The Nazi Hunters (37 page)

From then on, the young Rosenbaum’s radar was particularly attuned to stories about Nazis—and, in the 1970s, there was a growing number of them.
New York Times
reporter Ralph Blumenthal followed up the Braunsteiner case by writing extensively about other Nazi criminals in America, and a young writer named Howard Blum produced
Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America.
The hero of that instant nonfiction bestseller was Anthony DeVito, a World War II veteran who, like Rosenbaum’s father, had visited Dachau shortly after its liberation. After he returned to the United States with a German wife, DeVito worked as an investigator for the INS—which assigned him to the Braunsteiner case.
From then on, he was off and running, trying to follow up on a list of fifty-nine Nazi criminals living in the United States that he obtained from a researcher at the World Jewish Congress.

DeVito was constantly battling his bosses and finally resigned from
the INS in 1974, claiming that its leadership was doing everything to obstruct further investigations of Nazis living in the United States. “
He was a lone figure calling for vengeance,” Blum wrote. The dramatic portrait of the crusader battling a cover-up of Nazis, some of whom had worked for the CIA and other government agencies, captured the popular imagination—and the imagination of Rosenbaum, who at that point was headed to Harvard Law School. “I certainly believed it, hook, line and sinker,” Rosenbaum recalled. “I bought into the whole thing.”

Later, Rosenbaum would conclude that Blum had overplayed the drama, ignored earlier efforts by the United States to keep many Nazis out, and hyped DeVito’s role. As for DeVito himself, Rosenbaum added, he came to believe in Blum’s portrayal of him and conflated fact and fiction when it came to Nazi hunting. “His life became a thriller,” Rosenbaum said. “He was one of these guys who had read too many of these novels.” Still, there was no question that Blum’s book contributed to a growing awareness that something had gone seriously wrong, allowing numerous Nazi criminals to find sanctuary in the United States.

Blum and DeVito were not alone in reaching that conclusion. Shortly after Elizabeth Holtzman became a member of Congress in 1973, the Brooklyn Democrat was approached by a mid-level INS official who wanted to see her unofficially. Their encounter set off a chain of events that, six years later, would culminate in the creation of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which Holtzman explained was to be “
an effective Nazi-fighting unit.” It could not bring the Nazis to trial for the crimes they had committed elsewhere or seek prison sentences for them. But it could expose the lies they had told about their past when they had entered the country, leading to their loss of citizenship and deportation—in the best scenario, to countries that could then put them on trial.

• • •

When Holtzman first read about the Braunsteiner case, she viewed it as an aberration. So when the INS official showed up in her office in the Longworth House Office Building to tell her that the immigration service had a list of fifty-three Nazi war criminals and was doing nothing about
it, she was disbelieving at first. “This seemed impossible,” she recalled. Given America’s sacrifices in World War II, she added, “It made no sense for our government to allow Nazi war criminals to live here.”

But the conversation left an inkling of doubt in Holtzman’s mind that was reinforced by an article she subsequently read about Valerian Trifa, a former member of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard who led its student group; he was accused of instigating a pogrom against Jews in Bucharest in 1941.
After the war, Trifa had settled in the United States and risen through the ranks of the North American Romanian Orthodox Church, ultimately serving as its archbishop and leader. Charles Kremer, a Romanian-born Jewish dentist, had been waging a lonely campaign to bring him to justice starting in the 1950s. Trifa denied the charges, claiming that the Romanian authorities were trying to smear him because of his anticommunist activism.

A few months after her encounter with the official who had talked about Nazi war criminals, Holtzman had the chance to question INS commissioner Leonard F. Chapman, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, who was testifying before the immigration subcommittee.

“Does the Immigration and Naturalization Service have a list of alleged war criminals living in the United States?” she asked.

“Yes,” Chapman replied.

Holtzman had been fully expecting him to say “no,” and, as she recalled later, “I almost fell out of my seat.” When she asked how many people were on that list, he answered equally clearly: “Fifty-three.” But when she recovered enough to ask what the INS was doing about this list, he retreated behind “a cloud of words, a smokescreen of words” that provided no answers.

Frustrated by her inability to learn what had happened with the list, which was similar to the one that DeVito had obtained earlier, she asked to see the files. Again to her surprise, the commissioner readily agreed.

