Hunting the Last Nazi Murderers Among Us

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From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

Citizen 865 IS a powerful, important book by Debbie Cenziper, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. It could earn her a second prize. It is serious journalism at its best. Citizen 865 reads like a fast-paced mystery novel. But it is not fiction. It is all true. There is no fake news here, no false history. It is a history worth reading and knowing. It is about genocide, the Holocaust, immigration fraud by Nazi war criminals and murderers, and the politics of memory and justice. It takes us from Nazi-occupied Poland to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The book illuminates current politics and reminds us that “never again” means “never forget.”

. . . .

In 1979, with legislation sponsored by Democratic Representative Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn, and the support of President Jimmy Carter, the US Department of Justice created the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) to hunt war criminals who had illegally entered the United States. The object was not to punish them for their crimes — the US had no jurisdiction over them for the murders they committed and the genocide they carried out — but, by lying to immigration officials about their wartime activities when they entered the US and when they applied for citizenship, they were subject to denaturalization and deportation.

. . . .

By the mid-1970s, World War II had been over for three decades. Trials of Nazis had mostly ended, and the war criminals at Nuremberg were long buried. Those executed at Nuremberg included both Nazi leaders who planned and perpetrated the Holocaust and German military leaders who had carried out a policy of killing disarmed prisoners of war. That too was a war crime, whether done on a mass scale or by a single rogue soldier. In 1962, 16 years after Nuremberg, Israel executed Adolf Eichmann for his role in masterminding the Holocaust. By 1970, West Germany had lost interest in hunting down and prosecuting the thousands of former SS men and women, the camp guards and killers, and the banal war criminals, who had melted into postwar German society, hiding their identities and past deeds.

At the same time, West Germany was making cash payments to Holocaust survivors and emerging as Israel’s best friend in Europe. A decade and half after the execution of Eichmann, the Israeli Navy would begin replacing its aging submarine force with state-of-the-art Dolphin Class Submarines — essentially modern U-Boats — built in Germany. As Cenziper explains, while Germany was remorseful and making amends to Israel and to survivors of the Holocaust, it had no stomach for confronting the faces of its evil past who were peacefully and sometimes prosperously living in their fatherland or overseas.

In the United States (and elsewhere), former camp guards, SS troops, Gestapo thugs, doctors who performed horrible experiments on prisoners, and other cold-blooded murderers and sadists also lived freely. They had no fear of discovery, prosecution, or any penalty for their active (and usually enthusiastic) participation in the murder of millions of Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays and lesbians, intellectuals, labor leaders, and anyone else who did not fit into the Nazi vision of the new world order.

After the war, thousands of these criminals made their way to the United States, even though American law prohibited the immigration of war criminals, camp guards, and others who participated in acts of persecution. Immigration officials questioned and investigated German immigrants and Eastern Europeans who might also have been complicit in the Nazi death machines. In fact, many were excluded. But many war criminals and murderers were skilled at lying about their sadistic pasts and were able to create false narratives of what they had done during the war. Thus, they slipped into the country and became ordinary citizens, often constructing themselves as refugees from communism rather than killers wanted for their murderous behavior in Eastern Europe, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere.

. . . .

In 1979, after Representative Holtzman’s legislation created the Office of Special Investigation, the Department of Justice began to hunt the hidden war criminals illegally living in the United States. The OSI was charged with finding Nazi war criminals who had lied about their wartime activities, taking away their citizenship, and expelling them from the country. The US could not prosecute them for their murderous activities in Europe, but it could deport them with the hope that when they returned to the scene of their crimes, they might indeed be punished.

Citizen 865 tells the story of the OSI’s work. Cenziper recounts how historians went through mountains of documents to discover the war criminals who lied their way into the United States and lived in comparative peace and prosperity — sometimes significant prosperity — while hiding their criminal pasts. Valerian Trifa, for example, had been a fascist organizer in Bucharest and the leader of the Romanian Iron Guard, which attacked Jews. “In the streets, Jews were stabbed, beaten, shot, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. In a Bucharest slaughterhouse, they were murdered in a fashion intended to mock kosher butchering techniques, then left to hang on meat hooks.” After lying about his past, Trifa came to the United States, where he ultimately became an archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America. Romanian authorities had prosecuted Trifa in absentia, sentencing him to life in prison, but Cold War America was not interested in deporting someone — even a vicious war criminal — to an Iron Curtain country. In 1957, Jewish survivors in Michigan identified Trifa as a war criminal, but he managed to evade a full investigation until the OSI was established. In 1980, in the middle of his denaturalization hearing, he agreed to voluntarily surrender his citizenship and leave the United States. He was allowed to enter Portugal in 1984, once more lying about his fascist past. Portugal was attempting to deport him when he died in 1987.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

PG notes that, although the OP criticizes the anti-Nazi bonafides of a couple of American presidents who are/were Republicans, most of the Nazi emigration to the US and elsewhere occurred while President Truman was in office.