The Nazis Next Door (37 page)

That’s when MacQueen realized that he had been going at his search backwards. Instead of looking for the files on the murderers, he began looking for the files on their victims. He searched the records for a prison in Vilnius where he knew many Jews were jailed before they were killed. In the prison records, he discovered a canvas-bound book
with the names of nearly twenty-nine hundred wartime prisoners typed in Russian. He pulled the files on the ones with Jewish-sounding names. There were hundreds. Some of the documents were lightly singed; it looked like the Nazis had started burning the records on their way out of town, but ran out of time.

In the batch, after some digging, he found a red file
with the records for a young Jewish man named Rachmiel Alperovicius, who was arrested by Lithuanian security police on September 4, 1941, and executed just two weeks later. Like farmers advertising their livestock, the security police described the young Jew’s physical attributes: big, flattened ears; strong body; broad shoulders; small teeth. And there at the bottom of the page, in thick, black ink, was the signature MacQueen had been struggling to find for more than three years now:
Aleksandras Lileikis, chief of the security police in Vilnius
.

Soon, MacQueen found the records for another Jewish prisoner with Lileikis’s signature at the bottom, then another, then another. Suddenly, Lileikis’s long-elusive name was everywhere. MacQueen worked through lunch, taking photos of the documents and typing notes on his laptop as he dug deeper into the files. He had been at the Justice Department for five years since he first answered an ad for a war historian on the Nazi team. Nothing topped this moment.

That night, MacQueen returned to the Radisson Hotel in Vilnius. The place was a dive, but at least he could get an international phone line. He needed to call Washington. He reached Eli Rosenbaum, his boss at the Justice Department, who had been struggling off and on for a decade to build a case against the former Vilnius police chief, ever since meeting the Lithuanian immigrant at his home in Boston.

“Remember we needed a document
signed by Lileikis?” MacQueen asked Rosenbaum.

“Yeah?” his boss answered.

“How would you like about twenty?”

Rosenbaum was so excited that
he would have gotten on the next plane for the Baltics himself if he could. The Justice Department had been getting pummeled for months over the collapse of the Ivan the Terrible case. Any bit of good news was welcome in Washington. MacQueen had now delivered it, signed and sealed.

A handwriting expert compared the signatures to another one on file for Lileikis in Germany. It was a match. To MacQueen, the signatures were a smoking gun
—evidence that Lileikis had ordered Jews in town to be rounded up and turned over to the Gestapo for certain death. Lileikis, he was convinced, was a
Schreibtischtäter
—a desk murderer. He gave the orders. He hadn’t roused any of Vilnius’s Jews from their homes himself. He wasn’t the one who pinned the Stars of David on their shirts or herded them into ghettos surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. He hadn’t trucked them to a death pit outside town, stripped them down to their underwear with his own hands, or machine-gunned to death all but five thousand of the local Jews. He never even wore a Nazi uniform. But MacQueen was convinced that Lileikis was in control. He had directed the carnage in concert with the Gestapo. The distinguished-looking gentleman from Boston, he believed, had been the Nazis’ henchman in Vilnius, a man with the blood of many thousands on his hands.

MacQueen studied the names
of the victims, reading the stories of their unmourned murders in the long-buried files: Beila Levinson, Danielius-Antanas Konas, Chaja Lapyda. Two names stood out
from the rest: Gitta Kaplan and her daughter, Fruma. The girl was six years old. She and her mother had fled the Jewish ghetto and gone into hiding at the nearby home of a Catholic family that had tried to protect them. Lileikis’s men discovered them there. Lileikis was the one who signed an order imprisoning mother and daughter on November 28, 1941. The two shared a cell in the Lithuanian prison—cell 17, the order noted matter-of-factly.

Three weeks later, the Nazis took them, along with the others in their death shift, to an excavation site six miles outside town. The pit was at a wooded hamlet called Ponary. In the Jewish ghetto, the mothers had a dark song that they sang to one another about the place.
All roads lead to Ponary
,
but no roads lead back
. The Nazis would line the Jews up ten at a time at the edge of the crevice and shoot them, their bodies falling backward into a mass morgue in the pit below. A small few, wounded but not killed, hid among the dead in the pit and lived to tell of the horrors of the place. Legend had it that the executions were so unsettling even to the brutal Nazi gunmen that they began lining up the victims with their backs to their executioners so as to avoid their terrified gaze.

