The Great Depression (69 page)

Most of Arcand’s hate literature came directly from Germany. In 1938 Canada was flooded with more than four hundred kinds of anti-Semitic leaflets, most published in the interests of the German Nazis.

In addition to Arcand’s new united front and several smaller fascist groups in Toronto and western Canada, four German-speaking organizations, financed and organized by the German government, were operating in Canada. The Deutscher Bund, with branches in all the principal cities, was supervised by the German consul general in Montreal. The bund maintained schools in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Kitchener. Here children were taught the German language and the glories of the Hitler regime. The bund’s weekly newspaper,
Deutsche Zeitung
, published in Winnipeg, was violently anti-Semitic. It existed for the sole purpose of fostering Nazi propaganda.

The NSDAP, or Nazi party, along with the Arbeits Front constituted the inner circle of the German Nazi movement in Canada. The latter was restricted entirely to Aryans who were not Canadian citizens. Its members were pledged to propagate Nazi theories “by word and deed.”

The German Unity League was a union of all the Nazi organizations, with branches in most provinces. It was formed for the purpose of arranging the annual German Days in order to gain control of other non-political organizations and disseminate Nazi propaganda. In 1937, the league managed to secure the Minister of Trade and Commerce and M.P. for Waterloo North, the Hon. William Daum Euler, as guest speaker at a Nazi mass meeting during Kitchener’s German Days. Euler agreed with other speakers who deprecated stories and articles critical of Germany, “which instead of healing sores [tend] to keep up hatreds.” The minister declared that he sometimes thought that the publication
of such propaganda should be made a criminal offence for newspapers. In a town whose citizens had strong German ties, Euler was a good catch for the league.

Arcand was at some pains to deny any connection with the German Nazis, but a mass of documentary evidence makes it clear that he was in constant and intimate touch with Berlin. The German diplomatic community also tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with the pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic literature pouring into the country. Erich Windels, the German consul general in Ottawa, who was a master at getting pro-German publicity into the press, explicitly denied that his country was carrying on any pro-fascist or anti-Semitic propaganda in Canada, either directly or indirectly. “Any German who takes part in anti-Semitism is not acting in the limits prescribed by German laws for emigrants,” Windels announced, suavely. That, of course, was pure rubbish.

Windels turned his considerable charm on the gullible Mackenzie King while complaining, among other things, that the American picture magazine
Peek
had been allowed into Canada after carrying a caricature of Hitler. The magazine was not banned (although another magazine,
Ken
, was stopped at the border the following year for carrying a caricature of George VI and the Queen), but King soothed the German as best he could by inviting him and his wife to Kingsmere, along with another Nazi couple.

“A most enjoyable evening” followed. King felt he had managed to cheer up the Germans, who “had felt lonely and depressed at times,” no doubt because other more sensitive Canadians had shrunk from entertaining Hitler’s minions. Before the evening was over the Prime Minister of Canada and Hitler’s resident stooge and propagandist were singing songs together. King was delighted. “I could not help dwelling on the significance of the little gathering,” he wrote. “It showed what was possible if only good-will could exist between people of different nationalities rather than ill-will.” Windels and the others could not have been pleasanter, he thought.

There’s little doubt that the Nazis’ efforts in Canada, aided and abetted by Arcand and his ilk, were having an effect. Anti-Semitism was increasing, especially in Ontario and Quebec. Some insurance companies were treating Jews as bad business risks, for no other reason than their race. Entire residential subdivisions
were closed to Jews, to say nothing of the “restricted” summer resorts where the appalling expression “No Jews or dogs allowed” was making its appearance on public signs. A Jewish tennis team found it was no longer welcome in the Toronto Tennis League, while the St. Andrew’s Golf Club changed its policy and banned all Jews – citing pressure from the membership.

During the CIO battle a year earlier, the
Globe and Mail
had gone so far as to identify Jews with the CIO and communism. “The indications are that a large percentage and probably a majority of Communists are Jews,” the paper said. In fact, as the Committee on Gentile-Jewish Relations revealed, only 3 per cent of the party’s membership was Jewish.

