UCLA student research team finds closely-guarded Nazi war crimes file

Discovery of mislabeled Deschênes list reignites debate over Canada’s postwar immigration and justice policies

By UCLA Undergraduate Education | May 23, 2025

A team of undergraduate researchers working under the direction of Jared McBride, assistant professor of history at UCLA, has made a groundbreaking archival discovery that is helping reshape national debate over Canada’s postwar history. The discovery comes in the wake of the 2023 “Hunka Scandal, ” when former SS veteran, Yaroslav Hunka, was publicly honored in the Canadian parliament. The incident reignited debate about Canada’s role in admitting and harboring alleged war criminals after the end of World War II.

 

A central flashpoint of this debate is the 1986 Deschênes Commission, a federal investigation into how and why these individuals were admitted into the country. While the commission’s report was partially released, the Canadian government withheld nearly half — including its nearly 800-person suspect list — citing national security concerns. 

 

McBride’s research team — composed primarily of history majors and minors participating in UCLA’s Student Research Program — spent the past year analyzing declassified archival records and publicly available sources concerning the presence of suspected war criminals in Canada after World War II.

 

Their work revealed that Canadian officials had unknowingly released a significant portion of the long-classified list. Neither the federal government nor the national archives realized the file was publicly accessible until the UCLA team brought it to light.

 

Professor McBride discussed how his team of student researchers discovered the remarkable war crimes file. The interview was edited for length and clarity. 

 

How did UCLA undergraduates get involved in the research?

 

For the past two years, under the auspices of the Undergraduate Research Program, where students serve on faculty-driven research projects, I have been working with a small team of undergraduates on projects related to World War II and war crimes prosecution. In January 2024, having just written an op-ed in a Canadian newspaper on the Deschênes report and Canadian archives, I realized that looking into this story further would make for a great group project.

 

Our team of six students worked on the topic for one quarter during last academic year and then continued this project starting again in fall 2024. The guiding question for our work was: how many names, and how much information about alleged war criminals from World War II, are already circulating in the public domain? Much of the media coverage of the report — and related government records — has maintained an air of secrecy surrounding the individuals in question.

 

Given that four decades have passed since the release of the Deschênes report, and that millions of pages of related material have since been declassified by governments around the world, I believed it was worth investigating just how much we could uncover from publicly available sources.

 

What kinds of sources did the team use during the research process?

To answer our research question, we used a range of public sources that dealt with suspected war criminals residing in Canada. First, we worked with books published in various languages over the past four decades to see how many individuals in question were openly discussed by journalists and historians.

 

Second, this past winter quarter, we examined newspaper records, working extensively with digital databases of Canadian media to harvest names and stories.

 

Next, we looked at archival holdings at Canada’s national archive, Libraries and Archives of Canada (LAC). We were surprised to learn that many of the names that were redacted in the Deschênes report were publicly listed in other pertinent collections at LAC.

 

What did your student research team do next, once you found that the names were already publicly listed?

 

In a moment of serendipity, we came across seventeen documents belonging to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) War Crimes Unit in a public online repository, totaling nearly 2,000 pages. We tracked these documents back to the RCMP War Crimes Unit record holdings at LAC to legitimate them. The documents included several lengthy lists, internal governmental discussion between RCMP and other agencies, and outreach to foreign governments.

 

To our surprise, we stumbled upon hundreds of names related to war crimes contained within these publicly available documents. As a result, most of our work this past year focused on these documents. In working with all these diverse sources, our primary task was to catalog every name, alleged war crime and relevant documents we encountered in a comprehensive database.

 

What kinds of roles or responsibilities did undergraduates take on during the project?

It’s important to emphasize that this team of six students did all the hands-on work with the historical sources, whether it was scrutinizing hundreds of pages of suspect lists, combing through newspapers or reading through thousands of pages of books. The team typically worked in pairs, each assigned a specific task each week and asked to report back on their findings.

 

At our weekly meetings, teams shared their results, addressed challenges, and reflected on the broader historical and political implications of the work. My role was primarily that of a guide — offering historical or methodological insights as needed and spot-checking research for accuracy.

 

How did the team locate and identify the Deschênes list?

One of our major goals for the year was to make sense of the various lists we found in the aforementioned cache of RCMP documents. After a first pass, we determined that the lists were likely the RCMP’s working lists of suspected war criminals in Canada dating back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made sense, since RCMP was the main agency, alongside the Department of Justice, tasked with investigating war crimes.

