TORONTO, ONTARIO -- (Marketwire) -- 12/28/12 -- Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) applauds Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism for stripping suspected Nazi war criminal Helmut Oberlander of Canadian citizenship. Oberlander, a member of Detachment 10a of Einsatzgruppe D, a mobile killing unit that murdered tens of thousands of Jewish and other civilians in southern Ukraine and the Caucasus in the former Soviet Union during WWII, has been fighting extradition to Europe since the 1990s.

"As a human rights advocacy organization grounded in the lessons of the Holocaust, we are so pleased to see the Canadian government taking steps to deport one of the few remaining Nazis in Canada - there is no statute of limitations for those who participated in genocide," noted Avi Benlolo, President and CEO of FSWC. "Having led a delegation of Holocaust survivors to Ottawa to speak to Minister Kenney in April, it is particularly gratifying to see our concerns that Oberlander, a Nazi living freely in this country, have been taken seriously and acted upon in this manner."

Helmut Oberlander has been listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as one of the top ten most wanted Nazi war crimes suspects worldwide. In addition to Oberlander, FSWC has also pressed for the deportation of Vladimir Katriuk, a beekeeper in Quebec who was a member of a battalion responsible for a massacre in the village of Khatyn, in what is now Belarus.