54 MARCH | APRIL 2017 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE INPURSUIT OFJUSTICE

Over more than three decades, mostly at the US Justice Department, Eli Rosenbaum has made a career and a calling out of tracking down Nazi war criminals and more recent human-rights abusers. BY JULIA M. KLEIN

ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHANTHE PENNSYLVANIA BARTLETT | PHOTOGRAPH GAZETTE MARCH BY JUSTIN | APRIL TSUCALAS 2017 55 “So this, of course, is our always have. From the very beginning, father, where he found the courage—what best-known Nazi case. when I started here, we were being told, moved him to finally leave the country,” ‘Work as fast as you responsibly can— Rosenbaum says. “He was successful This is ,” because these people are dying.’” there. He and a partner had a chain of Eli M. Rosenbaum W’76 WG’77 says as we Thanks largely to then-US Representa- what we used to call 5-and-10-cent stores. stride through his US Justice Department tive Elizabeth Holtzman (D-NY), the Justice He just gave it all up.” quarters in a nondescript Washington Department’s Office of Special Investiga- Several of Rosenbaum’s more distant office building. tions (OSI) was established in 1979 to find relatives—among them his paternal grand- Demjanjuk, a Cleveland, Ohio, autowork- people implicated in the Nazi persecution father’s siblings—stayed in Germany and er, was the reluctant star of a long-running of civilians, strip them of US citizenship, perished. “I don’t know the details,” he says, legal saga replete with faulty eyewitness and deport them to countries with jurisdic- “and maybe I should. It was never talked testimony, judicial reversals, and, finally, a tion to prosecute their original crimes. about.” (Silence about those left behind was precedent-setting conviction by a German In 2004, Rosenbaum’s portfolio as OSI common in postwar American Jewish fam- court in May 2011. The 91-year-old died in director was broadened to include the ilies. I learned only recently from an aunt 2012, while the case was on appeal. pursuit of human-rights violators from that my late father, Abraham, had been Rosenbaum indicates a facsimile on the more recent conflicts, in Guatemala, named for a great-uncle of mine who died corridor wall: “This is a captured Nazi per- Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Six years in the Holocaust. I, too, know no details.) sonnel record which was at the heart of later, OSI merged with another criminal At war’s end, Rosenbaum’s father’s unit, the case for several decades. That’s his unit, and Rosenbaum assumed his current tasked with questioning high-value pris- photo, his identifying information—name, title. But Nazi investigations continue, oners, interrogated Leni Riefenstahl, date of birth, parents, place of birth, et alongside the newer ones. As long as one director of the famous Nazi propaganda cetera. And, of course, he challenged this perpetrator is still alive, this country’s films Triumph of the Will and Olympia. throughout litigation here and in Germany leading Nazi hunter—and, arguably, the (Rosenbaum would later share her testi- and in Israel, and said it was a KGB forgery. world’s—vows to remain on the job. mony with his professor in an introduc- That used to be a very common defense. A rhetorical note: Rosenbaum dislikes tory film class at Penn, a rare break from But it wasn’t a forgery. being called a Nazi hunter—it’s too reductive, his “all-business-studies-all-the-time” “It’s interesting the SS officer who signed too heroic-sounding, too much like the mov- curriculum.) The day after the Dachau here was named Teufel,” Rosenbaum adds. ies. Rosenbaum has made his own mark on concentration camp outside Munich was The word means devil in German. popular culture as the model for at least two liberated, his father was dispatched to We’re meeting on Rosh Hashanah, the fictional investigators, in Jodi Picoult’s The assess conditions there. Jewish New Year—a holiday for many. Not, Storyteller and Alan Elsner’s The Nazi He mentioned the mission to his son, then apparently, for the lanky, mustachioed Hunter. And the work, he concedes, “has its 14 or 15, while the two were driving through director of Human Rights Enforcement incredibly dramatic moments—I’ve knocked a blizzard in upstate New York: “And I Strategy and Policy, who is dressed for- on more than a few doors, as have my col- remember saying, ‘What did you see?’ I mally in a black pinstripe suit. Rosenbaum’s leagues.” But “to call it Nazi hunting makes didn’t hear any response from my father. work ethic is legendary. Save for a single it look like a sport,” he says. “And it’s not a So I finally looked over and there he was, four-year break, the 61-year-old Harvard- sport, it’s not a game—it is something that his eyes welled with tears, his mouth open trained lawyer has spent his entire career has to be done by professionals.” … He couldn’t talk, and he never did,” though at the Justice Department, tracking war he later showed Rosenbaum the order send- criminals. His sole hobby, he says, is col- hat Rosenbaum would be among ing him to Dachau and an Army report on lecting rare memorabilia about the fate of them was not always clear to him. the camp to which he had contributed. Nazi perpetrators. T Growing up in Westbury, New York, Other incidents piqued Rosenbaum’s “He’s relentless. He’s dogged,” says Sara he thought he might join the family busi- curiosity about the Holocaust. In 1967, J. Bloomfield, the longtime director of the ness: running a chain of discount stores. he watched a television version of Peter US Holocaust Memorial Museum in But there were portents in his back- Weiss’s play, The Investigation, which Washington, whose historians and collec- ground. Both of his parents, German Jews, incorporated testimony from the 1963-65 tions have aided Rosenbaum’s investiga- fled the Third Reich with their families in Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. He also tions. Chasing down Nazi perpetrators the late 1930s, after the 1938 Kristallnacht remembers reading ’s isn’t so much Rosenbaum’s work as “his pogrom left no doubt of the Nazis’ violent 1967 memoir, The Murderers Among Us. calling,” she says, “because his dedication intentions. His father’s family emigrated Some two decades later, Rosenbaum and is fierce, impassioned. He goes so above from Dresden to New York, his mother’s Wiesenthal, who was probably the most and beyond in his pursuit of justice.” from Berlin to what was then the British celebrated of private Nazi hunters, would More than 70 years after the end of the Mandate of Palestine. His parents later fall out bitterly over the wartime culpabil- Holocaust and World War II, there isn’t a met in New York, after his father’s wartime ity of the Austrian president and former day to waste. “We race the Grim Reaper service in US Army infantry and intelli- UN Secretary General , in these cases,” says Rosenbaum, the 1997 gence units. whom Wiesenthal was defending. recipient of Penn Law School’s Honorary “Among the regrets I have is that I never Meticulous and detail-oriented, Fellowship Award for public service. “We got to ask my grandfather, my father’s Rosenbaum has prepared for a discussion

56 MARCH | APRIL 2017 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE of his years at Penn—where he graduated University’s backing to pursue research Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Harvard’s summa cum laude and completed a five- in Norwegian archives on the way to a 1979 Commencement speaker, who was sym- year BS/MBA program at Wharton—with semester of study in London. pathetic to the petition. It was Rosenbaum’s a long list of favorite professors, courses, From Adams, Rosenbaum says, “I learned first encounter with a head of state. anecdotes, and lessons learned. “I would something about inspiring confidence in Soon afterwards, West Germany agreed to say I was as happy at Penn as I’ve ever been people that I tried to bring to my work when extend the statute indefinitely, clearing the in my life,” he says, fighting back emotion. I was a deputy director and director at OSI.” way for additional prosecutions. Rosenbaum His appreciation for both the University No longer interested in joining the fam- credits the move primarily to the 1979 airing and Philadelphia were enhanced by his ily business after Penn, Rosenbaum applied in Germany of the American television experience of isolation at Cornell, where to law school and was accepted to Harvard. miniseries Holocaust, whose soap-oper- he spent his freshman year. The verdant There, in concert with the university’s atic take on the tragedy had a galvanizing Ithaca, New York, campus had initially Jewish Law Students Association, he orga- effect on German public opinion. charmed him: “It’s gorgeous—till October, nized a national petition drive in favor of As a second-year law student, Rosenbaum