Canada Declassifies the Rodal Report on War Criminals

Canada has declassified nearly all of the landmark Rodal Report, a historical study of Nazi war criminals who settled in the country after the Second World War, after the Federal Court ordered Ottawa to lift redactions that had stood for almost four decades. The ruling, issued on September 1, 2026 and won by the Jewish advocacy group B'nai Brith Canada, opens the Rodal Report, a study running to 618 pages, on how suspected war criminals entered Canada and how the screening system of the era failed to stop them.

The Rodal Report's newly unredacted passages, announced on October 8, 2026, reveal that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had identified between 35 and 40 people suspected of entering Canada on falsified security clearances obtained with American help, according to B'nai Brith. Historians believe a classified United States military program, later linked to the CIA, moved the suspects out of Europe so they could assist the West in the Cold War.

The files also show that in the early 1950s, Canadian police rejected 52 immigration applications tied to the covert American resettlement program, while Washington was believed to have pushed "larger numbers" of people through the Canadian immigration stream anyway, according to the group's announcement. The disclosures give the fullest picture yet of a resettlement scheme that helped suspects evade justice in exchange for help against the Soviet Union.

What the Nazi war criminals files now reveal

The document at the center of the fight is the Rodal Report, historian Alti Rodal's September 1986 study titled "Nazi War Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present," prepared for the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada. It was first released in heavily censored form in 1987, and additional pages were made public in February 2024 after an access-to-information request, according to a Government of Canada statement.

Rodal examined Canadian immigration policy toward alleged war criminals and collaborators after the war. In the passages discussed by the court, she described American intelligence activity, the resettlement of defectors and former agents, and irregular processing by some Canadian immigration offices, according to an analysis of the court decision. Coverage of the ruling by the Canadian Press notes that Rodal found "ample opportunity" for war criminals and collaborators to enter Canada, and that postwar screening was aimed chiefly at suspected communist infiltrators rather than former Nazis, as reported by the Canadian Press.

For the families of Holocaust survivors, the files answer questions that lingered for generations: how the suspects got in, who helped them, and why the details stayed hidden so long.

Why the Rodal Report stayed secret for decades

The road to disclosure ran through the courts. The organization, which has pressed Ottawa to open Holocaust-era records since the 1980s, asked the archives for an unredacted copy of the Rodal Report in 2023. When passages stayed blacked out, the group complained to the information commissioner and then sued. In the September 2026 ruling, Justice Simon Fothergill ordered the government to disclose material it had withheld under section 15 of the federal access law, which covers information whose release could injure international relations or national security.

The judge found that Ottawa had not shown a clear, current, non-speculative injury from releasing the material, and had not properly weighed the public's right to know, the record's historical importance, the decades that had passed, or the fact that parts had already been disclosed, according to the analysis of the decision. Among the longest-withheld material were passages describing the role of American intelligence agencies in moving Nazi collaborators into Canada.

The Department of Canadian Heritage did not appeal. On October 1, 2026, Library and Archives Canada gave B'nai Brith an advance copy of the declassified report, and the group announced the release a week later.

What the court kept secret, and what comes next

One redaction in the Rodal Report survives. The court allowed the government to keep withholding a confidential opinion from a United States official about an American law, on the grounds that it was shared in confidence and Washington has not consented to its release. The judge described the material as innocuous and suggested Canada keep seeking American consent to publish it.

There are limits to what the ruling means. It is a decision about access to records, not a criminal verdict: it publishes no new list of perpetrators and establishes no one's guilt. It also does not open the confidential second part of the inquiry's own final report, which Ottawa has withheld in full for four decades and which is believed to contain the names of suspected war criminals. The group says it is still seeking that document.

For historians, Holocaust survivors, and their descendants, the release of the Rodal Report ends a long wait. "Canadians have a right to know more about the circumstances surrounding the resettlement of Nazi war criminals in this country," B'nai Brith Canada chief executive Simon Wolle said, according to the announcement, calling the continued withholding of the inquiry's confidential report disappointing. The group says it will keep pressing for the remaining files.

Declassified records have a way of rewriting what the public thought it knew. For a related read, see our explainer on the declassified American plan to stage attacks as a pretext for war, and follow more coverage on our conspiracies topic page.