The Nazis Next Door (38 page)

Rosenbaum gave Lileikis his standard opening line: the Justice Department had some questions about his immigration status. Lileikis gave no hint of alarm. In Vilnius during the war, Rosenbaum asked him, had he run the security force known as the Saugumas? Yes, Lileikis answered; that was him. Rosenbaum suppressed a smile. They had the right man. And what were his duties there? Routine stuff, Lileikis answered; basic security work. Rosenbaum, however, knew there was nothing routine about the activities of the Saugumas. These were the plainclothes officers who did political intelligence work in Vilnius, and they were aligned with the Nazis.

Rosenbaum began pressing Lileikis. Certainly he was aware, Rosenbaum said, that the Nazis had rounded up tens of thousands of Jews and killed them in the death pit at Ponary?

For the first time, Lileikis seemed agitated. He had heard rumors about the killings, he said, but only rumors. He himself was not involved. “How could I know? I was in the office,” he said. But he was the chief of the special intelligence police force, Rosenbaum said. His men were the political arm of the Vilnius police. They must have cooperated with the Germans, Rosenbaum said. “No, no, the Germans did that on their own,” Lileikis said. Rosenbaum pressed him again: his men on the force must have had some involvement, he said. “Absolutely not,” Lileikis repeated. “That was all the Germans.”

Rosenbaum reached into his briefcase and took out a document with a list of fifty-two names typed down the side. This was going to be his gotcha moment.

“Then how do you explain this?” Rosenbaum asked, handing Lileikis the paper.

Lileikis studied the document for a minute. It was an order dated August 22, 1941, and it listed the names of fifty-two imprisoned Jewish men, women, and children who were to be handed over to the Nazis. “I request that you turn over the Jews listed below, currently held at my disposition, to the custody of the Commander of the Ypatingas Burys”—a Nazi execution force operating in Lithuania. At the bottom, typed out, was his last name and title:
“Lileikis, District Chief.”

“I’ve never seen this before,” Lileikis said finally, handing the order back. He did not seem flustered.

“Are you saying it’s a forgery?” Rosenbaum asked. This was the typical defense in such cases—the Soviets had faked the evidence—and Rosenbaum expected nothing less now. But Lileikis surprised him. “I don’t know,” he said. “It may be real, it may be not. I’m not saying it’s not real. It could be that my men did things under my name without telling me.”

Then Lileikis spoke the words
that Rosenbaum would remember like the sound of nails on a chalkboard for years to come. “Show me something that I signed,” he said.

Was that a slight smile that Rosenbaum thought he saw? The old man sounded smug, almost as if he were daring the Justice Department:
Show me something that I signed
. Lileikis had studied law in Lithuania, and he appeared to have learned it well. He wasn’t admitting anything. Rosenbaum knew he would need more than just Lileikis’s name typed on a prison form if he wanted to deport him. Too many cases had fallen apart in the last few years over less. He would need a signature, an eyewitness, an admission. He needed proof that Lileikis really had been a “desk murderer.” Rosenbaum knew he didn’t have it. He left the pretty yellow house on Sumner Street and headed back to Washington empty-handed.

The investigation stalled. Rosenbaum couldn’t find anything else to link Lileikis to the brutal crimes. Ten long years passed. The Berlin Wall came down. The Baltic republics became free nations. And finally, Mike MacQueen found the canvas-bound notebook in the long-hidden archives. During those ten years, Lileikis lived quietly in Boston, hearing nothing from the Justice Department.

The case had languished for so long that Rosenbaum, a junior lawyer on the Nazi team when he first knocked on Lileikis’s door, was now running the office. The documents unearthed by MacQueen, Rosenbaum believed, were enough to finally move ahead in trying to deport Lileikis. A nervousness pervaded the Nazi unit in the wake of the Ivan the Terrible fiasco. The Justice Department couldn’t afford any more big mistakes. But to Rosenbaum, the case now seemed rock-solid.

Just one thing bothered him as he prepared to request approval from the higher-ups at the Justice Department: Lileikis was now eighty-seven years old. The Nazi team had never prosecuted anyone that old before. Even with accused Nazis in their sixties or seventies, critics inevitably howled over the defendant’s age: Why, they asked, was the Justice Department hounding old men who belonged in a nursing home, not a courtroom? They should be left alone. Even some Holocaust survivors in America thought the time for punishment had passed. “These criminals must now be
in their eighties and on their way out,” one Auschwitz survivor wrote to the Justice Department when he was asked to testify in a case. “Let God deal with them, if he hasn’t already.”