as I found out, and then it’s frozen tundra.” abolishing West Germany’s statute of read a story about the creation of OSI Entering Wharton as a sophomore trans- limitations for Nazi-era murders. He and immediately thought: “That’s the fer student entailed a scramble to complete secured a meeting with West German job for me.” requirements for his finance major. Prerequisites for the introductory finance course included statistics and calculus. He asked Finance Professor John P. Lutz whether it would be feasible to take all three simultaneously. “I wouldn’t recom- mend it, but I wouldn’t say it’s impossible,” Rosenbaum recalls Lutz saying. But Rosenbaum struggled with the first exam, which required facility with calcu- lus, and received his lowest grade ever: F-plus. He told Lutz he realized he’d prob- ably better drop the course. The response surprised him: “No, I saw a glimmer of recognition—I think you’ll manage this.” “And then,” Rosenbaum recalls, “very un- characteristically for the shy person I was around a seemingly intimidating profes- sor, I said, ‘Professor, forgive me, I’ve never gotten an F- plus before, and, actually, I’ve never heard of an F-plus. What is it?’ “And without missing a beat, he said, ‘Oh, that—that’s failure with distinction.’ And I’ve always said, ‘That’s what I want on my tombstone: Failure with distinction.’ ” Lutz, Rosenbaum adds, “taught me some- thing about mercy—because when I got my grade at the end of the semester, it was clear that he had just taken that F-plus and tossed it in the garbage.” Rosenbaum says he has applied that lesson since, as both a teacher and a prosecutor. Another favorite teacher was History and Sociology of Science associate pro- fessor Mark B. Adams, whose course on the history of eugenics “probably played some role in my career path.” Rosenbaum researched the eugenics movement in Norway, and Adams encouraged him to present his paper at a professional con- ference—a rare honor for an undergrad-

JUSTIN TSUCALAS JUSTIN uate. Adams also helped him secure the

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 2017 57 He called OSI’s first director, Martin Sher says. Rosenbaum’s interest in Rudolph prosecutions, be dismissed. The rest of the Mendelsohn, first thing the next morning was sparked by a discovery in his final year suspects died before trial or decision. The and asked whether he might be in the mar- at law school. Browsing a Cambridge, Mas- Justice Department also maintains a “watch ket for a summer law clerk. Mendelsohn sachusetts, used bookstore, he found a list,” designed to prevent human-rights vio- asked Rosenbaum whether he knew Alan 1980 survivor memoir, Dora, by the French lators from entering the country. Dershowitz, the celebrated Harvard law Resistance fighter Jean Michel, about a But of the Nazi perpetrators removed professor. Rosenbaum said that he had Nazi concentration camp where slave from the United States, just 10 were just earned an A-plus in Dershowitz’s legal laborers toiled in underground tunnels charged or prosecuted abroad; eight ethics course. He got the job. under horrific conditions to produce V-2 more were charged abroad, but died Now he tells the Justice Department’s rockets. “People died in large numbers,” before leaving the US. summer interns: “Be careful. My career Rosenbaum says. “I thought it was surpris- “In the vast majority of cases,” European is a summer internship gone awry.” ing that we hadn’t heard of it.” A second countries “did not discharge their moral book, The Rocket Team, by Frederick Ira obligation to prosecute, and that’s some- On this balmy October day, Rosenbaum’s Ordway and Mitchell R. Sharpe, recounted thing history will not look favorably modest office, its carpet soaked from an the history of the Nazi rocketry program, upon,” Rosenbaum says. Sher blames the air-conditioning leak, is uninhabitable. and Rudolph, chief of operations at Dora’s US State Department for not having put We drop in for a quick look at his stacks Mittelwerk factory, figured prominently. more pressure on Germany and other US of books and papers and his celebrity wall. Like the more famous Wernher von allies: “Our State Department refused to Two fans whir, slowly drying the carpet. Braun (who died in 1977), Rudolph had push the Germans to do the right thing. “In 1995,” he recalls, “I had the extraor- come to the United States after the war It would have opened terrible sores with- dinary privilege of escorting Miep Gies, who in , a US program to in German society, no question about it, was the heroine of the Anne Frank story, to recruit German scientists, engineers, and and my answer is, ‘So what?’ There were meet then-Attorney General [Janet] Reno.” technicians. Before he retired, Rudolph bigger sores when it was Nazi Germany.” Other photographs show Rosenbaum with had been one of NASA’s leading lights, President Bill Clinton and with the Holo- directing development of the Saturn V or all his fervor—or maybe be- caust memoirist Elie Wiesel—“one of my rocket that put a man on the moon. No cause of it—the frustrations of heroes.” There’s also a photo commemorat- question, says Rosenbaum, “he was abso- F the job told on Rosenbaum. He ing a 1987 appearance, during his break lutely brilliant at what he did.” decided to leave OSI in 1984. from the Justice Department, on CNN’s But his activities at Dora were trou- “The main reason was, the work was too Crossfire. Defending OSI’s work, he faced bling. Rosenbaum brought the case to depressing,” he says. “And there was too off against two conservative critics, Pat Sher on his first day at OSI after Harvard, much of it, and not enough people to handle Buchanan and Robert Novak. “They double- and got the go-ahead. “It was an extraor- all of it, and I used to work nights and week- teamed me,” he says, not without pride. dinarily complicated evidentiary jigsaw ends, and it got to the point where … if I didn’t According to Richard Rashke’s Useful puzzle,” Rosenbaum says. work throughout a weekend, I felt guilty that Enemies: John Demjanjuk and America’s The novice lawyer found evidence, includ- some war criminal was going free because I Open-Door Policy for Nazi War Criminals, ing Rudolph’s own testimony in a US Army wasn’t working.” (To this day, Rosenbaum the subject of that debate was , war crimes trial, showing that the engineer says he also feels “very guilty” about neglect- a retired Long Island, New York, land sur- was no detached bystander. He was direct- ing friends, as well as his wife and two chil- veyor accused of having overseen the murder ly responsible, Rosenbaum says, for getting dren, because of his focus on work.) of several thousand Jews in Estonia during the SS to send laborers “to work under those Securing survivor testimony could be the war. According to Rashke, Buchanan grotesquely inhumane conditions.” And particularly wrenching. Rosenbaum argued that the Soviet evidence was inac- when prisoners died, “he would go to the remembers his “hardest experience” as curate—that, at most, Linnas was responsible SS and say, ‘Send more.’” a trip to Israel to interview survivor wit- for the deaths of four or five hundred Jews. To save years of court battles, OSI made nesses. “Almost all … have a point at “How many Jewish bodies are enough a deal with Rudolph, allowing him to which they’re going to fall apart—usu- to meet the quota?” Rosenbaum respond- relinquish his American citizenship and ally when talking about members of their ed, leaving Buchanan speechless. return to Germany. “They investigated family,” he says, and he would always Neal M. Sher, who served as OSI director him, and—this is typical—didn’t prose- regret causing them pain. But when he from 1983 to 1994, says that he was cute,” Rosenbaum says. asked if they wished to continue, “They impressed with Rosenbaum from the start, Since 1979, working the coldest of cases, would all say, ‘Yes, justice is important.’” and recommended his hiring after law OSI and its successor office have won court While he admired their courage, “it was all school. “I was drawn to Eli because of his decisions against 108 participants in “Nazi very difficult,” he says, “and I was exhausted.” dedication, his brains, his commitment, his crimes of persecution.” In all, the office So he returned to New York as an associ- savvy,” says Sher, and over the years, “I came sought the “denaturalization and removal ate with a corporate law firm, Simpson, to rely on his judgment very heavily.” or extradition” of 137 such people. OSI lost Thacher & Bartlett. But he missed the high Working together on the high-profile eight cases and asked that two inherited stakes of his old job. He left, after about a case of a former Nazi rocket scientist, from the US Immigration and Naturalization year, to become general counsel for the Arthur L. Rudolph, “solidified” their bond, Service, which previously had handled such —and was drawn into

