Last update - 00:00 17/01/2008
Former Nazi guard loses Canadian deportation appeal
By Reuters
Canada's highest court refused on Thursday to hear the appeal of a former Nazi guard fighting deportation to Italy, where he was convicted of war crimes in World War Two.
Michael Seifert, a Ukranian-born man who has lived in Canada since 1951, acknowledged being a guard at a prison in Bolzano, Italy, that held Jews and others headed to German concentration camps, but denied he murdered anyone.
An Italian military court convicted him in absentia in 2000 of torturing and killing nine people, and sentenced him to life in prison. Press reports said Seifert and another guard were called "The Beasts of Bolzano."
Seifert appealed his deportation and argued Canadian courts ignored
weaknesses in the Italian trial. The Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the case.
Seifert was born in 1924 in a town in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, and began work as a guard for the Nazi SD after the German occupation. He was transferred to Italy in 1944 and stayed there until the war ended.
Seifert eventually immigrated to Canada and moved to Vancouver where he was employed as a mill worker and raised a family. He was arrested by Canada in 2002.
A judge in November upheld a decision by immigration officials to strip Seifert of Canadian citizenship for hiding the fact that he had been a prison guard and claiming he was born in Estonia.
Canada barred former members of the Nazi SS and related units such as the Nazi SD from immigrating after the war because of their involvement in concentration camps and other war crimes.
But the November court ruling also said immigration officials had failed to prove Seifert was responsible for any war crimes, raising at that time the prospect that the Supreme Court might hear his deportation appeal.
The Canadian Jewish Congress estimated between 1,000 and 3,000 people with Nazi pasts were able to get into Canada illegally between 1947 and 1956, but only two have had their Canadian citizenship revoked.