In a remarkable display of verbal gymnastics, Arcand managed to link the Jews with both communism
and
capitalism. “The Jew is everywhere,” he declared. “He has seized control of our gold, our pulp, our press. He controls our government.” The Big Lie was believed by many Canadians, but the truth was different. So violent was discrimination against Jews across the country that there wasn’t a single one on the board of any Canadian bank, mortgage company, utility company, railway, or shipping firm. As for controlling the government, those members of the Jewish community who attempted to ease immigration restrictions would soon discover just how impotent they were. Jews did, however, make a convenient target for Canadians struggling blindly to find a scapegoat for their own misery. Arcand blamed them for causing the Depression. He promised, if elected, to disfranchise them all, revoke their citizenship, and expel them from Canada.

But as Hitler’s star rose in Europe, Arcand’s began to fall in English-speaking Canada. The invasion of Austria in the spring and the Munich crisis in the fall made Nazism repugnant to most Canadians.

Arcand’s tactics in Ontario differed from those he used in Quebec. Among anglophones he portrayed himself as a British loyalist whose party would fight for “our King, our God and our Country.” His Toronto meetings were marked by the singing of the National Anthem and cries of Long Live the King! In Quebec, however, Arcand’s rhetoric was that of an extreme French-Canadian nationalist. Here he was able to appeal to the anti-war sentiment of French Canadians, who had a horror of becoming
involved in another European conflict. Why should they go to war “for rotten democracy,” Arcand asked in fiery speeches that received hearty ovations across the province.

His was only one of several voices encouraging the sickly weed of independence and finding a sympathetic hearing among those Quebeckers who blamed their Depression ills on the economic dominance of a “foreign” minority. Even though he would be interned and discredited during the war that followed, the fascist leader’s shrill tones would echo down the corridors of future decades to mingle with those of others calling for a new and distinct Quebec.

In 1938, John Murray Gibbon, a prominent Canadian literary figure, popularized the phrase “Canadian mosaic” in a book with that title. The implication was that Canada had developed along lines different from those of the American melting-pot. Yet at the time, the concept of a series of closely knit ethnic communities fostered by the Canadian experience was largely a myth. It is true that government policy had brought tens of thousands of Slavic peasants to the Canadian West, but these people had little power. The real power lay with the WASPS of Central Canada and the Catholic hierarchy of Quebec, neither of which wanted any diluting of the traditional racial mix.

Canada was very much a British nation, pledged to maintain “British justice” and “British ideals.” The Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Celts of Ontario didn’t want an alien strain polluting the purity of the line any more than the Quebec nationalists did. Although there were no pogroms in Canada, Jews were beyond the pale, as they had been in much of Europe. Now, facing the greatest pogrom of all, Jews from Central Europe were hammering at Ottawa’s doors. But nobody in the government wanted to let them in.

It is a profound understatement to say that the Canadian government was lukewarm to the idea of Jewish refugees entering the country. As Irving Abella and Harold Troper have made clear in their remarkable book,
None Is Too Many
, the government didn’t want
any
Jews to enter Canada.

The villain of the piece is Frederick Charles Blair, director of the Immigration Branch. Blair was the same man who, earlier in the decade, had engineered the deportation of twenty-five thousand people for economic and political reasons. A narrow-minded bureaucrat who ran the department with little interference from Thomas Crerar, his minister, Blair was a man of strong religious views and a violent anti-Semite who despised all Jews. But it must be said that Blair worked in an atmosphere of anti-Semitism, which included the views of the Prime Minister himself. He had little trouble in convincing King and his Cabinet that Jewish refugees from Hitler should be kept out of the country.

All that year King kept telling his diary what a wonderful man Hitler was. “His desire for peace seemed to me to be important and significant and, I believe, true,” he wrote on January 12. Similar sentiments followed: “I am quite sure he does not want to face war …” (February 4). “As I listened to the translation of his speech [he] stood out as
the
leader in Europe – a voice stronger than any other for order …” (February 20). “I believe the world will yet come to see a very great man – mystic in Hitler [who] will rank some day with Joan of Arc among the deliverers of his people …” (March 27).