Rosenbaum disagreed. The refrain that these men were too old to be prosecuted was heard so often that he had a stock response he delivered to anyone who raised it: There was no statute of limitations for the monstrous crimes that had made these men unworthy to call themselves Americans. Holocaust survivors shouldn’t have to live alongside men who took part in genocide. And the United States needed to send a message, he said, to anyone else who might be looking for a haven to escape their past crimes: They were not welcome here, no matter how old they were. So long as these men were fit enough to stand trial, Rosenbaum wanted to go after them. He just prayed that they stayed alive long enough to be sent away in disgrace.

At the Justice Department, he laid out the evidence
against Lileikis for Mark Richard, the senior official who had to sign off on bringing the case in court. “You should know,” Rosenbaum said, “that he’s eighty-seven.” He paused, waiting for the pushback. Just in case, he had even put together what he impolitely called his “geezer file,” filled with prosecutions of other elderly defendants accused of standard crimes much less appalling than rounding up Jews or delivering them to execution squads. “This is easily the oldest person we’ve ever recommended,” Rosenbaum continued, “but I think when you read the file, you’ll see why. He caused these people to be delivered to their murderers.” Rosenbaum waited, but there was no objection from his boss. He didn’t even need to bring out his geezer list.
Richard made clear that he didn’t care how old Lileikis was, so long as the evidence against him was solid. Go ahead and file the case, he told Rosenbaum.

Everything was a go. But just as he was readying the final charges that fall of 1994, Rosenbaum got a call. “Eli, you can’t file this case,” the caller said. It was a lawyer for the CIA. Officials at Langley had learned the Justice Department was about to bring Nazi charges against their onetime spy, Lileikis, and they were not happy. The CIA did not want to risk seeing classified records on Lileikis’s spy work spilling into public view, the lawyer told Rosenbaum. “We can’t guarantee you’ll be able to produce the documents in court,” the lawyer said. “You can’t file this case,” he repeated.

Rosenbaum was startled by the demand. Unknown to him, the CIA had used much the same tactic years earlier to muddy a number of budding Justice Department investigations into Nazis-turned-CIA spies like Otto von Bolschwing in California and Tom Soobzokov in New Jersey. But for Rosenbaum, still new to the director’s job at the Nazi-hunting unit, this was a first. He had never confronted a demand like this himself. He wasn’t sure what to say. The CIA had no formal authority to shut down a Justice Department investigation, he knew, but he couldn’t just ignore the CIA’s claims that they were protecting national secrets. “Look, I tell you what,” Rosenbaum said finally, grasping for a compromise. “If we have to produce his records in court and you tell us we can’t release them, well, then, we will dismiss the case.” It was an unusual arrangement for both sides, but his CIA counterpart seemed satisifed. “Okay,” he said. The agency stood down. Its secret connections to Lileikis were still safe.

Days later, in the fall of 1994, prosecutors filed their case at the federal courthouse in Boston, calling Lileikis one of the most important Nazi collaborators ever targeted by the United States. In announcing the prosecution, Rosenbaum made sure to mention Fruma and Gitta Kaplan. Like Mike MacQueen, he too had been touched by their story. This was not just about faceless victims, but real people. “Fifty-three years ago, on a day in late December 1941, a little girl, just six years old, was removed from a cell at the dreaded Vilnius Hard Labor Prison,” Rosenbaum told reporters. “She was taken,
with her mother, to a heavily wooded site a few miles from the city.” This was Ponary, he said, “a place from which, as all of the terrorized Jews of Vilna knew, there was no return.”

Reporters rushed to Lileikis’s neighborhood afterward to try to interview the eighty-seven-year-old man who had been unmasked just hours before as the security police chief in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. “No comment,” he said as he slammed the door.

Sixteen months later, after a long bout of legal wrangling, Lileikis showed up at a third-floor conference room at the federal courthouse in Boston to face questions from federal prosecutors at a sworn deposition. His lawyer and his priest
from his Lithuanian church sat with him at the long conference table, as prosecutors questioned him for three hours. He was scared,
he admitted to his lawyer, but he hid his fears behind a wall of silence. He had no interest in answering the Justice Department’s questions, even as the lawyers showed him one arrest order after another with his signature on them.