The files were in Manhattan, and on a trip home the following weekend she was ushered into an office where a neatly prepared stack of them was waiting for her. As she began opening them one by one, she encountered similar stories: there were accusations that each of the alleged Nazi
war criminals was responsible for some atrocity, often the killing of Jews. But it was also clear that, if INS officials had followed up at all, it was only to locate the named persons and visit them, inquiring about their health and not much more. It had not investigated the actual charges against them, nor checked any documentary evidence or looked for possible witnesses. “The INS is doing nothing,” she concluded. “This is outrageous.”

From then on, Holtzman mounted a campaign to demand the creation of a special unit to investigate those and other possible cases. She had no idea how many Nazi war criminals had settled in the United States, but she was convinced that the INS was “at best a reluctant enforcer and at worst a non-enforcer.” She believed that DeVito and INS attorney Victor Schiano, who had worked with him on the Braunsteiner case, had been dedicated to changing that record but failed. As far as she could see, they had been the only INS officials interested in seriously pursuing Nazi cases—and both of them had resigned by that point.

With the help of Pennsylvania Democrat Joshua Eilberg, the immigration subcommittee chairman, and other colleagues from both parties, Holtzman kept up the pressure. In 1977, the INS announced the formation of a Special Litigation Unit that was supposed to handle the Nazi cases. Attorney General Griffin Bell tapped lawyer Martin Mendelsohn—who, like Holtzman, grew up in Brooklyn—to get it up and running and serve as its director. “
I don’t know anything about this stuff,” Bell told Mendelsohn. “But this lady from Brooklyn is driving us crazy so make her happy.”

Mendelsohn knew that his new unit would face huge challenges in seeking to establish the record of what happened decades earlier. “The evidence in these cases can be viewed as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that have been warped by time so they don’t fit,” he said. Alluding to the difficulty of getting reliable testimony even when surviving witnesses could be found, he pointed out: “Even good memories fail.” Many survivors could not identify their tormentors. “When I was in the camp, I looked at their feet; I didn’t look at their faces,” one of them told him.

To have a chance to fulfill their mission, Mendelsohn needed a top-notch team. But most of the investigators and lawyers at the INS, he
quickly concluded, were “less than adequate, less than competent.” He even dismissed former investigator DeVito as “a total fraud” who had vastly exaggerated his accomplishments and convinced himself that “he was Simon Wiesenthal.”

The Special Litigation Unit proved singularly ineffective, but Holtzman was not about to let that slow her efforts to make up for government inaction. In 1978, she won passage of a bill that she had been pushing since 1975. The Holtzman Amendment, as it became known, provided the authority for the INS to deport anyone who participated in Nazi persecutions. “
This action confirms my belief that it is not too late to make our stand against war crimes clear and unequivocal,” she declared in a press release at the time.

In January 1979, she took over as chair of the House immigration subcommittee and stepped up her efforts to achieve another goal of her campaign: to shift responsibility for such cases from the INS to the Justice Department, which was far better equipped to handle them. Frustrated by his own experiences in the INS, Mendelsohn was fully supportive—but they encountered initial resistance from top Justice Department officials, who made clear they had no desire to take this on.

Holtzman left them no choice. “I said you can do this voluntarily or I’ll write this into law,” she recalled. That same year, 1979, marked the creation of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), operated as part of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. This was a far more ambitious unit than the one it was replacing at the INS.
With an initial budget of about $2 million, OSI was able to put together a fifty-person team of lawyers, investigators, historians, researchers, and support staff.

At about the same time, Rosenbaum was driving back to Harvard Law School from the wedding of a friend in Philadelphia. Stopping to get a soda, he picked up a newspaper as well. That’s where he spotted a short item about the Justice Department’s plans to set up OSI. As a second-year law student, he needed to look for a summer job and he immediately decided to see if he could apply there. “More than anything else in the world that’s what I want to do,” he thought.

Returning to his apartment in Cambridge at about midnight, he called
the Justice Department to get the number for the new office. At nine the next morning, he reached Mendelsohn, who had already transferred over from INS to help set up OSI. Mendelsohn had only one question for him: did he know Alan Dershowitz, the famed Harvard Law School professor? Rosenbaum responded that he had been in his class the previous semester. After Mendelsohn called Dershowitz, who confirmed that Rosenbaum was “a good guy,” he offered Rosenbaum the summer internship on that basis alone. Referring to the elaborate vetting process for applicants now, Rosenbaum pointed out: “This could never happen today.”

