Haralds Puntulis

Haralds Puntulis (14 May 1909 – 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 Maltā police precinct during the German occupation of Latvia. Puntulis directed the execution of Latvian Jews, gypsies, and communists, and was awarded the Iron Cross for service to the Reichskommissariat Ostland. (The FBI note reads: "And why should Heralds Puntulis sit on the accused bench?) He was the man who was at the head of a man-shooting commando, specially organized from 20 policeman, which, systematically and on a mass scale, murdered peaceful inhabitants in the Rezekne and Ludza Districts. Sadists subservient to them completed their bloody deed in the Ancupani hills; at his command, rifle salvos caused the Audrini people to collapse in the market square of Rezekne." 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 " …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. Puntulis was named as having personally shot an 11-year-old Jewish boy in the head after a subordinate failed at the task. 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." Ansell claimed that, in 1980, Puntulis made a sealed deposition before the Ontario Supreme Court and testified in the West German trial of Eichelis.