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today’s ” AR-online” again dossier, origins of antisemitism AR-Online recent issues: January 1999 December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 September 1998 August 1998 July 1998 Toronto, February 20, 1999 Letters Desk | Editorial, Feb. 23, 1999 Johann Dueck, a Ukrainian-born 79-year-old German Mennonite, was last December cleared of any complicity in atrocities in German-occupied Ukraine during the Second World War.
The photo with this story is captioned: ” Years of persecution have finally ended for Johann Dueck, shown here flanked by his lawyer, Donald Bayne.” WITCH HUNT For crimes not committed THE [Canadian] Justice Department did its best to have Johann Dueck deported to Ukraine for alleged war crimes.
But five years and a million dollars in legal fees later, a Federal Court judge concluded that the accused was exactly what he said he was: a simple man compelled under threat of death to act as a translator for Nazi thugs. by KIRK MAKIN OHANN DUECK was battling bladder cancer when the process server showed up at his home
on May 6, 1995. The rotund 75-year-old man had known for months he was under investigation for war crimes. Still, he was petrified when he propped himself up in bed to accept his denaturalization papers. The accusations were sketchy. They boiled down to this: The federal War Crimes Unit believed he had bamboozled Canadian immigration officials in 1948, concealing from them his wartime role as a whip-toting Nazi executioner. The process server had barely exited the Dueck home in St.
Catharines, Ont., when reporters materialized on the front lawn. They chased him down the street for quotes, then returned to pound insistently on the front door. Throughout the day, they aimed through the back windows with telephoto lens. Mr. Dueck’s wife, Tatjana was mortified: “I didn’t believe they could attack our house that way,” she recalls. It was barely the beginning. The Nazi war-crimes circus had come to town for a long engagement.
Federal prosecutors would not fold their tents until two months ago, when a Federal Court of Canada judge systematically rejected their frail evidence that Mr. Dueck had participated in Nazi wartime atrocities. Judge Marc Noel concluded that Mr. Dueck was exactly what he had always said he was: a simple man compelled under threat of death to act as a translator for Nazi thugs. Mr.
Dueck’s struggle to avoid being turfed out of the country he has called home for 50 years has had immense repercussions. His extended family is out the million dollars it funnelled into defending him. His children and grandchildren have been scarred for life. And as recently as last week, Mr. and Mrs. Dueck still lacked the stomach to leave their self-imposed exile and face the outside world.
Their story may or may not be emblematic of the half dozen denaturalization cases currently in motion across Canada. It most certainly does not detract from the Holocaust itself . In the main, it is a story of unrelenting personal tragedy, for Mr. Dueck didn’t go through the Holocaust. But his life has become one. ORN in a tiny Mennonite community in Ukraine on June 23, 1919, Johann Dueck can trace his family’s ancestry