The Nazis Next Door (22 page)

After years in the shadows, new Nazi suspects seemed to be constantly emerging in the spotlight in cities around the country, and some of them, just like Tom Soobzokov, boasted protection from the CIA and the FBI. In 1976, reporters in San Diego
went to the ranch home of a high-school track coach named Edgars Laipenieks and confronted him with evidence that he had collaborated
with the Nazis as a police officer in Latvia. With a shotgun on the floor and two German shepherds at his side, the burly immigrant invited the reporters into his house and began showing them a stack of papers on the dining room table. The papers, he said, would clear him of any suggestions that he had killed Jews and Communist civilians as part of a Nazi-led militia. Midway through the stack, the reporters noticed three recent letters to Laipenieks—on official CIA letterhead. He was reluctant to let the reporters see the letters at first, but he finally allowed them to make copies. Laipenieks, the startled reporters learned, had worked with the agency after the war as a spy in anti-Soviet operations, and the agency was still in touch with him. Just months earlier, with the Nazi accusations bubbling up against him, the CIA had written to Laipenieks, a former Olympic star in Latvia, and assured him, with an apologetic air, that the INS was closing a war crimes investigation against him. “Thank you once again
for your patience in this instance, and your past assistance to the Agency,” the CIA wrote.

The CIA director, George H. W. Bush, was visiting San Diego the next month when one of the reporters asked him about the city’s newfound Nazi. Bush admitted that the Latvian immigrant did in fact play a “minor” postwar role with the agency, but he was evasive when asked if the CIA had hired other purported Nazis as well. That was a confidential national-security matter. “If it were in my knowledge,” the future president said, “I’m not sure I’d tell you.”

But even the CIA could not keep a lid on the growing story that the Nazis had become. What Holtzman called “an ugly blot on our country’s history” received its first full public airing at a remarkable series of congressional hearings
in 1977 and 1978 at an ornate House hearing room. Holtzman and Eilberg could not understand how the country had arrived at this place: struggling to track down Nazis who had called America home for decades. “Why, after individuals were identified as having committed these crimes against humanity, were they allowed to remain undisturbed in the midst of our society, enjoying the very privileges they sought to destroy, protected by the same laws they violated?” Congressman Eilberg, a former prosecutor, asked at the start of one hearing. “I can only ask ‘why?’
Were the U.S. government agencies deliberately shielding these individuals? Were they so ignorant of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime that they gave no significance to these persons being here?”

The hearings brought together an eclectic cast of characters who had been warning for years about the country’s silent indifference. There at one of the witness tables, suddenly in the national spotlight as the long-ignored dean of Nazi hunters, was Chuck Allen. There, too, was Tony DeVito, the bitter ex-INS investigator, telling the lawmakers how he was blocked at every turn from going after suspected Nazis. With them was a parade of State Department and INS officials, wishing they were anywhere but behind the witness table as they tried to explain how all this had happened. And, of course, there was Holtzman, grilling the government witnesses with a prosecutor’s eye for flimsy rationalizations.

No one had really cared about the Nazis before, Chuck Allen lamented. Fifteen years earlier, when he had published his forty-two-page investigation on Nazi war criminals in the United States, “there was no cry of rage, there was no indignation in the halls of Congress,” he said. Now, he was happy to report, that finally seemed to be changing.

Tony DeVito, blunt and passionate as always, told the committee that he faced “obstructions galore” from his former bosses at the INS in investigating accused Nazis like Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, the Stomping Mare of Majdanek. He had to take up a collection in the office just to cover the meals and expenses of a group of elderly Holocaust survivors who had flown from Israel to New York to testify against the ex-Nazi camp guard; the INS money had fallen through at the last minute. It was not just bureaucratic ineptitude, DeVito was convinced, but an actual government cover-up driven by the CIA and other intelligence agencies under the banner of protecting national security. “There was a fix just as sure as I’m sitting here now,” he declared.

As for the famed Nazi scientists brought over in Project Paperclip, DeVito had heard all the justifications from Washington for importing them to America to keep pace with Russia’s technological advances. The World War II veteran bristled at the notion that the Nazi scientists were somehow essential to national security. “If they were so brilliant,” DeVito demanded, “how come they lost the war? We didn’t need these people. We could have gotten to the moon without them, and this country would be better off without ’em.”

