The Holocaust,
the Shoah, is a catastrophe too great even to be absorbed, much less
comprehended. At the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) we have
to deal with the reality of the acts which accomplished the
near-total destruction of European Jewry.
After World War II, countries that were generous
in accepting immigrants from war-torn Europe; countries like the
United States, Australia, Canada and England, which collectively took
in hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, also took in thousands
and thousands of people who were implicated in the Shoah and other
Nazi crimes. We know that at least hundreds and perhaps thousands of
them came to the United States. And it’s simple arithmetic, my
friends. Australia took in a large number of displaced persons. Your
country had immigration investigation, background investigation
procedures that were virtually identical to those the United States
had. They were just as flawed as ours. And so, at a minimum, hundreds
of these people came to your country as well. And probably just under
half of them are still alive.
In my country, occasional prosecutions were
attempted, civil prosecutions, we don’t have criminal jurisdiction
under our constitution. We can, at best, bring citizenship revocation
cases. And then if we succeed in that, we attempt to deport these
people from the United States. That was attempted in the 50s and
early 60s with hardly any success. By the early 1960s, my government
gave up and all the Nazi criminals who had moved to the United States
were confident that they had gotten away with it.
In fact they almost had gotten away with it but
for one courageous lady named Elizabeth Holtzman, who was a
congresswoman from the state of New York and who received allegations
that Nazi criminals had actually come to the United States and that
the United States government was doing nothing about it. Hearings
were held in our Congress in 1977 and ’78. The result of those
hearings was the enactment of a law now known as the Holtzman
Amendment that rendered individuals who took part in Nazi crimes
against humanity under the Nuremberg charter excludable from the United States.
Liz Holtzman put enormous pressure, almost
single-handedly, on the Carter Administration to create a special
unit. She understood that these cases cannot be investigated by
regular police units. Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
FBI, as fine a national police force as I think you will find
anywhere in the world, was not up to the task of investigating these
cases. You need unique skills, you need language skills, you need
historical skills, you need to know how to do research in foreign
archives, you need to know how to find the proverbial needle in a
haystack in these documents. You need to have a proper sense of
understanding what happened in the various countries of Nazi Europe.
Finally in 1979 an office
was established, now known as the Office of
Special Investigations, and we were given this
responsibility. But our supporters said to us, "Look,
we are realists. We have a sense of the daunting
obstacles that lay in your path." First
of all, we would not have the kind of evidence
that prosecutors the world over are accustomed
to have. We wouldn’t have
a murder weapon. We wouldn’t have a fingerprint.
We wouldn’t
even have the corpus delecti, the body.
And we were reminded that our best evidence,
therefore, was likely to be documents. But do
you know what? The typical Nazi crime was not
reduced to writing; they did not record the name
of each killer of each victim. And in the closing
months of the war when the Germans and their
acolytes realized that all was lost, they built
huge bonfires to destroy the documentation.
So our supporters said to
us that if we succeeded in citizenship revocation
in a few cases, two or three or four, then
consider that a victory. It would send a message
to every other person in my country that took
part in these crimes that the law might just
catch up with them. But our supporters said
to us that they really didn’t
think that we would be able to ultimately deport
anyone; that there wouldn’t be time, that
the evidence mightn’t be there. Does that
sound a bit familiar here?
In light of those pessimistic projections, I am
relieved to report as someone who has been at this almost since the
beginning, that we have to date succeeded in obtaining the
denaturalization of more than 60 individuals who took part in these
crimes and we have thus far removed from the United States 53 of
them.
I will say
immodestly that our record in these cases
exceeds that of all the other countries in
the world in the past 10 years, combined
and multiplied by five. And that, I think,
is less a tribute to the dedication and talents
of our staff, which are considerable, than
it is so much a condemnation of the rest
of the world, Europe in particular. Whatever
responsibilities our countries have – Australia,
Canada, the United States, England – let’s
face it, the principal responsibility for securing
justice in these cases lies with Germany, Austria,
Hungary and Romania, the countries that perpetrated
these crimes. We in my country, you in your
country, ought to be flooded with extradition
requests from these countries. Of course, that
is not happening. Austria has not prosecuted
a war crimes case since 1971. Germany has largely
ceased prosecuting these cases; the only case
I think that they prosecuted in recent years
was the Hering case which actually and ironically
arose out of an SIU investigation here in Australia.
There is a Hollywood conception, I think, of our
work, that is exemplified by any number of movies in which Holocaust
survivors in the United States recognize their former tormentors on
the street and give chase. The way we go about developing these cases
is very different and only governments can do it. No private
organization, no Nazi hunters can do this, only governments have the
resources, and more importantly the access to information, to
national data bases, that’s required to do this work successfully.
