The Nazis Next Door (24 page)

The prosecution of John Demjanjuk, an auto worker in Ohio, who was mistakenly thought to be the infamous Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, was the worst black eye in the history of the Justice Department’s Nazi unit. Demjanjuk was cleared of the charges linking him to Treblinka, but was found guilty years later in Germany of taking part in the murders of nearly 29,000 Jews as a Nazi guard at another concentration camp. He is shown in his U.S. immigration photo, and standing trial in 1987, viewing a photograph used to identify him.

Wernher von Braun (first row, seventh from right) was the star among dozens of rocket scientists who posed for a photograph at Fort Bliss after coming to America as part of the secret Project Paperclip. Arthur Rudolph, a top deputy to von Braun in producing V-2 rockets at a brutal slave-labor camp in Germany, is shown as well (first row, fourth from left, in light sweater).

Dr. Hubertus Strughold oversaw a clinic in Nazi Germany where brutal human experiments were conducted on children and prisoners. In the United States, he became known as the father of space medicine for his work with the Air Force. When the INS began probing his Nazi ties in the 1970s, powerful congressmen came to his defense.

Arthur Rudolph was the production chief at the V-2 slave-labor rocket factory. Above is his Nazi identification card during the war, with swastikas visible.

Chuck Allen, a left-wing journalist, began investigating suspected Nazis in America in the early 1960s, at a time when few others in the media or the government took any interest.

Allen organized an anti-Nazi protest in Brooklyn and Chicago in 1963.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (shown here with President Richard Nixon), skeptical that there were any actual Nazis in the United States, secretly designated Allen a national security threat and had agents trailing him for years.

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Eli Rosenbaum (left) and Elizabeth Holtzman (right) leave the Panamanian Embassy in Washington in 1987, along with a representative from a Holocaust survivors’ group, after warning the Panamanians of the political damage if Panama gave refuge to Karl Linnas, an ex-Nazi commander who had settled on Long Island and was stripped of his U.S. citizenship. Holtzman spearheaded the creation of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting office in 1979, while Rosenbaum was a key figure there for nearly three decades.

Rosenbaum, in 2012, stands in front of a jail cell in Vilnius, Lithuania, where six-year-old Fruma Kaplan and her mother were ordered jailed in 1941 by a Nazi collaborator, Aleksandras Lileikis, who ran Lithuania’s security police during the Nazi occupation.

Lileikis is shown in Lithuania during his time as head of the security police in Vilnius, and in his U.S. immigration photo. After collaborating with the Nazis, Lileikis went on to work for the CIA in Europe and lived quietly in Massachusetts for four decades. Rosenbaum spent more than a decade trying to build a case against Lileikis before he succeeded in prosecuting him at the age of eighty-seven.