“Did anyone order you
to turn Gitta and Fruma Kaplan over to the German security police?” the prosecutor asked as he showed Lileikis the prison record with their names.

“Fifth Amendment,” Lileikis said tersely. He was not going to incriminate himself by answering.

“What ultimately happened to Gitta and Fruma Kaplan?” the prosecutor continued.

“Fifth Amendment,” he repeated.

“You knew, did you not, that most or all of the people who you turned over to the German security police would be killed?” the lawyer asked.

“Fifth Amendment,” Lileikis said again.

“Did you ever personally participate in the interrogation or torture of prisoners?” he was asked. Once more, Lileikis pleaded the Fifth.

Again and again, the prosecutors asked Lileikis about his role in rounding up Jews for slaughter, and again and again, he refused to answer, with no hint of regret. The prosecutors could ask him whatever questions they wanted about Vilnius; he wasn’t talking.

His silence did not help him in court. A federal judge in Boston concluded that his refusal to answer such damning questions about his role in the war amounted to an admission of his complicity. Nor was the judge sympathetic to Lileikis’s claims that he was essentially just an administrator in Vilnius with no real power—“a disembodied signer of orders,” as Lileikis’s own lawyers characterized it. At Nuremberg, the accused Nazis had claimed they were just following orders. Now, the judge scoffed, “Lileikis is attempting
to stand the classic Nuremberg defense on its head by arguing that ‘I was only
issuing
orders.’” Unimpressed, the judge stripped Lileikis of his American citizenship, saying he never should have been allowed in the country in the first place.

The decision was a much-needed win for the Justice Department’s Nazi hunters. After botching the Ivan the Terrible case, the prosecutors had succeeded in deporting another significant perpetrator of the Holocaust. Yet at the CIA, the prosecution was an unwanted reminder of the agency’s old ties to Lileikis. Once a valuable anti-Soviet asset, Lileikis was now nothing but a liability. With the Justice Department identifying him publicly as a Nazi collaborator, the CIA moved to distance itself from him as quickly as it could. In the spring of 1995, CIA officials wrote
to their overseers at the House intelligence committee with a glossed-over account of the agency’s involvement with Lileikis years earlier. “Although Lileikis was a CIA asset from 1952 to 1957,” the CIA said in a classified letter to the intelligence committee, “there is no evidence that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities.” The account was a gross distortion of what the CIA knew about Lileikis. In fact, there was plenty of evidence that the CIA was aware of his wartime activities. In the agency’s own files was evidence that Lileikis “was possibly connected with the shooting of Jews in Vilna,” that he worked “under the control of the Gestapo,” and that his Nazi ties got him rejected the first time he tried to come to America. None of that was mentioned in the letter.

It had been four decades since Lileikis worked for the CIA in Europe. The Cold War was now over, Lileikis would soon be headed back to Lithuania to face war crimes charges, and the CIA agents who hired him as an American spy were long gone from the agency. Yet even in 1995, the CIA was still covering up what it knew about the Lithuanian immigrant’s ties to the Nazis and his role in the brutal massacres at Ponary. For years, the CIA had joined with Lileikis and dozens of other Nazi war criminals in a Faustian bargain against their common Soviet enemy. As the CIA’s Allen Dulles said after meeting with Himmler’s chief of staff, General Wolff, over a bottle of Scotch, American spies “should be free to talk with the Devil himself” if it would help win the Cold War. But its own complicity in working with someone like Aleksandras Lileikis was still too damaging for the CIA to admit, even in 1995.

Deported to Lithuania in 1996, Lileikis died four years later, at the age of ninety-three, still awaiting a verdict in a courtroom in Vilnius on charges that he took part in the Nazi genocide there. Until the end, he denied any role in the massacres. He was the victim in all this, he insisted.

Twelve years later, in the winter of 2012, Eli Rosenbaum traveled from Washington to Lithuania. He was there to try to get the Lithuanians to take back another Nazi collaborator in Massachusetts, this one an ex-SS officer in Warsaw.
But Fruma Kaplan was still on his mind.