Ottawa will take a fresh look at the case of a Montreal-area man convicted of hiding his Nazi past to enter Canada 60 years ago because of new evidence that he may have committed actiual war crimes, according to recent news reports.

According to the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre (FSWC), Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson told a small contingent of centre officials and Holocaust survivors Apr. 25 in Ottawa that they would review the case of Vladimir Katriuk.

Katriuk, a 91-year-old retired beekeeper living in Ormstown, QC, about 50 kms. from Montreal, in 1999 was convicted by the Federal Court of Canada of hiding his identity and past as a member of the Waffen-SS in his native Ukraine (now Belarus) during the Nazi occupation.

Although the court found Katriuk lied to enter Canada and eventually obtained Canadian citizenship under false pretenses, the federal cabinet in 1997 gave up on efforts to denaturalize and deport him because no evidence existed he committed atrocities.

According to a recent academic paper published in the journal Holocaust and Genocides Studies based on Soviet documents de-classified in 2008, however, Katriuk is depicted, based on several eyewitness testimonies, as having been behind a machine gun that murdered victims during an April, 1943 massacre in the German-occupied village of Khatyn.

In a National Post story last week, historian Per Anders Rudling, a postdoctoral fellow at Lund University in Sweden who wrote the paper, said, “the testimonies are consistent in identifying Katriuk as a machine gunner in Khatyn, and indeed in other atrocities.”

Although Rudling conceded that Soviet archival materials need to be looked at “carefully and critically,” still,  “[t]ogether, the material produces compelling evidence that Katriuk was indeed an active participant in the massacre.”

In response, Katriuk said he did not know of Rudling’s paper. At his trial during the 1990s, he testified that he never participated in German operations.

Besides Katriuk, the FSWC added two other names with Canadian links to its “Most Wanted” list of alleged Nazi war criminals: Helmut Oberlander of Kitchener, On., and 95-year-old Laszlo Csatary, now believed to be living in Hungary.

The FSWC wants Katriuk’s citizenship to be revoked and for him to be deported as soon as possible.