When the story broke in 1995, the Toronto Star sent me to his house - he'd decamped to his condo in Florida, but the CBC found him there. One of his neighbours offered to let me set up cameras in a room that overlooked his house! He never gave any support in Canada to neo-Nazis, but I did go to his trial and some of the people in the court who seemed to be there to support him definitely had pro-Nazi sympathies, verbally attacking some of the German witnesses as traitors. I sat with Professor Gunnar Boehnert , a Canadian Mennonite who spent the war years interned in Germany with his parents who were missionaries, and we heard some of the audience making some obvious anti-Semitic remarks in German. Einsatzgruppe is another one of those innocuous words that the Nazis used to disguise their actions - it sounds like it means an 'assigned task group' but they really were death squads that murdered Jews and others in occupied eastern Europe.
Hi all, journalist photographer, Blogging since 1996. Written for Toronto Star, Cité Libre, Toronto and Ottawa Sun, Ottawa Citizen, Morgunblaðið (Iceland), Indian Time (Mohawk/Kanien'kehá:ka) . email markbellis@spamcop.net, enjoy! All content copyright Mark Bellis, and other copyright holders unless where noted.
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