58 MARCH | APRIL 2017 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE an investigation of ’s Waldheim. As the Cold War ended, and US investiga- formed part of that “common design.” One thinks of the signature line of Al tors gained access to Eastern European Explaining the approach to a German Pacino’s character, Michael Corleone, in archives, OSI’s caseload exploded. According colleague, Rosenbaum said: “If you The Godfather: Part Three: “Just when I to an internal study partly based on the decide to stab me to death, and another thought I was out, they pull me back in.” annual reports of the Simon Wiesenthal person stands outside the door and holds Rosenbaum soon became embroiled in Center, during the period 1990-2010, it closed while you chase me around the an international drama of accusation and Rosenbaum says, “my office brought and room, in American law you’re both guilty cover-up. In his 1993 book Betrayal, written won more cases by far than all of the other of first-degree murder. And I can’t imag- with William Hoffer, he recalls being buried countries in the world combined.” ine that German law is any different.” in “a swelling sea of paperwork in a babble One victory was in the Demjanjuk case, The German court agreed, convicting of languages” as he researched Waldheim’s previously OSI’s greatest embarrassment. Demjanjuk—and igniting the possibility knowledge and possible complicity in civil- Whole books have been devoted to the of prosecuting thousands of low-ranking ian murders in the Balkans and the depor- imbroglio, which began in 1977, before the Nazis and collaborators. Except that, by tation of Greek Jews to death camps. establishment of OSI. “I was not involved,” then, most of them were dead. “The frus- A former Wehrmacht intelligence offi- Rosenbaum says, “in what we call ‘Demjan- tration, of course, is that this could have cer, Waldheim had concealed the extent juk One,’” which included Demjanjuk’s been done for many, many years—it didn’t and location of his wartime service, and extradition and 1988 conviction in Israel require the Demjanjuk case,” Rosenbaum claimed to have been a mere translator. as “Ivan the Terrible,” a particularly sadistic says. “So it’s a tragedy. You would have But documents and photographs sug- guard at the Treblinka death camp. But in had a huge pool of potential defendants.” gested deeper involvement in prisoner interrogations and seemed to reveal his chumminess with Nazi leaders who were “It got to the point where … if I didn’t implicated in criminal acts. With each work throughout a weekend, I felt guilty revelation, his story changed. Defending Waldheim, who was then running for that some war criminal was going free president of Austria and already had held the world’s top human-rights post, was because I wasn’t working.” his Austrian compatriot, Wiesenthal. In his 2016 book, The Nazi Hunters, 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned Two other cases illustrate Rosenbaum’s Andrew Nagorski depicts the Rosenbaum- the conviction, based in part on faulty eye- tenacity and working methods. Wiesenthal clash as a vitriolic battle of the witness testimony, sparing Demjanjuk the The Ukrainian-born Jakob Reimer, like Nazi-hunting titans—a somewhat “over- gallows. That same year, the Sixth US Cir- Demjanjuk, had trained at Trawniki, blown” portrait, Rosenbaum says, though cuit Court of Appeals cited OSI for “prosecu- which Rosenbaum calls “a school for his anger towards Wiesenthal, who died torial misconduct” for having withheld mass murder.” But the former New York in 2005, was genuine enough at the time. potentially exculpatory evidence. potato-chip salesman was so adept “at The conflict was “ironic because I grew But the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, creating a sympathetic impression,” up lionizing Wiesenthal,” says Rosenbaum. while not Ivan the Terrible, was no inno- Rosenbaum says, that, in the early 1980s, “And I still say that without [his] tena- cent. The ID card now hanging at Justice the case was recommended for closure. cious, often brilliant advocacy, the efforts suggested that he had trained at the noto- Then he found evidence that Reimer had in Germany and elsewhere to pursue rious Trawniki camp for concentration been in Warsaw and other Jewish ghettos justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi camp guards, and served (among other in Poland when they were