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 John Demjanjuk,” 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 Simon Wiesenthal’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 Kurt Waldheim, 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.