The Nazi Hunters (38 page)

In a few cases, OSI achieved relatively quick results—sometimes with unexpected consequences.
In 1981, it identified Albert Deutscher, a sixty-one-year-old railway worker who had arrived in the United States in 1952, as a Ukrainian ethnic German who had been part of a paramilitary group that shot Jews who arrived by train in Odessa. The day after OSI filed its complaint, Deutscher committed suicide by jumping in front of a freight train in Chicago.

But most of the legal battles took years or even decades, including those that were started before the creation of OSI. Valerian Trifa, the Romanian archbishop accused of instigating pogroms against Jews, proclaimed his innocence all along. When he was shown a photo of himself in an Iron Guard uniform, he had to admit that he had been a member of that fascist organization. Still, he insisted he had done nothing wrong. OSI then took up his case. Trying to stop the legal proceedings against him, Trifa surrendered his citizenship in 1980. Two years later, with the government still pressing charges, he agreed to be deported.

But that was not the end of his story. One of OSI’s most difficult tasks was to find a country that was willing to take such war criminals, particularly if it might mean subsequent pressure to prosecute them as well. OSI tried and failed to get Israel to take him. That country’s leaders did
not want to signal that they were ready to hold more Nazi trials; they always saw the Eichmann case as something exceptional, not a precedent. In 1984, Portugal finally admitted Trifa, where he lived openly and continued to sound defiant. “
All this talk by the Jews about the Holocaust is going to backfire,” he proclaimed. He died three years later.

• • •

During his final year at Harvard Law School, Rosenbaum was browsing through the Holocaust section of a used bookstore in Cambridge when he came across a volume about Dora, a concentration camp that he had never heard of. The author was Jean Michel, a former French Resistance fighter who has survived his ordeal as a prisoner there. Even for someone who was already familiar with many horror stories from that era, Michel’s account of conditions in this facility where German scientists produced their famed V-2 rockets was singularly chilling.

“
The missile slaves worked ceaselessly in fear for their lives, terrorized by the sadistic SS and Kapos,” Michel wrote. The prisoners, who came from a variety of occupied countries, had to dig and prepare tunnels with minimal tools, often using their bare hands. “They carried rocks and machines in the most shocking conditions. The weight of the machines was so great that the men, walking skeletons at the end of their strength, were often crushed to death beneath their burden. Ammonia dust burnt their lungs. The food was even insufficient for lesser forms of life.” Working eighteen-hour days and even sleeping in the tunnels, only strong prisoners survived. Of the sixty thousand who were dispatched to Dora, Michel reported, thirty thousand died.

Rosenbaum then picked up another book called
The Rocket Team,
an admiring study of Wernher von Braun and his group of fellow German rocket scientists, many of whom were brought to the United States to play a key role in the American missile and space program. Among them was Arthur Rudolph, who oversaw the development of the Saturn V rocket, which sent the first astronauts to the moon.
But the book’s American authors also pointed out that Rudolph was responsible for missile production at Dora. This meant he was one of the masters of the “missile slaves.”

As Rosenbaum frequently notes, OSI’s cases were often triggered by
tips from foreign governments or the media. But in this case he was anxious to provide his own tip as soon as he returned to the Justice Department after he graduated. While von Braun had died in 1977, Rudolph was still alive. On his first day back at OSI, Rosenbaum brought the subject up in his meeting with Neal Sher, the unit’s deputy director. Sher had not heard of Rudolph, but immediately asked whether he was part of Operation Paperclip, the postwar program to bring the German scientists over. Rosenbaum said he was. Sher warned him that other Paperclip investigations appeared to be going nowhere since it was hard to implicate scientists in specific crimes. But he agreed to let him look into it—“
as long as you don’t spend too much time on it.”

