OTTAWA, September 23. /TASS/. Nazi accomplice Helmut Oberlander, whom Russia holds responsible for complicity in the mass killing of children from an orphanage in 1942, has died in Canada, the CBC television network said on Thursday.
Oberlander, 97, died in his home on September 22. Earlier this month, the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada paused hearings on his deportation. According to the TV broadcaster, Oberlander's lawyers, who had insisted on terminating the case due to their client's poor health, have already informed the Board of his death.
Oberlander was born in the village of Molochansk, the Zaporozhye Region, on February 15, 1924. When Nazi Germany occupied Ukraine in 1941, he was mobilized as an interpreter and served in the SS-10a death squad.
After Nazi Germany's capitulation, he went into hiding and evaded criminal prosecution, while in the 1940s and 1960s several of his co-servicemen were arrested, tried and convicted. In December 2019 Canada's Supreme Court ruled that Oberlander, who had concealed his WWII past from the Canadian authorities, should be stripped of his Canadian passport, issued in 1960.
Canada's migration authorities have been considering Oberlander's case since then, but none of the officials ever replied to questions as to what country he might be deported to. Oberlander had settled in Canada in 1954.
At the beginning of February 2020, Russia's Investigative Committee, while probing the killing of children from an orphanage in Yeisk in 1942, requested from Canada all available evidence concerning Oberlander, who was a suspect in that crime. The Investigative Committee is scrutinizing the case under the genocide article of Russia's Criminal Code. The case was launched after the federal security service (FSB) declassified archive materials concerning the mass killing of children from an orphanage in the city of Yeisk in 1942. The Nazi death squad of which Oberlander was a member put the minors to death in gas vans.