Montreal will become the latest Quebec city to erase any trace of a Nobel Prize-winning doctor because of his alleged Nazi ties.
Alexis Carrel's name will be stricken from a park and a street in the city, Mayor Denis Coderre said Wednesday.
The French surgeon and biologist won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for work in vascular suturing and transplants, but became the subject of controversy for supporting eugenics and the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War.
Coderre told an executive committee meeting that Carrel, who died in 1944, was "at minimum, a Nazi sympathizer."
Last year, Gatineau officials removed Carrel's name from a street and did likewise for Philipp Lenard, a German physicist who won the Nobel in 1905 but was also an adviser to Adolf Hitler and a known believer of Nazi ideology.
The Quebec city, which is just across from Ottawa, made the change after a grassroots campaign by a group of citizens.
"It was in this context that we realized three municipalities in Quebec still had street names for this man," said David Ouellette of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
Ouellette was referring to Quebec toponymy records that show Montreal-area suburbs Chateauguay and Boisbriand also have Alexis-Carrel streets.
Carrel's name doesn't appear to be used outside of Quebec, said Ouellette, who added it was removed in his native France when his past came to light.
Provincial Liberal politician David Birnbaum recently asked the Chateauguay and Boisbriand mayors to make the change ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day in May.
Birnbaum said in a statement that in the German edition of Carrel's book "L'Homme, cet inconnu," he praised the Nazis and their move to stifle "the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal."
He also endorsed destroying mankind's "inferior stock" through the use of gas chambers, Birnbaum said.
Quebec municipalities can vote on a name change and propose it to the province's toponymy commission for approval.