A longtime INS lawyer named Vincent Schiano, who had worked with DeVito on Nazi investigations, testified as well. He didn’t buy into his old partner’s conspiracy theories. The two weren’t on speaking terms,
in fact, because of what Schiano saw as DeVito’s overheated rhetoric about cover-ups. Still, Schiano shared DeVito’s frustration over the INS’s failure to move against suspected Nazis, whatever the reason. Schiano told the committee about his bosses at the INS pulling him off promising Nazi cases to work instead on the deportation of John Lennon. He shared the story of a particularly frustrating investigation into a notorious Nazi financier in Romania named Nicolae Malaxa, who immigrated to New York and became a friend and business associate of Richard Nixon’s. Malaxa, who fled to Argentina for a time before returning to the United States, wanted to make an INS investigation into his Nazi connections go away. A friend of Malaxa’s approached him, Schiano recounted, and mentioned that he had a few hundred thousand dollars to “dispose of this problem.” Schiano told him to get lost.

For Holtzman, the litany of Nazi horror stories was affirmation of what she had suspected since her INS tipster came to her five years earlier to report the existence of a secret “Nazi list”: the U.S. government, she told the committee, “allowed our country to become a haven for persons who were guilty of war crimes and atrocities.” Even now, she said, the CIA and the FBI were blocking congressional investigators from finding out what the agencies’ own secret files said about suspected war criminals. That information was classified, protected under the guise of national security. The bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo incensed Holtzman.

“National security can be used to hide a lot of things,” she said pointedly. “I don’t understand what people who engaged in mass murder could do that has anything to do with the well-being of this country, and I find it very hard to understand why the CIA and the FBI or any other agency would throw a cloak of secrecy over their connection with these people.”

With the political winds at her back, Holtzman set out to change the immigration laws in ways that would prod the government to go after the Nazis after all the years of inaction. The first priority was to plug a startling loophole: in the late 1950s, immigration law did not ban Nazis from entering the United States. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Nazis and Eastern European collaborators exploited the loophole to gain entry, and the INS maintained that they had little power to deport them. Under what became known as the Holtzman Amendment, Congress authorized the INS and the courts to kick out any Nazis or Nazi collaborators who engaged in persecution in the war years, regardless of when they came to the United States. Lawyers for some of the suspected Nazis facing deportation howled. Congress couldn’t just go back and make it illegal thirty-five years later for Nazis to come into the country, they insisted; that was the type of ex post facto law banned by the Constitution. But the courts came down on Holtzman’s side, and the 1950s-era loophole was finally sealed.

The second step that Holtzman took was a top-to-bottom restructuring of the way Nazi cases were prosecuted. With the stories from DeVito and others fresh in her mind, she was convinced that the INS was unfit for the job. In the wake of public pressure, the immigration agency’s small team had actually managed to try five cases against suspected Nazis in the late 1970s, but the results were a disaster. Prosecutors lost three of the five cases
outright after embarrassing missteps in court. In one of the losses in 1978, a Holocaust survivor on the witness stand, when asked if he saw the man who had been a guard at Treblinka in the courtroom, looked past the defendant and pointed instead to an elderly man in the gallery, as listeners in the courtroom gasped.
The only deportation case of the five that the government actually won—this one against a Polish immigrant in Chicago accused of having been a member of the Gestapo—had to be thrown out when it became clear that the prosecutors had the wrong man; one of the original tips about the defendant’s supposed Nazi links came from a disgruntled former tenant of his who was angry over his eviction and made up the accusation.

The INS’s Nazi-hunting efforts were a mess. Holtzman was determined to create an entirely new organization at a high level within the Justice Department to take over the task. The problem was that some officials in the Justice Department didn’t want the job; the Nazi cases, as one lawyer put it, were “legal lepers,”
dangerous to any prosecutors who touched them. The resistance did not deter Holtzman. In 1979 Congress ordered the Justice Department to create the Office of Special Investigations within the Criminal Division to handle the Nazi cases, and it authorized more than $2 million for the work. The new team was to include lawyers, investigators, and historians to chase the hundreds of dormant leads that had accumulated over the years. Still, some skeptical Justice Department officials weren’t convinced there were enough real Nazi cases out there to spend the money on. But like it or not, the job was now theirs.