liquidated. crimes would have fizzled out.” places) at Sobibor, another Nazi death When Rosenbaum interviewed Reimer Waldheim’s lack of candor about his unsa- camp in Poland. With the support of in 1992, he “looked like someone I could vory past didn’t keep him from winning the Attorney General Reno, Rosenbaum decid- trust to hire as a babysitter for my chil- Austrian presidency. But the Justice Depart- ed in 1999 to go after Demjanjuk again, dren.” But by “peeling away the onion layer ment put him on its watch list, barring him provoking another decade of US litigation. by layer, we finally got to a very dramatic from entering the United States. After OSI won the denaturalization and point,” Rosenbaum recalls. “I asked him Meanwhile, Sher was urging Rosenbaum the deportation cases, a defense attorney about seeing people die. You could almost to return to OSI—this time as deputy told Rosenbaum: “You know you’ll never see him thinking, ‘I wonder if Rosenbaum director in charge of investigations. “The deport my client, because no one will take knows this—better give him something.’” mission still had enormous meaning to him.” Rosenbaum says that his heart sank, Reimer first claimed to have missed a me,” Rosenbaum says, and he convinced “because I knew that he was probably right.” mass execution by oversleeping. Then, himself that the supervisory position But he persisted, persuading the Munich challenged by Rosenbaum, he said he had “might make the job more manageable.” authorities to charge Demjanjuk in 2009 instead hit his head on a rock and been Maintaining his “singular focus” and on the American theory of the case: that knocked unconscious. “By the time I got grueling work days, he would become Nazi concentration camps existed “to per- there, everyone was dead,” he insisted. principal deputy director in 1990, acting secute people,” and that guards, even if “They weren’t all dead, were they?” director in 1994, and director in 1995. they couldn’t be linked to specific crimes, Rosenbaum said.

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE MARCH | APRIL 2017 59 “‘Okay,’ he finally allowed, ‘they weren’t fter years of trying, Mark M. of more than 250 civilians in the rural all dead.’ You could almost see him crack- Richard, at the time Rosenbaum’s village of Dos Erres, Guatemala, involved ing. ‘There was a sea of bodies, and there A boss at the Justice Department, a similar atrocity. The killings began, was one man pointing at his head.’ received approval in 1999 to produce a Rosenbaum says, when a Guatemalan “And I said, ‘You finished him off, report on OSI’s history. As director, soldier, Gilberto Jordan, threw a baby didn’t you?’ Rosenbaum, like Sher before him, had re- down a well. In 2010, a federal court in “And he said, ‘I’m afraid so.’ ” sisted the project, considering it both pre- Florida revoked Jordan’s US citizenship “You try not to imagine these scenes,” mature and a diversion from OSI’s more and sentenced him to 10 years in prison Rosenbaum says. “You do, anyway.” pressing investigative and prosecutorial for having concealed his participation in Reimer died while the deportation case mission. Another Justice Department pros- the massacre. was on appeal. ecutor outside OSI, Judith Feigin, was Since 2004, in partnership with the An even bigger target was Aleksandras tasked with the job, and produced a rough- FBI, Immigration and Customs Lileikis, chief of the Lithuanian Security ly 600-page draft report that Rosenbaum Enforcement, US attorneys, and other Police for the Vilnius region, where tens says was “riddled with errors” that he did federal agencies, Rosenbaum’s office of thousands of Jews were massacred. not have time to fix. also has developed cases involving the After the war, according to Eric Lichtblau’s The report languished unseen and, 1994 Rwandan genocide and the “ethnic 2014 book, The Nazis Next Door, Lileikis Rosenbaum says, unfinished—until 2010, cleansing” of Muslims during the 1992- had been recruited to spy in Europe for when the nonprofit National Security 95 Bosnian War. In one recent case, the CIA. Although his intelligence file Archive sued for its release under the Mladen Mitrovic, of Loganville, Georgia, noted his possible connection to the Freedom of Information Act. The Justice was found guilty by a federal jury of hav- shooting of Jews, he was allowed to immi- Department’s Office of Enforcement ing lied on a US naturalization applica- grate to