The Nazis kept typed “execution cards” for each of their victims, with a slash mark in red or blue pencil confirming that the fatal deed was done. Fruma had a card of her own.
Kaplan, Fruma Juedin
.
geb. 1935. “
Kaplan, Fruma: Jew. Born 1935,” it said. Below that was the same ice-cold euphemism that was typed on the cards of thousands of other victims at Ponary to confirm their fate:
Befehlsgemass behandelt
. “Treated according to orders.”

Mike MacQueen would never forget Fruma’s name. After all he had learned as a student of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, it was still difficult to fathom such cruelty: a little girl imprisoned and killed at the age of six, all because she was Jewish. On his bulletin board, MacQueen put a copy of Fruma’s execution card; he vowed to keep it there until Lileikis was prosecuted.

It proved a long road. MacQueen had to travel more than forty-five hundred miles from Washington to Lithuania to gather evidence on Lileikis and his role in the massacres at Ponary. He had no inkling that evidence of the Boston man’s crimes had been gathering dust much closer to home. It sat dormant for four decades right across the river from the Justice Department, in Langley, Virginia—in the secret files of the CIA.

The CIA had a file
on Lileikis because the former Nazi collaborator was one of their own. Like Tom Soobzokov in Paterson, New Jersey; like Otto von Bolschwing in San Jose; like Edgars Laipenieks in San Diego, and like dozens of others with Nazi ties on their resumés, Aleksandras Lileikis, too, had worked for the CIA as a Cold War spy targeting the Soviets.

The CIA first recruited Lileikis when he was living in Munich in 1952, seven years after the war had ended. The United States was recruiting ex-Nazis en masse in Europe, and Lileikis fit the bill. As the saying went, no one hated the Soviets more than the Nazis. The agency thought he might be of use in getting information from Lithuanian nationals working for the Communists in East Germany. He had no particular skills in spying, the CIA admitted in assessing him, but he appeared committed to working with “any western anti-Soviet power,” and he needed a job to support his family.

His Nazi ties were not a secret to the agency. His CIA file noted that Lileikis “was the chief of the political Lithuanian Security Police in Vilna during the German occupation and that he was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna.”
The file also noted that just two years earlier, Lileikis had been unanimously rejected for entry into America because he was “under the control of the Gestapo.”
In fact, he had been investigated as a war criminal, his CIA file noted. As the CIA’s own notes made clear, Lileikis and people like him in power in Lithuania during the German occupation “were generally there because of their known Nazi sympathies.”

Lileikis’s history with the Nazis might have been enough to keep him out of the United States, but it was not enough to keep him out of the CIA. Despite all the evidence in its filings cataloging Lileikis’s ties to the Nazis, the CIA concluded that there was “no derogatory information” on him. The agency gave him a security clearance and hired him as a spy—at a salary of about $1,700 a year, plus twenty-one pounds of coffee
and two cartons of cigarettes each month to feed his habits. He met secretly with fellow Lithuanians in East Germany, did some surveillance and interrogation work, helped with a bit of translating, and fed the CIA’s insatiable appetite for intelligence on the Russians.

Lileikis worked for the CIA for five years in Europe. Then, in 1955, he applied anew for entry to the United States, just six years after he had been unanimously rejected. He had always hoped
his work with the CIA in Europe might allow him to whitewash his record and get into the United States, and it did. On his second try, without explanation, his visa was approved. The CIA denied any role in his sudden reversal of fortune, but the agency did keep an eye on its Nazi spy after he immigrated. In 1956, after Lileikis had moved to central Massachusetts near old friends from Lithuania, CIA officials learned that investigators from the immigration service were asking questions about his past. Concerned, the CIA demanded to know what was behind the inquiries. The agency told the INS
that it had a continued “interest” in Lileikis. In other words: Stay away from him. It was a false alarm. INS officials assured the CIA that they were asking questions about Lileikis not because of any possible immigration problems, but because they, too, hoped to use him as an informant. The INS thought the ex-Nazi loyalist could provide the agency with intelligence on fellow Lithuanian immigrants. Lileikis was a man in high demand.

