Haralds Puntulis (14 May 1909 â 4 July 1982), known locally in Canada as Harry Puntulis, was a Latvian police officer and Nazi collaborator.
In World War II Puntulis served as the chief of the 4th MaltÃÂ police precinct during the German occupation of Latvia. Puntulis directed the execution of Latvian Jews, gypsies, and , and was awarded the Iron Cross for service to the Reichskommissariat Ostland. After the war, Puntulis escaped to Canada and requests to extradite him to Latvia to face criminal charges were refused by the Canadian government. He was tried in absentia, was convicted of murder, and sentenced to death.
A retired building contractor, Puntulis died of natural causes in Toronto, aged 73 years, 17 years after being sentenced to death.
Haralds Petrovich Puntulis (or Horald Petrovich Puntulis) was born on May 14, 1909 in Yaroslav, Latvia.
Serving as the Head of the 4th Police Precinct of the Militia Police of the District of RÃÂzekne, Puntulis reported to Alberts Eichelis and served alongside Boüeslavs Maikovskis. Puntulis was the leader of a special firing squad that carried out mass murders in Maltàand the Audrini massacre, executing the entire population of the village, including the public execution of 30 villagers in the public square of RÃÂzekne.
Following WWII, Puntulis fled to Canada via Sweden, arriving in Quebec City aboard the Empress of Canada on October 13, 1948. He moved to Toronto, worked as a building contractor and married, living in relative obscurity, and became a Canadian citizen. A minor protest by Jews occurred outside his Willowdale home in 1979.
In 1965, the USSR requested that Puntulis be extradited in order to face trial for war crimes. However, Canada and the USSR did not have an extradition treaty and the Canadian government refused. Between 1965 and his death in 1982, the Canadian government did not prosecute Puntulis in Canada or establish an extradition treaty with the USSR.
The Canadian Department of External Affairs took the position in a 1965 memo that: " [Puntulis], regardless of anything else he may or may not have been doing, was in a state of armed revolt against the Soviet Union", and that his acts during this time " â¦may equally well be considered to have been acts of civil war⦠and can be considered to be political offences and therefore not extraditable", a position that may have been informed by the fact that many accused Nazi war criminals from Eastern Europe were also anti-communists.
Tried in absentia in a Riga court, Puntulis was convicted of the murder of 713 Jews, 28 gypsies, and nine communists. During the trial, that concluded on 30 October 1965, Puntulis was named as having personally shot an 11-year-old Jewish boy in the head after a subordinate failed at the task.
Following a tip from Simon Wiesenthal, Jeff Ansell, a Canadian investigative journalist, and fellow reporter, Paul Appleby, conducted a year-long investigation into Puntulis and Helmut Rauca, another Nazi war criminal also living in Canada. On 28 August 1982, in an exposé published in TODAY Magazine, a supplement in 18 Canadian newspapers, Puntulis was, for the first time, publicly identified as a war criminal living in Canada. Sensationally, the exposé article was emblazoned with a maple leaf and a swastika. Puntulis died seven weeks before the exposé was published.
David Levy, the Moscow correspondent for CBC News, who was in Riga for Puntulis' 1965 trial, described, in 1982, the trial as a "...show trial, but [with] no inquisitorial atmosphere. The fact is, they had evidence."
According to Ansell, the United States Office of Special Investigations had files on Puntulis as a part of its work to locate and bring to justice Nazi war criminals, but the Canadian government did not request these files or demonstrate an interest in investigating Puntulis. Ansell claimed that, in 1980, Puntulis made a sealed deposition before the Ontario Supreme Court and testified in the West German trial of Eichelis. Historian Atli Rodal, author of the Rodal Report for the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, wrote that an interdepartmental meeting of the Canadian government concluded that there was "substantial evidence against Puntulis, and that revocation of citizenship seemed possible", but that then-Minister of Justice Pierre Elliott Trudeau dismissed the possibility, concerned about domestic political considerations with Eastern European communities in Canada.
The Canadian government began denaturalization proceedings against Nazi war criminals in the mid-1990s, after Puntulis' death.