Rosenbaum freely admitted he disregarded that admonition. With the help of an intern, he dug up documents from the National Archives and traveled to West Germany to examine records from the Dora-Nordhausen war crimes trial, one of the series of U.S. Army trials at Dachau in 1947.
Rudolph was not a defendant, but on June 2, 1947, he was interrogated by Major Eugene Smith—and Rosenbaum came up with the incriminating transcript. Randolph admitted to attending the execution of “six maybe twelve” prisoners. The SS hung them slowly from an electric crane that was used to move rocket components, while other prisoners were forced to watch. As Rudolph explained, the point was “to show the penalty of making a plot for sabotaging the factory.”

Based on such evidence, Sher became just as convinced as Rosenbaum that they should move against Rudolph. The German scientist was by then living comfortably in retirement in San Jose, California. Confident of his good standing as an honored American scientist, he did not appear alarmed when Rosenbaum, Sher, and OSI director Ryan showed up there to meet with him in 1982. He met with them alone, without a lawyer, eager to convey the notion that he was willing to be fully cooperative, and the message that he had tried to make life easier rather than harder for the Dora prisoners. But it was a narrative that was hard to sustain, particularly in face of the evidence of the brutality and executions in the camp that the OSI lawyers had at their disposal.

By their second meeting, Rudolph came with his lawyers and asked if
there was a way to end the case against him without any formal legal action. The two sides cut a deal: Rudolph would give up his U.S. citizenship voluntarily and leave the country. Since this was done without any legal action, he would be able to keep receiving his American pension. From OSI’s standpoint, this was a victory. “If it had been litigated, it would have taken years,” Rosenbaum pointed out. “Basically he was agreeing to lose and we were agreeing to win.”

For Rudolph, this was less than a devastating loss, even if he complained bitterly about the alleged ingratitude of the Americans who had made use of his scientific expertise. As in the case of Nazis who were later employed by the CIA, Rosenbaum does not necessarily share the indignation that such compromises were made in the early days of the Cold War. Speaking of Rudolph, he said: “I don’t Monday-morning-quarterback the decision to employ him.” But he was convinced that, given the evidence against him, the United States should have sent him back to Germany earlier—once he was no longer useful to the rocket program.

This was Rosenbaum’s biggest case during his early years at OSI. But he was not sure how long he would stay in the Nazi hunting business—or, for that matter, how long the Justice Department unit would stay in operation. His colleague Elizabeth White, a specialist in modern European history, was hired in 1983. “
At the time I was told the office would last three to five years max, and every new hire was told that for the first twenty-five years of its existence,” she pointed out with a laugh. The assumption was that there would be fewer and fewer Nazi criminals to investigate due to the fact that many of them were likely to die soon. She worked there for twenty-seven years, vastly expanding the Watch Lists that were maintained to flag former Nazis who might attempt to enter the United States.

Rosenbaum was an eager pursuer, and became particularly adept at surprise visits to check on potential targets of investigations. But he also felt frustrated. “So many people you knew in your gut were in it up to their ears, but you couldn’t prove it,” he said. “It was inherent in the task. We didn’t have enough people to do all these cases right; we were having to triage all the time.”

After three years at OSI, he decided to try a more conventional path, taking a job at a big Manhattan law firm. But he soon discovered that corporate litigation “didn’t have any meaning for me.” He had already “had the misfortune,” as he put it, “of working on cases that had great meaning for me.”

By 1985, Rosenbaum was once again working on those cases—not back at OSI yet, but as the general counsel for the World Jewish Congress. It was during his two years there that he found himself not only exposing the past secrets of those who had served the Third Reich but also caught up in a rapidly escalating confrontation with another Nazi hunter. It was a battle that pitted him against the man he had idolized when he first became fascinated by the hunt for war criminals: Simon Wiesenthal.

“
Forty-four children deported—no mere statistic, but rather forty-four tragedies which continue to cause us pain some forty years after the event.”

Beate and Serge Klarsfeld

T
he French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld readily admitted that SS Captain Klaus Barbie, who served as the Gestapo chief in Lyon, was hardly in the same league as Eichmann, Mengele, or Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss. “
Barbie is not a member of the board of directors of the Nazi crime, but a middle manager,” he noted. Nonetheless, he argued that this in no way diminished his guilt or significance. “He is the very symbol of the Gestapo as it raged in our land. The higher-ups of the Nazi police had no contact with their victims; they acted through the Barbies. It was Barbie himself who left a palpable memory with those of his prisoners who survived. He was a particularly zealous and fanatical local operative.”

