut Oberlander, Jacob Fast, Jura Skomatchuk and Josef Furman, among others. This issue is about to resolve itself through natural attrition. If these men live out their remaining days as free Canadians, it will send a signal that Canadian tolerance extends to those guilty of humanity's worst atrocities. It already has.

In the end, it won't make a difference for the victims of the Nazi regime – the woman Seifert tortured before killing her, the boy he starved to death, the man whose eyes he gouged out, the pregnant woman he raped and murdered, the attempted escapee he kicked to death – there can be no true justice for the dead. But there can be a message to those who see the injustice of the past and conclude that there will be no justice in the future.

Already, Canada has become a comfortable and apparently welcoming home to perpetrators of atrocities later in the 20th century. If Canada were finally to extradite Seifert to serve his time in Italy, it would be a message – incomplete and overdue, but vital – that this is no haven for humanity's worst offenders.

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