Lileikis had company from the old country. His second-in-command on the brutal Vilnius security force, a Lithuanian named Kazys Gimzauskas, also came to America—and like his boss, he had help from the CIA. In Nazi-occupied Vilnius, Gimzauskas was the man in charge of “interrogating” the Jews. By one account in the CIA’s files, he also took part in shooting to death “hundreds” of Polish academics, lawyers, political leaders, and others in the region during the Nazi siege. The CIA brought him on its team after the war anyway, making him a part of the huge anti-Soviet intelligence network in Europe led by ex-Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen. Like his old boss, Lileikis, he longed to come to America soon after the war. The State Department rejected Gimzauskas and his wife for entry at first because of his obvious Nazi ties in Lithuania. But his employers at the CIA helped grease the skids for the couple because of the spy work he had done for the agency. In a 1955 memo, the CIA said the agency “still feels a moral obligation to aid them in speedy resettlement to the U.S.” Soon, Gimzauskas and his wife were on their way to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he worked for years as a machinist among a close-knit community of Lithuanian immigrants.

Two lower-ranking men on Lileikis’s security force, both implicated in rounding up Jewish children in Vilnius, also wound up settling in St. Petersburg, and a third became a real estate agent in Ohio. In all, at least three dozen Lithuanian immigrants with ties to the Nazi massacres there found sanctuary in the United States beginning in the 1950s, clustered in Florida, Massachusetts, and Illinois. With U.S. immigration policies wide open to immigrants from the Nazi-occupied “captive nations” in the Baltics, these men had little difficulty getting into America, hiding themselves among thousands of legitimate war refugees from the region. More than a dozen of them came from a single Nazi-controlled battalion in Lithuania that carried out a string of massacres in the region that were considered brutal even by Third Reich standards. Resettled in America, these Nazi collaborators from Lithuania were now American success stories: leaders of their churches, pillars of their communities, exemplars for other U.S. immigrants.

Aleksandras Lileikis, for his part, lived an unremarkable life in Massachusetts for a quarter century. He belonged to the Lithuanian social club in the Boston suburb of Norwood, he attended a Lithuanian Catholic church, and he worked for a Lithuanian encyclopedia company, painting houses on the side. Lithuanian maps and artwork lined the walls of his home. While his English was decent enough, he would sometimes insist on speaking only in Lithuanian. He clung to the ways of his old country even as he lived comfortably in his new one.

He rarely mentioned the war. Not until Lileikis was in his midseventies, in fact, would he have any reason to fear that his Nazi ties might finally be exposed.

But then, twice in the same week
in the fall of 1982, his name surfaced at the Justice Department as a possible war criminal. First came a cable to Washington from Berlin saying that a man named Lileikis was “listed as head of Lithuanian Security Police in Wilna [Vilnius]” and may have been connected to Einsatzkommando 3, one of the Nazis’ infamous mobile killing teams. He was last known to be living in Massachusetts, the cable added. Next, by chance, came an interview with a Lithuanian in the United States in the course of another investigation. At the end of the interview, the Justice Department lawyer asked, almost as an aside, whether the man knew of any other Lithuanians in America who had collaborated with the Nazis. Yes, the man said, he did know of one:
a man from Vilnius named Aleksandras Lileikis.

Two mentions in a span of days was enough to get Eli Rosenbaum’s attention. The prosecutor began collecting what few documents were available on Lileikis’s war years. Months later, he and an investigator headed to an address in the suburbs of Boston for one of his surprise “knock and talk” visits. This was the address Rosenbaum had found for Aleksandras Lileikis—the same Aleksandras Lileikis, he was certain, who was mentioned in that tantalizing cable from Berlin months earlier. This could be big. If the leads were right, Lileikis wasn’t just some low-level guard; he was a senior Nazi collaborator who issued orders in one of the Holocaust’s most notorious massacres—a Nazi killing field where at least fifty-five thousand Jews were murdered, along with tens of thousands of Poles, Russians, and others.

Rosenbaum knocked
on the door of a pretty yellow house on Sumner Street in a tree-lined, middle-class neighborhood. A housekeeper answered. He and his investigator had come from the Justice Department to speak with a Mr. Lileikis, Rosenbaum explained to her. The housekeeper let them in and sat them down on the sofa in the living room. Lileikis, tall and distinguished-looking, with slicked-back white hair and glasses, joined them.