By Mike Cohen
Tribune Correspondent
MONTREAL – A prominent American Nazi hunter is urging Canadians to make the prosecution of war criminals residing in Canada a prominent issue in the coming federal election.
PHOTO: MIKE COHEN
American Nazi-hunter Steven Rambam urges Canadians to make catching war criminals an issue in coming election.
Speaking at a school in Montreal recently, Steven Rambam was asked what Canadian Jews can do now to bring the issue to the forefront.
“There is an election coming up,” he said. “If every rabbi in every synagogue stands up and urges their congregations to make the Nazi war criminals dossier a priority, this would have impact. Forget about taxes or issues like daycares. This is what counts for us and time is running out.
“You tell the candidate in your riding that you want his or her commitment that they will champion this issue, otherwise they won’t get your vote. And you hold their feet to the fire. If within 90 days of the election you see no results, then you sit in the lobby of their office and don’t leave until they act.”
Rambam heads Pallorium, Inc., a New York-based licensed Investigative Agency, with offices and affiliates worldwide. Since 1980, Pallorium’s investigators have successfully closed more than 5,000 cases, ranging from homicide investigations to missing persons cases to various types of sophisticated financial frauds. Rambam was featured in major media outlets such as CBS’s 60 Minutes and Dateline NBC when he began “outing” Nazi war criminals in Canada about a decade ago. All of his investigative work was split with his longtime friend and investigation partner Joey Schachter, who accompanied him to Montreal last week. At the time he worked closely with Canadian Jewish Congress, an organization he seems now disenchanted with.
“The CJC never contributed in any way financially or logistically to our work,” says Rambam. “I have asked them on numerous occasions for assistance of one kind or another to set up their own investigative unit. I also asked them to fund activities towards pursuing war criminals in Canada.”
CJC CEO Bernie Farber dismissed Rambam’s claims. “Steve Rambam has not been in touch with me in years,” Farber told the Jewish Tribune. “We have a focussed and deliberate strategy on dealing with alleged Nazi enablers and continue to work hard on this issue. As a child of Holocaust survivors no one need fear that CJC and other Jewish groups for that matter will drop the ball. Rambam was important for his time and we welcomed his help. In the path he helped forge we continue to move forward. I will not, however, engage Steve in what he sadly does often and that is misconstrue the record. It is in no one’s interests to cast aspersions or respond to them.”
At last week’s talk, Rambam told B’nai Brith Canada’s Quebec regional director Bill Surkis that he would love to work with B’nai Brith.
“Make no mistake about it,” he said. “I would welcome the support from any Jewish community group or synagogue.”
Rambam told the Jewish Tribune that he is preparing to “out” another Nazi war criminal in Alberta. “I plan to do it around Dec. 26,” he said. “It will be a good Christmas gift for this man. I also have information on a notorious neo-Nazi whose live-in partner is a Canadian court justice.
“In Canada there are still dozens and maybe hundreds of Nazi war criminals living happy and peaceful lives,” he said. “They live without fear of being caught. And now there are war criminals here from Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia.”
The reason for Rambam’s trip to Montreal was to take part in the completion of a documentary on former Concordia University Professor Adalbert Lallier. As a result of Rambam’s presence in Canada a number of years ago, Professor Lallier stepped forward and admitted that as a young man and member of the Waffen SS during WWII he witnessed the cold-blooded murder of seven concentration camp prisoners and did nothing about it. Fifty-five years later his conscience would not let him go. He contacted Rambam, resulting in a war crimes trial in which his general, Julius Viel, was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in jail where he subsequently died six months later. Two Montreal filmmakers – Evan Beloff of Ontic Media and Frederic Bohbot of Bunbury Productions – are now putting the final touches on a documentary to be distributed by the National Film Board.
Rambam hailed Lallier as a hero.
“I was 17 and drafted against my will,” said Lallier. “My recollections are vivid because I saw the killings not from a distance but up close. I was a teenage SS officer cadet, a boy in jackboots with a gun of his own, was assigned to guard the Jewish prisoners as they dug an anti-tank trench outside of Prague at the Theresienstadt work camp, Julius Viel shot them for no apparent reason. Even now, at the age of 80, I can still hear the lament the Jews sang before they were killed; see the looks on their faces as they turned at the sound of the first shot; and feel my own shame for doing nothing to stop it.
“I think there’s no way you can prepare somebody to go to war. It’s a strange, violent world there,” says Lallier.
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