that the FBI, CIA, and INS had made fools of the GAO and called its report a “whitewash.”
What really upset DeVito and Schiano was that GAO investigators hadn’t even bothered to interview either one of them, when it was their sworn testimony that had sparked the investigation to begin with. As far as they were concerned, the GAO had tarred them as liars and fruitcakes.
Despite its severe limitations, the GAO report had an important, albeit quiet, impact on both Americans and foreigners who were watching the Nazis-in-America drama unfold. It whetted their appetite for more details about government use and protection of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. It increased international pressure to find and deport them. And it showed the world that America was finally serious about facing its own war crimes hypocrisy.
In keeping with her promise to do whatever she could to expel Nazis from the United States, Elizabeth Holtzman began to lobby for a special unit of prosecutors dedicated exclusively to finding, investigating, and trying alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators for immigration fraud. Unlike the Zutty team at the INS, the new unit would have to be independent and have its own budget. Given the Justice Department’s reluctance to pursue former Nazis, Holtzman’s six-year struggle for a dedicated Nazi unit was greeted with hostility. In 1978, the department finally gave in to the constant nagging and created the Special Litigation Unit (SLU), a five-attorney team inside the Justice Department responsible for preparing alleged Nazi cases for trial. Local U.S. attorneys would conduct the courtroom prosecutions. Fedorenko had been one of SLU’s first cases.
In the fall of 1978, while the government was licking its Fedorenko trial wounds, the winds of congressional power unexpectedly shifted. Facing indictment charges for bribery, Joshua Eilberg failed to get re-elected in a stunning upset. Elizabeth Holtzman became the chairperson of the Immigration Subcommittee. With new congressional teeth and muscle, she was ready to play serious Washington hardball.
Not one to crawl or beg, Holtzman simply told the Justice Department she wanted an independent Nazi office with a respectable budget inside its Criminal Division, which was the department’s strongest and least subject to manipulation. The Justice Department responded: Over our dead body. Holtzman parried: Do it voluntarily or I’ll introduce a law mandating the office and I’ll hold public hearings. You’ll come out smelling, and it won’t be of roses.
Justice buckled.
The new Office of Special Investigations (OSI), with a budget of $2.3 million, quickly fielded a staff of twenty lawyers, seven historians, four investigators, and a raft of support personnel with a wide range of language skills— secretaries, paralegals, researchers, and analysts. It was a long leap from the days when DeVito and Schiano had to crawl over each other’s desks to reach the door in an office without even a telephone.
If the INS dragged its feet, lacked direction and leadership, and was compromised, OSI was dogged, focused, ably led, and independent. Most important, it was driven by a deeply felt sense of urgency. Nazi war criminals and eyewitnesses were getting old and sick and were dying. Memories were fading. OSI hit the road running. In the fall of 1979, its team of attorneys gathered in its new office to review more than two hundred case files and twelve pending cases, and to parcel out assignments. Four of the hot targets were names on the original Karbach list: Bishop Valerian Trifa and Andrija Artukovic, friends of the FBI; and Tscherim Soobzokov and Boleslavs Maikovskis, friends of the CIA. There were other big targets not on the original Karbach list, among them Baron Otto von Bolschwing, who had worked for the OSS and CIA, and John Demjanjuk.
Because of its inexperience in trying forty-year-old Nazi cold cases, the pressure to prove itself, and its haste to get alleged Nazi collaborators into court before they and witnesses died, OSI would stumble badly.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
While preparing to try John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka, government attorneys learned that a former Ukrainian SS guard had identified Demjanjuk as a fellow guard at Sobibor, not Treblinka. Michael Hanusiak, who had included Demjanjuk’s name on his Ukrainian list of Nazi collaborators, reported the allegation in the
The Ukrainian guard’s name was Ignat Danilchenko. In 1949, a Soviet court in Kiev had sentenced him to twenty-five years of hard labor in a Siberian gulag for collaborating with the Nazis. He served eight years of that sentence and was released. When the news articles appeared in Ukrainian papers in 1976, he was living and working in Siberia.
The following year,
I first met and became acquainted with [Iwan Demjanjuk] in March 1943 in the Sobibor death camp where he served in the secret SS forces as a guard. He wore the uniform of a soldier of the German SS… and carried a firearm.
As an SS guard Demjanjuk participated in mass annihilation of persons of Jewish nationality… guarded them from possible escape before executions, and conveyed them to the [gas chambers] in which these people were executed by suffocation with exhaust from a special motor.
In the spring of 1944, together with me, he was sent to Flossenburg [Germany] and then to Regensburg [Germany] where he guarded concentration camps of arrested Soviets and other citizens and conveyed them to various jobs.
The newspaper even printed Demjanjuk’s home address in Parma, Ohio. “Today the residents of the city of Parma in the USA know Mr. Demjanjuk as an ordinary automobile inspector,” the article said. “And probably they do not know that in greeting him, they are extending their hands to a murderer of innocent people who has escaped just punishment.”
Most important, the newspaper published two pictures of the ID card called “Certificate of Service No. 1393.” Given that the newspaper was a communist publication, the authenticity of the card was immediately suspect. It would soon go on trial along with Demjanjuk and become, as one government attorney put it, “the most analyzed document of the twentieth century.”
Because official archival documents like “Certificate of Service No. 1393” are carefully guarded, the Soviet government or the KGB must have given photos of the card to
One day in 1953, Iwan Demjanjuk’s mother got a letter from America. It was posted from Cleveland and it was from her son. She must have been shocked, for Soviet officials had informed her soon after the war that her son was missing in action and that she was entitled to his military pension. A niece read her the letter from Ohio because Mrs. Demjanjuk was illiterate. It said that her son had a good job, was safe and healthy, and that she had a daughter-in-law, Vera, and a granddaughter, Lydia. Demjanjuk continued writing to his mother and sending care