Officials in the Carter administration hoped to give the new Nazi office instant gravitas by naming a former prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Walter Rockler, to lead the startup. Not long after, the Justice Department brought in Allan Ryan, a top appeals lawyer, to help lead the investigations. Bearded and professorial, Ryan had won a crucial case
that affirmed the government’s power to deport Nazi persecutors. With the government’s dismal record for prosecuting Nazis, “that’s one more win than anyone else,”
a Justice Department official told Ryan wryly when he brought him on. Ryan had another thing going for him that didn’t show up on his resumé: unlike Rockler and a number of the other top lawyers in the office, he wasn’t Jewish. It didn’t get him the job, but it didn’t hurt, either.
As Rockler said of his Irish deputy: “A little seasoning wasn’t a bad idea.”
The hunt for Nazis would always be inextricably linked with the Jewish victims, but the department did not want its Nazi hunters to be seen as merely an extension of Jewish activists. They needed to make their own name.

Expectations were high. This was supposed to be the moment when the United States got serious about finding Nazis, with a group of prominent, well-funded lawyers and investigators to lead the hunt. The Nazis in America had been hiding in plain sight for decades; now finally, the government was pledging to go after them in earnest. But the nascent effort, seeking to hold American immigrants accountable for crimes committed almost forty years earlier across the Atlantic Ocean, faced legal and political obstacles from the start. The Justice Department got an early taste of the skepticism it would face when one of Rockler’s senior deputies, Art Sinai, traveled to East Germany to meet with top officials there about getting access to war crimes documents and witnesses to aid the American investigations. At a meeting at the foreign ministry, General Günther Wieland, the top prosecutor in East Germany, laughed as Sinai, through a translator, laid out the government’s ambitious plans. “Oh, you’re finally talking about Nazis?” the East German general said dismissively. “Why did it take you so long? All those scientists you brought over . . .” The general’s voice trailed off. “Well,” Sinai said, “it wasn’t as many as your Soviet brothers.” East Germany had plenty of Nazi war criminals of its own, Sinai noted. What did they do with all of them? “We shot them,”
Wieland answered.

One of the biggest roadblocks that the government’s new Nazi-hunting efforts would face came not from overseas, but from right across the street from the Justice Department—inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building at the FBI.

J. Edgar Hoover himself, a defender of many accused collaborators in America, had been dead for six years when the Justice Department christened its new Nazi-hunting team in 1979, but resistance within the FBI toward Nazi investigations outlived him. Indeed, it was still sometimes difficult to know whose side the FBI was on when it came to prosecuting Nazis. Few agents at the FBI even knew what the Justice Department’s new Office of Special Investigations was, or what it did. Not long after the Nazi office was opened, Art Sinai got a surprise visit
from an agent in the FBI’s ’s espionage section. Sinai and another lawyer from the Nazi office had been spotted coming and going at the Polish embassy in Washington; the FBI had the place under surveillance as a Soviet bloc nation, and the agent had tracked them back to the Justice Department. Government lawyers sneaking around in a Communist embassy? “What were you guys doing there?” the G-man demanded. The lawyers explained that they were part of a new Nazi-hunting unit and that they were meeting with the Poles to get access to war crimes archives. It was all part of their job.

Satisfied with the explanation, the agent left. But not all of the Nazi hunters’ dealings with the FBI would end so neatly.

Soon after, officials in the Nazi office went to the FBI with what seemed like a routine request, as they began gathering material on hundreds of suspects whose files had grown musty over the years. The Justice Department gave the FBI a list of 239 names of Nazi suspects to see what information the bureau’s own files might turn up. “We’ll help you out
any way we can,” a friendly intelligence official at the FBI told Sinai when they met. But it turned out that there was a catch: sixteen people on the Nazi list had been confidential FBI informants over the years, often providing information on Communists in America and “domestic security.” And the Nazi prosecutors learned that the FBI’s informants were off-limits to them. These were people like Bishop Trifa and Tom Soobzokov, staunch anti-Communists who had worked with the FBI for years. Five people on the list, in fact, were still FBI informants—and the FBI wasn’t willing
to give up information on any of the sixteen, no matter what its files might say about their Nazi ties. The refusal was cloaked in typical government bureaucratese. “In accordance with our established policy of protecting the confidentiality of such sources of information to the fullest possible extent,” a senior FBI intelligence official wrote to the Justice Department, “their specific identity is not being disclosed.”