INS.
What troubled Karbach was
“Why do you care so much?” Karbach asked.
DeVito’s answer was as painful as it was personal. Long before working on the Braunsteiner case, he had concluded that the Immigration Service was filled with thieves who made all the honest, hardworking grunts like himself look bad. A 1972 multi-agency investigation, code-named Operation Clean Sweep, made that as clear as Polish vodka. Dozens of INS officials were indicted on charges of selling border crossing cards, smuggling heroin, stealing government property, and accepting bribes. It was a typical political investigation. It caught enough guppies to appear credible while letting the barracudas swim away.
As far as DeVito was concerned, Clean Sweep was nothing more than a diversionary tactic. It publicly tarred and feathered border agents in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas, and left Washington INS bureaucrats dressed in their immaculately pressed suits. It never asked: Is INS management engaged in obstruction of justice? Or why were the State Department, the White House, and the Justice Department constantly interfering in the workings of the INS? Or who was running the damn agency anyway?
DeVito had an even more personal reason behind his passion for deporting Braunsteiner. During World War II, he had served as an investigator in the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), arresting disruptive army drunks and petty thieves. One of his cases involved a rape, and he was driving around the Munich outskirts looking for witnesses. He stopped for a free warm lunch at the Seventh Army encampment in Augsburg. Everyone there seemed to be talking about Dachau, a concentration camp the army had liberated several hours earlier. DeVito decided to see for himself after chow.
As the very first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau was an experimental model for the thousands of camps that followed. The prison was located inside the town of Dachau, close to the railway station. Prisoners were marched from the station through the village to the taunts of residents who were ordered to jeer and spit or pay the consequences. Over the gate leading into Dachau hung the Nazis’ first wrought iron sign that read ARBEIT MACHT FREI (Work Makes One Free). Near the prison barracks was Himmler’s SS training school for raw recruits and for the seasoned SS officers he chose to run his T-4 string of “euthanasia” killing centers in Germany and Austria.
General Dwight Eisenhower had diverted the 45th Infantry Division of the Seventh Army to Dachau in the closing days of the war with orders to seize the camp, but not to disturb or destroy any war crimes evidence. When the first U.S. soldiers crept through the gate on Sunday, April 29, 1945, they found more than thirty-two thousand starved, sick, and crazed prisoners—nearly all Jewish—as well as three hundred SS guards. Himmler had ordered the guards to kill all the prisoners, then flee. In such a hurry to leave, they skipped the killing. What happened next became a closely guarded military secret.
Angry, shocked, and disgusted by what they found at Dachau, some American soldiers began shooting the SS guards who remained, including those who surrendered. Prisoners joined in the lust for revenge. In the end, fifty of the three hundred SS men were killed, in violation of American and international law. The irony of the slaughter was that they killed the wrong men. The SS war criminals who ran Dachau had already fled. The SS guards that the Seventh Army found were new recruits, some as young as seventeen.
Eisenhower reported: “The 300 SS camp guards were quickly neutralized.”
When DeVito arrived at Dachau after lunch, he found five gas chambers, one lined with a tile-like finish and false showerheads. Above the door to that chamber hung a sign reading BRAUSEBAD (Shower Room). In a large room nearby, he found four furnaces with metal trays on iron wheels. Standing in front of one furnace was an American soldier pushing the conveyor in and out, over and over, in disbelief.
DeVito found piles of bodies inside and outside the crematorium waiting for the final indignity. Wandering around in the roll-call
The evil DeVito saw that April day in 1945 was beyond his comprehension. More than twenty-five years later, he could still smell Dachau in the East Side restaurant as he told Karbach his story. The Jew understood. He was ready to take a chance on the Italian Catholic who
“A list of fifty-nine names,” the Nazi hunter said. All are living openly in the United States, he explained, and there are eyewitnesses willing to testify against many of them. “We are counting on you.”
DeVito knew that if he passed Karbach’s list up the line, his boss would get orders from Washington to bury the names so deep that no one would ever find them. So he devised a three-point plan to protect the list. First, he would keep a copy in a secure place. Second, he would create an internal INS paper trail that would prevent the service from asking later, “What list?” Third, he would investigate the names on the list on his own, hoping to build strong cases against them—cases that could not be denied.
If all else failed, there was always the
John Demjanjuk was not on the Karbach list. If anyone in his Ukrainian community in Cleveland knew of any war crimes he may have committed, no one had reported the fact to the INS, or to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, or to the World Jewish Congress. And unlike the Braunsteiner case, no alleged victim had asked Wiesenthal or Karbach to hunt for him.
Even though Demjanjuk was not on it, the Karbach list still constituted an important domino, the second to tumble in the row leading ultimately to him.
CHAPTER SIX
Publicity in the Braunsteiner case flushed more whistle-blowers into the sunlight. Two of them brought their Nazi collaboration cases to DeVito because, like Karbach, they knew he would take them seriously. Each had built an impressive file on a Nazi collaborator. One was Boleslavs Maikovskis. The other was Tscherim Soobzokov. Both were on the Karbach list.
During the war, Boleslavs Maikovskis was a policeman and the captain of the second precinct in Rezekne, a medium-sized town in eastern Latvia. The Displaced Persons Commission ruled that the Latvian police were inimical and barred its members from the United States.
As a Nazi collaborator, Maikovskis brutally rounded up Jewish and Christian civilians for execution by Einsatzgruppe A and burned their homes. In one purge, he delivered Jewish children from the Daugavpils ghetto to the SS to be shot and buried in a mass grave in the Pogulanka Woods.
An eyewitness at the roundup explained the role Maikovskis played. He described how Maikovskis dragged and shoved two Jewish women and two children into the group selected to die in the woods:
I saw him lead two small children out of the ghetto and he pushed them toward the whole group that was standing there. The children were grimy with black coal. They had been hiding. Maikovskis found them…. He beat them with the wooden end of the gun. They were crying, “Mama, Mama,” and the tears streamed down their dirty cheeks. And then the mother ran out from somewhere. Maikovskis pushed her. He kicked her. She fell down. She got up. He pushed her and the children to the other side where the people were standing…. They took out all the children and liquidated them.
In another action, he supervised the mass arrest and execution of the entire village of Audrini, with a population of two to three hundred, for allegedly hiding two Soviet soldiers, according to court documents and recently declassified CIA files.