 

However, we were not certain, since there were no descriptions of the sources in the archival finding aid and the covers had been removed. Working with what we had in hand, we set about trying to decipher when it was written, what information they contained, how to understand this information and what relationship the various records had with one another.

 

While we were confident most of the lists fit into this bucket, one list did not seem like the others. What first caught our attention about this list was that it was comprised of three individual parts: a primary list with 774 names, a second one with 71 names and third with 38 names. 

 

We were especially intrigued by the words “Revised October 6, 1986” at the top of most pages. While we had originally seen these words in our first pass, they only really struck us upon further viewing, since 1986 was the year the Deschênes commission released its report. Crucially, this year also made the list too early to be an RCMP working list, since their work ramped up later after the release of the report.

 

After the “1986” gave us pause, we turned again to three separate lists. The specific number of names on each list: 774, 71 and 38, sounded eerily familiar. And then it hit us — those are exact numbers of suspects compiled in the Deschênes report. Even though the coveted suspect lists attached to the Deschênes report were still secret, the table of contents is not and in it one can clearly see how many people were investigated across three distinct lists: 774 primary suspects, 71 German scientists, and 38 people on an addendum list. 

 

Given this overlap of timing and content, it became clear quickly that was, in fact, not another RCMP suspect list, but likely a copy of the actual Deschênes list that RCMP must have had in its possession and accidentally given to LAC.

 

What was your reaction when the team identified the document?

We were astonished that this list was hiding in plain sight. Whoever had put the list on the internet (likely an investigative journalist organization who had ordered a copy from LAC) had no idea what it actually was. We likewise surmised that when this version of the list was released in 2020, LAC likely did not even know what it was releasing. The fact that a document of such significance could be accidentally declassified — and go unnoticed until we discovered it — ran counter to nearly all public discourse surrounding the Deschênes report and its infamous list. As The New York Times reported in 2023, “For 37 years, Canada has kept close guard on an explosive roster of names.” Yet at the time that quote was published, and throughout the uproar following the Hunka scandal, the list was publicly accessible online for anyone to find.

 

What did your research team do next and what has been the impact of the discovery thus far?

 

As excited as we were about our discovery, we knew it was important to verify our findings, internally and externally. If our breakthrough could be falsified in any way, it would be critical to find this out before moving forward. We began by cross-referencing as much data from the list as possible with our rapidly growing database to verify that the visible names on this list were potential Deschênes commission targets.

 

To our satisfaction we were able to match multiple names with our earlier work leading us to still believe this was the Deschênes list. We then brought our findings to an outside party. I contacted a reporter, Marie Woolf, at Canada’s leading newspaper, The Globe and Mail, who had previously reported on this topic. Woolf reached out to both LAC and RCMP for comment, and tested our hypothesis herself in various ways. Ultimately, she came to the same conclusion as us: this was, in fact, a copy of the Deschênes list, and she wrote a front-page article that featured our group and the discovery.

 

What do you hope students take away from participating in this kind of research?

I have joked with the students that the type of discovery we made in many ways is the wrong lesson to learn about doing historical research. Often historians spend months, if not years, toiling away in archives and working with primary sources to unearth enough material to tell a story about the past. The idea that one would work with a small, curated set of publicly available documents over the course of months and make a discovery that would warrant front-page news and kickstart a national discussion about government transparency is extremely rare.

 

This experience offered three important lessons about historical research. First, always read primary sources for yourself — regardless of how long they’ve been available or who else has reviewed them, whether scholars, journalists or others. You can’t make meaningful contributions, let alone make discoveries, if you rely solely on other people’s interpretations. However insightful another reader may be, they won’t necessarily notice what you notice or bring the same background knowledge to bear.

Second, never assume that governments are omniscient — or even consistently competent — when it comes to document disclosure. Across countries, agencies routinely release records they didn’t realize they had or accidentally declassify materials they intended to keep secret. Persistence and tenacity are among the most powerful tools a historian has.

Third, give your sources the attention they deserve. Don’t ignore what’s right in front of you in a rush to move onto other documents or focus on big picture questions. A quick glance at the unidentified list we found could have led us to dismiss it as insignificant or redundant — just another version of RCMP records we already had. It took multiple careful readings before the year “1986,” printed faintly at the top of every other page, caught our attention. That tiny detail prompted the series of questions that ultimately led us to confirm the document’s identity.