Editorial note: The conflict raging in Ukraine will forever change the lives of millions of people. Ukrainians suffer the horrors of war, losing their lives, loved ones and the country they knew. On the front lines, there are also soldiers in the service of Russia, often very young and far from decision-making centres. They will also live with the physical and mental consequences of the fighting.
To take a step back from this reality, the 24 hours presents the memoirs of Adalbert Lallier, a Hungarian who was forcibly conscripted into the German army at the age of 17, at the start of the Second World War. After the armistice, he helped refugees reach Canada and had a war criminal convicted, even though he suspected it was going to cost him his career. His whole life was marred by this conflict in which he never wanted to take part.
Note that the interview took place before the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
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Adalbert Lallier was an emeritus professor of economics at Concordia University, respected and appreciated by his students, but he was hiding a terrible secret. The Hungarian-born man was forcibly recruited into the Waffen-SS, an elite military unit of Nazi Germany, when he was just 17 years old.
During World War II, he witnessed atrocities committed against Jewish prisoners. More than 40 years after the events, he decided to ease his conscience and reveal everything to convict a Nazi war criminal. Today he lives alone on a farm in the Eastern Townships, where the 24 hours met him in order to collect what he himself calls his “final report”.
“I had no desire to become an SS officer, I had no desire to serve Germans, but I wanted to survive,” he says.
Birth and youth in a battered Europe
Adalbert Lallier was born in Szeged, Hungary in 1925 to a Hungarian mother and a father of Austrian and French Huguenot descent. He grew up in the heart of a Europe that still bears the scars of the First World War.
In 1939, Adolf Hitler’s Germany began its military conquest of the European continent with the invasion of Poland, which officially started the Second World War. In 1940, the Kingdom of Hungary officially joined the Axis forces of Germany, Italy and Japan.
From this moment on, the course of history directly influences Adalbert’s life. Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR, in June 1941. However, the expedition turned out to be much more complex than the Führer had anticipated. It is therefore to make up for the losses on the eastern front that the Waffen-SS, which wanted to be an elite military unit made up of convinced Nazis and based on “racial purity”, will relax its selection criteria and recruit citizens of the German ethnic diaspora (Volksdeutsche). In some confusion, people who do not speak German are also recruited, including Hungarians.
“Volunteers” recruited by force
In 1942, Adalbert was 17 and attending secondary school when the Waffen-SS forcibly recruited “volunteers” in Hungary. He is drafted as a radio operator to serve in the Seventh SS Division, the Prinz Eugen Unit, reserved for foreigners. His older brother, André Lallier, was also recruited by the Waffen-SS in an infantry regiment.
Illustration Felipe Bello
“My father went to see the local archbishop, who told him simply: ‘We must save the Christian faith. You must send your son to sacrifice his life, fighting communism.” My father couldn’t do anything because if you say no, you’re machine-gunned against a wall.
“The real SS was the first four divisions. I was in the seventh division, which was used as cannon fodder.”
A massacre in Czechoslovakia
In March 1945, Adalbert Lallier witnessed an event that would change his life. In Czechoslovakia, near the Theresienstadt concentration camp, Second Lieutenant (Untersturmführer) Julius Viel kills in cold blood seven Jews busy digging a trench supposed to slow down the Soviet tanks. Petrified by fear, the young Adalbert does not dare to rise up against his superior and assists, helpless, to this assassination which will haunt him forever.
Illustration Felipe Bello
Shortly after, another tragedy occurs for the Lallier family. The eldest, André, decides to desert, but he is captured by the SS military police. It is executed immediately. Adalbert will not know the truth about his brother’s death until 2003, when a former SS officer telephones him.
The end of the war
The conflict ends soon after for Adalbert, who finds himself a prisoner of war of the British in Austria.
Illustration Felipe Bello
The Allies decided, since he spoke five languages, to make him work for the United Nations’ International Refugee Organization (IRO), so that he could help relocate Jewish refugees from Central Europe and the Romania. Thanks to his involvement, Lallier was offered by Cornelius Klassen, a Canadian of Russian origin responsible for visas for refugees in Salzburg, to immigrate there himself. This is how he set foot in Quebec City in 1951.
“Mr. Klassen warned me: ‘Never mention after your arrival that you were a member of the SS.'”
A new life
It’s a new start for the young Hungarian, who realizes his dream of studying in the best universities in the world. He began his academic career with a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science at McGill, followed by a master’s degree in economics at Columbia University in New York, before completing a doctorate in economics at Paris 2 University.
Illustration Felipe Bello
Adalbert also landed a professorship in economics at Loyola College in Montreal, and later at Concordia University, where he received a certificate of excellence in teaching. Like his academic prestige, his professional reputation increased. He then became an economics consultant for various clients in banking, industry, government and even for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
Revisiting the drama
In 1995, during a stay in Czechoslovakia where he was involved as an economic adviser for the Canadian Executive Service Organization (CESO), he decided to take a bus to go to the site of the former Theresienstadt concentration camp. His instinct guides him to the exact location of the killing he had witnessed 40 years earlier. Carried away by his emotions, he falls to his knees and asks for forgiveness.
“My soul was asking me, ‘Adalbert, are you glad you didn’t do anything?'”
Chase the murderer
This mystical episode persuades him to reveal his past and try to find Julius Viel, the murderer of the seven Jews. A friend of Lallier, himself a Hungarian Jew, is aware of the possible negative impacts this will have on his career and tries to make him give up his project. Preferring to follow his conscience, Adalbert decides to carry out his plan all the same and hires a Nazi hunter, an American named Steven Rambam. The latter finds Viel somewhere in Württemberg, near Stuttgart in Germany. He is brought before a court of law. During the trial, Adalbert was called several times to the witness stand. Julius Viel is finally sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Illustration Felipe Bello
Back in Canada, these revelations had the effect of a bombshell in the professional environment of the Concordia teacher. His university hierarchy pushes him to take early retirement by announcing that she is not renewing his contract. Lallier also becomes a pariah in his field of expertise, finance.
“I lost all my professional connections. No contract, since that time – industrial, banking. Nothing. So I retired, devoting all my energies to solving problems that concern social scientists.
Banking and Poverty Survey
Since then, Adalbert has continued to conduct his research, writing several books, including four on the Holocaust. He also looked at the functioning of the Canadian banking system and the role that the central bank should play in it.
Video capture Louis Delisle
Reacting to economic news during our interview, he questioned Canada’s economic strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic (PKU, PCRE) and he anticipates that it is the most vulnerable who will foot the bill in the long run.
Recluse on his farm in the Eastern Townships, the old man delivers this final testimony in the hope of proving that he was worthy of its welcome by Canada, but also to show his gratitude for having received a second chance in life.
“War is the dumbest invention, custom, all over the world.”