While Mendelsohn soon left OSI and pursued Nazi-related cases as a private lawyer, Rosenbaum had taken his first step on a journey that, after a few detours, propelled him to the very top of OSI, making him its longest-serving director and the country’s leading Nazi hunter.

• • •

It was no accident that most of those involved in Nazi persecution who made it to the United States were not from Germany or Austria, but from the countries that Hitler’s army conquered. In Europe’s postwar chaos, many of those who had fled from the former occupied territories or survived the Holocaust ended up in displaced persons’ camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy.
In 1948, President Truman signed the Displaced Persons Act, allowing 200,000 DPs to come to the United States over two years. But in a period when anti-Semitism was still all too prevalent and many Americans feared an influx of Jewish refugees, the initial legislation deliberately favored other groups—those coming from countries that had been “de facto annexed by a foreign power,” such as the Baltic states, which were swallowed up by the Soviet Union, agricultural workers, and even
Volksdeutsche
, the ethnic Germans who had fled from the formerly occupied territories.

The rules would change over time, with a liberalization of the provisions leading to the inclusion of about eighty thousand Jewish DPs among the nearly 400,000 admitted before the act expired in 1952. While the arrivals from the Baltic states and Ukraine were seen as victims of communism, they also included numerous Nazi collaborators. When it came to ethnic Germans who had lived in territories conquered by Hitler,
the probability of collaboration was even higher. As Allan Ryan, who was the director of OSI from 1980 to 1983, pointed out: “
The DP Act had cast U.S. nets into waters known to be rife with sharks, and it was inevitable that sharks would be brought in.”

Ryan added that it would be wrong to imply that a majority of the new immigrants were implicated in Nazi crimes. But positing that perhaps 2.5 percent of them were guilty, he calculated that “nearly 10,000 Nazi war criminals came to America.” That figure was merely a guess, and Rosenbaum, among others, believes that it is much too high. But given the fact that there was no serious vetting of the new arrivals, the guilty easily slipped in with the innocent. At that point, they usually made themselves as inconspicuous as possible. These were not the villains that were portrayed in Hollywood movies, eager to hatch new Nazi plots. As Ryan put it, “they became model citizens and quiet neighbors.”

Up until 1973 when pressure began to build to go after more of the perpetrators, the government had only pushed for the deportation of nine Nazi collaborators, and failed in most of those cases. When it was formed in 1979, OSI was charged with making up for more than three decades of almost complete neglect. The idea was to send the message that, even at that late date, the United States was serious about ridding itself of the Nazi perpetrators who had lied about their personal histories to gain entry in the first place.

Looking ahead to his internship in the new unit, Rosenbaum was full of ideas about the dark conspiracies of government officials that Blum had written about in his bestseller, echoing the charges that DeVito had made when he left the INS. He would have access to the files, Rosenbaum reasoned, which meant that “this coming summer I’ll get to the bottom of this cover-up.” Instead, he found himself doing legal research on complex but fascinating cases, working with members of the new team, who struck him as dedicated and smart. “I did not, of course, uncover any grand conspiracy or cover-up,” he added with a grin. By the end of the summer, he had a more realistic goal: to return to OSI after he graduated from law school the following year, which is what he did.

The new unit faced the kind of huge obstacles that Mendelsohn highlighted
when he initially attempted to get the INS to move more aggressively. “ ‘
Nazi hunting’ so many years after the war is dramatic, tedious and difficult,” a 2010 Justice Department internal report on the history of OSI pointed out. There was the added complication of collecting evidence from territory that was now behind the Iron Curtain. Building on contacts that Holtzman and others had developed with Soviet officials, OSI was able to gather testimony from witnesses inside the Soviet Union, bringing along both its lawyers and defense attorneys. But American judges were wary of anything emanating from the Eastern bloc, whether in the form of testimony or documents, especially since Ukrainian and Baltic groups charged that many of those under investigation were victims of communist smear campaigns. Columnist Pat Buchanan, the future presidential candidate, joined in the denunciations of OSI as a purveyor of Kremlin misinformation.