He preferred Hitler to Tweedsmuir – the dictator “in his grey shirt, the absence of feathers, sword, etc.,” the Governor General all “buttons and gold braid.” On April 11, after the Austrian people voted to join the Reich, King wrote approvingly that “Hitler may well be a very proud man as he said he is today in relation to what he has done for his own class.… He has reason to feel that his achievements have been great indeed.”

Like the vast majority of his countrymen, King viewed Chamberlain’s backing down before Hitler at Munich with great relief. “Hitler,” he wrote on September 14, following a particularly explosive speech by the German dictator, “has spoken out like a man. Exposed fearlessly some of the current hypocrisies.” The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia he saw as a necessary manifestation of
realpolitik
. The Munich meeting, he believed, “is the most momentous meeting between two men that has ever been held in the history of the world.” Chamberlain would “go down in history as one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

King applauded the British prime minister’s plan to separate Russia from its relationship with Britain and France – an act that
led to Stalin’s pact with Hitler. “I cannot but believe,” he wrote on September 20, “that Hitler has enough chivalry and sincerity of purpose to join with Chamberlain in seeking wholeheartedly to work out a plan for Europe as a whole which will begin to relieve all its nations of their armament burdens.” King’s perception was as clouded as it had been in February, when one of his visions had convinced him that his party would win a by-election in Argenteuil. The Liberal candidate lost badly and King was shaken. “I have never been deceived in a
vision
,” he wrote, and mused that he should perhaps place less reliance on “visions, dreams and impressions.” (He failed to take his own advice.)

But then, following the Munich crisis, the whole country was caught up in a dream of peace, a vision of a secure Europe – the wistful belief that Hitler, having got what he wanted at the expense of the Czechs, would have no further designs on other countries. Thus it would be unfair to single out the Prime Minister for his lack of insight.

King, however, appeared to believe that
he
, the Prime Minister of Canada and the grandson of a despised rebel, had actually been the catalyst that brought Chamberlain and Hitler together. He recalled that he had first introduced the British prime minister to the new German ambassador, Ribbentrop, during a reception at the House of Lords during the Coronation. The other guests stood back, “looking in a rather surprised way at the cordiality of the conversation the three of us were having.” As a result, Ribbentrop had invited King to lunch and urged him to visit Hitler.

This placed King, in his own overblown view, at the very centre of the international stage, arm in arm with the British prime minister and the German dictator. “It is a remarkable fact,” King wrote, “that beginning with a determination to see Von Ribbentrop the day of his arrival in London as Ambassador, from then on there have been links which have brought a closer relationship between the British and the German governments in which Chamberlain and I and Hitler have figured in a relationship that has been exceedingly significant.”

On November 9 the dark and dreadful
Kristallnacht
, when the streets of every community in Germany and Austria were littered with broken glass from Jewish homes, shops, and factories, brought from King nothing more than a low moan. He did not mention Hitler in his diary, blaming German youth for the destruction,
but he did admit that “the sorrows which the Jews have to bear … are almost beyond comprehension.”

Abraham Heaps, the CCF member for Winnipeg North, who was Jewish, had just lost his wife, and this contributed to the Prime Minister’s distress. He sat down with Heaps and the conversation turned to the subject of admitting Jewish refugees into Canada. “Something will have to be done,” King told his diary that night. He repeated it the following day when he attended Mrs. Heaps’s funeral in an Ottawa synagogue. But the emotion of the moment quickly passed, and nothing was ever done.

To the Prime Minister, national and party unity were far more important than the fate of thousands of European Jews. French Canada was solidly opposed to admission of any more Jews. The St. Jean Baptiste Society gathered 128,000 names on a petition opposing “all immigration and especially Jewish immigration.” The Knights of Columbus, the Quebec press, and several of the
caisses populaires
were just as adamant. “Why allow in Jewish refugees?”
Le Devoir
asked. “The Jewish shopkeeper on St. Lawrence Boulevard does nothing to increase our natural resources.” Quebec’s Liberal M.P.s were unanimously opposed to Jewish immigration. One, H.E. Brunelle, told the House that the Jews caused “great difficulties” wherever they lived. More significant was the unyielding attitude of Ernest Lapointe, who led the opposition in Cabinet.