Our historians brought back to Washington nearly 70,000 names of Nazi
suspects. They are checked methodically, name by name, in the US
Immigration Service’s database of documented immigrants to the
United States. It never fails to fascinate me the types of people
that we identify in that way. And governments that haven’t engaged
in that kind of process have absolutely no idea who the Nazi
criminals are living in their country.
We have now the highest rate of successful
litigation of any component of the Justice Department Criminal
Division. We are busier than ever. And the reason we are busier than
ever is one no one but a madman might have predicted as recently as
1989 and 1990. And that is the collapse of the Soviet Union. That has
meant for us and others who investigate these cases that we can now
get our own investigator-historians into the archives behind the
former Iron Curtain. And what we have found there is a veritable
treasure-trove of evidence. Cases that languished as investigations
in our office literally for years suddenly became prosecutable cases,
provable in court. And we learn from these records the identities of
people living in our country who were previously unknown to us and we’ve
been able to prosecute those cases as well. Interestingly, this
newfound access to archives behind the former Iron Curtain occurred
just as the Special Investigations Unit in your country was closing.
We’ve learned so many lessons from our work. One
I mentioned is that this work cannot be done by the police. This work
can be done only by specialists.
We’ve learned that you can’t rely on outsiders
to tell you who the Nazis are. They have sometimes useful information
and it has to be pursued. But it is not right for governments to sit
back and then expect somehow the Jewish community, the victims of
this crime, to know who the perpetrators are. It’s not the
responsibility of the victims to do this investigative work. It’s
the responsibility of the governments of the countries that
perpetrated the crimes and the governments of the countries where
these people live today.
We’ve learned that extradition, while important
in some cases, is not going to be the answer because we will never
get Europe to request extradition as often as it should. Let us be
honest. As little as Europe cared to intervene while the crimes were
being perpetrated, it cares even less to be reminded of those crimes
now.
One of the lessons that we have learned, and we
see it increasingly, is that defendants will, if all else fails,
claim they are medically incapable of proceeding. And they will find
doctors who will sign anything. This has been attempted in our
country numerous times. And only rarely are they a genuine person of
medical incapacity. As soon as there is a claim or even a suggestion
of medical incapacity, we say to the opposing council ‘fine, we
want our doctors to look at your client’. And we have excellent
doctors, with a lot of experience, mostly gained in organized crime
cases, in seeing through these kind of ruses.
In a sense the most important lesson that we’ve
learned is that even at this late date, these cases of 55 years ago
and older are capable of successful investigation and they can be
successfully proved in court.
Let us look, if you will, just at the past month,
February 2000. In one month, my office won two prosecutions. One at
the United States Board of Immigration Appeals, the other, two weeks
ago, at the United States Supreme Court, involving the case of former
Auschwitz SS man Ferdinand Hammer. The Canadian government, just last
week, won its citizenship case against Helmut Oberlander, a member of
a mobile killing unit. And just last month, the British authorities
won the appeal of the Sawoniuk case, a Ukrainian perpetrator, at the
High Court in London. And only a few months ago the Croatian
government, which frankly had to be dragged kicking and screaming
into this prosecution, successfully prosecuted Dinko Sakic, the
former commandant of the Jasenovac concentration camp. In a very real
sense, in these cases, some of them are actually easier to prosecute
now than they were a few years ago for the reason that we now have
better access to the documents of the Holocaust.
A few quick comments on the Australian situation.
In the late 80s and early 90s, it was my privilege to serve as
liaison for the Special Investigations Unit of the Australian
Attorney-General’s Department. I worked very closely with Bob
Greenwood and Graham Blewitt and their talented staff. They put
together some important cases. And I shared and still share their
disappointment that those cases failed. At least they failed in
courts of law. They didn’t fail in another sense. We all know that.
By aggressively prosecuting some suspects, they sent a message to all
the other people in your country who took part in these crimes and
the message was: "You could be caught tomorrow. You didn’t get
away with it. Not necessarily. You may wake up tomorrow to find out
that the SIU knows who you are."
One of the things that I’ll be doing while I’m
here in Australia is meeting with officials with
your government; once again offering the assistance
of my office, in the event that they should
decide to reinvigorate their investigations
of these cases. We do what we do in my office,
I like to think, on behalf of the millions
of innocents murdered by the Nazis; on behalf
of all of their families, of all of the other
victims of the Nazis. I am pleased that we
have outstanding support from the Administration
and from all the Administrations that have
served since 1979.
With the bipartisan support that we have in the
United States and the broad support of the American public and
especially with the help of the survivors who are, as I say, the
heroes of our prosecutions, we will continue to try to leave no stone
unturned in this effort, so no-one in my country who took part in
these crimes can ever be able to think "I have gotten away with
it."
Eli Rosenbaum is Director of the Office of Special Investigations at the US Department of Justice. He visited Australia as AIJAC’s guest in early March. The above is an edited version of an address given in Melbourne on March 6.