Barbie was responsible for thousands of deaths during the German occupation of France, and personally tortured countless victims. Even in a world awash with wanton brutality, he quickly developed an outsized reputation—and fully earned the nickname the “Butcher of Lyon.” His most prominent victim was Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance.
Barbie beat and tortured him mercilessly to get him to talk, but the battered Moulin never revealed anything; he died on a train to Germany.

Aside from seeking to crush the Resistance, Barbie focused on rounding up Jews—and here, too, he earned special notoriety. On April 6, 1944, acting on a tip from a French informer, the Gestapo from Lyon closed in on a school and refuge for Jewish children in the tiny village of Izieu. A local farmhand who was working nearby witnessed the scene. “
The Germans were loading the children into the lorries brutally, as if they were sacks of potatoes,” he recalled. The terrified children started calling to him for help, but when he moved in their direction, he was stopped by a rifle butt. One of the boys tried to jump out and escape, and he watched helplessly as the Germans “started beating him brutally with the butts of their rifles, and kicking him in the shins.”

Barbie immediately sent a signed telex to Gestapo headquarters in Paris reporting the arrests and the closure of the “Jewish children’s home” in Izieu. Barbie’s message, Klarsfeld wrote, “
has entered into history, proof of a ruthlessness that in intensity—and in absolute evil—outstripped that which was loosed against the Resistance.” The forty-four children, ranging in age from three to thirteen, and their seven guardians were quickly transported to Auschwitz; only one of the adults survived. She described how one of the youngest girls was ripped from her hands so that she could be sent with the others to the gas chamber.

For Klarsfeld the fate of those children was more than just another tragedy during the war; it felt intensely personal. After all, he and his sister had been saved in a similar village when they were about the same age. A letter from one of the children of Izieu, Nina Aronowicz, written to her aunt in Paris several months before the Gestapo raid, conveyed how secure she and the others had felt in the village refuge:

I’m very happy to be here. There are beautiful mountains, and from high up you can see the Rhone flow by, and it’s very pretty. Yesterday we went for a swim in the Rhone with Miss Marcelle (that’s a teacher). Sunday we had a birthday party for Paulette and two other children and we put on a lot of skits and it was really great.

Klarsfeld and his wife, Beate, decided early on to do everything possible to make Barbie pay for his crimes—and to rescue his victims from anonymity. They also were determined to expose the fact that the Butcher of Lyon had worked after the war for
U.S. intelligence services, and that it was the Americans who subsequently facilitated his escape via the ratline to Latin America. It would be a quest that spanned two decades, but ultimately they succeeded in all parts of their mission. In doing so, they also sparked an unprecedented effort by the U.S. government to examine its role in helping a Nazi war criminal.

• • •

A tribunal in Lyon had sentenced Barbie to death in absentia on two occasions after the war—first in 1947 and then in 1954. In 1960, the Association of German Victims of Nazism triggered an investigation in Munich of Barbie’s crimes in France. But Barbie had long disappeared. In 1951, he had left his homeland and settled with his family in Bolivia. Living under the name Klaus Altmann, he prospered as a “businessman” who enjoyed close ties with right-wing politicians and military officers. By the summer of 1971, when Beate Klarsfeld first heard that the German prosecutor in Munich was abandoning the investigation of Barbie’s crimes, “Altmann” had good reason to feel confident he had put his past behind him. He was on particularly good terms with Hugo Banzer, the military dictator who ruled the country for almost all of the 1970s.

But Barbie had not reckoned with the passion and determination of the Klarsfelds. They started with the most basic step: assembling every bit of evidence they could about Barbie’s war record and how he had been interned by the Americans at the end of the war. They soon concluded that he must have been working for them immediately afterward. Beate, in particular, worked on publicizing their findings in the press, and mobilized former Resistance fighters and others to join her on a trip to Munich to pressure the prosecutor to keep the case open.