A Canadian now in his nineties participated in a 1943 massacre of villagers by Nazi collaborators in what is now Belarus, according to a newly published academic paper based partly on declassified Soviet documents.

The paper in the latest edition of Holocaust and Genocide Studies has prompted Jewish organizations to ask Ottawa to reopen the case of Vladimir Katriuk, who arrived in Canada in 1951 and now lives southwest of Montreal.

“Canada should immediately revoke his citizenship and deport him to Belarus or Germany,” Dr. Efraim Zuroff, coordinator of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Nazi war crimes research project, told the National Post on Tuesday.

Written by historian Per Anders Rudling, a postdoctoral fellow at Lund University in Sweden, the paper says Soviet testimony unsealed in 2008 identifies Mr. Katriuk as having opened fire on civilians.

On March 22, 1943, villagers of German-occupied Khatyn were herded into a barn to be burned alive, the paper says. Mr. Katriuk “reportedly lay behind the stationary machine gun, firing rounds at anyone attempting to escape the flames.”

In an email Tuesday, the author cautioned that Soviet archival materials had to be treated “carefully and critically.” But he said other sources also pointed to Mr. Katriuk’s involvement in the massacre, which wiped out the entire village population.

nationalpost.com