the United States in 1955. Operations provided the archive with a tion by omitting mention of his service In 1983, Rosenbaum knocked on the heavily redacted version, and, soon after- as a guard at a Serbian-run prison camp door of Lileikis’ house in Norwood, wards, an earlier version of the full in Bosnia. In August 2016, he was sen- Massachusetts. “I will always remember report was leaked to The New York Times. tenced to 57 months in prison after wit- how calm he was, how sophisticated,” he The report recounted the “enormous nesses testified that he had beaten, tor- says. Lileikis didn’t deny having been hurdles” OSI faced in its prosecutions, and tured, and threatened camp inmates. security police chief, but insisted he’d also discussed the United States’ role in The newer crimes are “not all geno- had nothing to do with executing Jews. providing a “safe haven” for some Nazi col- cidal,” Rosenbaum says, so “it becomes Rosenbaum showed him a list of 52 laborators after World War II. Among the more likely that you can find a surviving imprisoned Jews to be handed over to report’s weaknesses, Rosenbaum says, is witness.” But in part because the United the Nazis—with Lileikis’ name typed at that it “totally ignores how this effort actu- States didn’t fight ground wars in these the bottom. “I have never seen this ally got started and mostly ignores a key later conflicts, “we did not capture any- before,” Lileikis said. “Show me some- obstacle that we faced in building and liti- thing like the vast quantity of incrimi- thing that I signed.” gating these cases”—the reluctance of US nating documents that we did in Europe It took the collapse of the Soviet Union to courts to credit Soviet-provided evidence. at the end of World War II.” make that possible. In 1993, OSI historian Bloomfield says that Rosenbaum’s in- On the waning Nazi front, 12 years after Mike MacQueen, working in Lithuanian vestigations have shaped historical un- winning its denaturalization and deporta- archives, unearthed numerous documents derstanding of Nazi perpetrators. While tion cases, the Justice Department is still with Lileikis’ signature—including death some were anti-Semitic, others were trying to find a country to accept Jakiw warrants for Gitta Kaplan and her six- motivated more by “peer approval, career Palij, another Trawniki guard. “No coun- year-old daughter, Fruma. advancement, greed—a whole host of very try will admit him,” Rosenbaum says. In court, Lileikis “argued that he was a human things,” she says. “It’s a danger- Nevertheless, the hunt for Nazis “is disembodied issuer of orders,” Rosenbaum ous thing to think they were just a bunch not over,” he says. “It will be, in the near recalls. “To this day, a half-smile comes of evil monsters.” future. I think we’re in the very last stage over my face when I think of that” defense— “People like Reimer … were high achiev- of this effort. The [Simon] Wiesenthal a reversal of “the classic Nuremberg defense ers,” Rosenbaum says, by way of example. Center has said—correctly, I believe—that of ‘I only followed orders.’” “He was successful in everything he set more than 99 percent of the perpetrators The judge ruled for OSI, and Lileikis out to do, including here in the United have died. Grotesquely, the vast major- returned to Lithuania, where Rosenbaum States. And so when the Germans were ity of them have gotten away with their says he became “the first person pros- in charge, he sought to achieve for them.” crimes. But there are still some alive, ecuted for a genocide-type offense in any Rosenbaum adds: “I still don’t under- and we continue to intend to leave no of the successor states to the former stand how a person can kill a child,” an stone unturned.”◆ Soviet Union.” But the Lithuanian court, action that was “repeated and repeated Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in accepting Lileikis’ claim of ill health, and repeated until a million Jewish chil- Philadelphia, has written for The New York Times, suspended proceedings against him. In dren lay dead.” Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Mother 2000, the 93-year-old died a free man— One of his office’s newer human-rights Jones, The Nation, and other publications. Follow after writing a memoir, Rosenbaum says. cases, stemming from the 1982 massacre her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein.

60 MARCH | APRIL 2017 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE