Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

To make it even easier for former Nazis and Nazi collaborators to become American citizens, the State Department refused to accept the legality of a raft of Nazi war crimes convictions in the Soviet Union and its satellites because the United States did not recognize Soviet bloc countries as legitimate.

In sum, Congress and the State Department sent Europe a clear message in 1952: The United States was passionate about keeping communists out, but not war criminals eager to salute the stars and stripes and eat hot dogs with yellow mustard on the Fourth of July.

The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 and its 1950 revision, the Displaced Persons Commission decision to grant U.S. visas to former members of the Baltic Legions, the Lodge Act, and Public Law 414 solidified long-standing U.S. immigration policy and practice. The United States would accept Western European refugees only with great reluctance and little generosity. It would do whatever it could to exclude Jews and middle European Catholics. At the same time, it would welcome their murderers. Virtually every Belorussian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian was eligible for an unchallenged U.S. visa. All a Nazi collaborator had to do was to spin a credible yarn, then swear to it.

As a result, the White House, State Department, and Congress had stacked the deck to favor Europe’s Nazi collaborators in the immigration game—easy visas, anonymity, safe places to hide, an immigration law nearly impossible to enforce, and the near-total indifference of the American public.

Given those odds, John Demjanjuk should have lived the rest of his life in the peace and comfort of Seven Hills, Ohio, surrounded by his family and Ukrainian friends, under the protection of U.S. law. But his luck was about to change.

It all began with Hermine Braunsteiner, a Nazi war criminal living quietly on Long Island.

Hermine Braunsteiner’s calling card was a pair of steel-studded boots. Her specialty was using them to stomp women and children at Majdanek, a concentration and death camp in eastern Poland where the Nazis murdered an estimated 1.5 million people, half of them Jewish. Braunsteiner was the vice commandant of the women’s sector there.

“I’ve seen cruel men and cruel women,” recalled a Majdanek survivor. “And Hermine Braunsteiner was one of the most vicious I ever met.” Prisoners called her Stute von Majdanek (Mare from Majdanek).

When the SS began to evacuate the camp in 1944 in advance of the Red Army, they sent Braunsteiner to supervise a small German labor camp for women and children just outside Berlin. It was a subcamp of the larger Ravensbrück prison for Polish, Jewish, and Gypsy women. Her war crimes there would one day come back to haunt her.

In 1958, Braunsteiner immigrated to Nova Scotia, Canada, to marry Russell Ryan, an American Air Force enlisted man whom she had met in Austria, her homeland. In 1959, the couple moved to Maspeth in Queens, New York, where Hermine took a job as a machinist in a clothing factory. New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld found her in Maspeth in 1964 living a frugal life.

Based on information supplied by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, Lelyveld wrote an article, “Former Nazi Camp Guard Is Now a Housewife in Queens.” The piece turned out to be an important story because it served to remind Americans that there actually were former Nazis hiding in America and not a single one had ever been deported. The story was the first domino to tumble in a row that would lead eventually to John Demjanjuk, and its falling prompted the building of a wall of government resistance and obstruction.

After the Times story appeared, the INS promised to review the Braunsteiner case. But when it thought interest in her story had waned, the INS closed its “investigation,” claiming there wasn’t enough evidence to strip Braunsteiner of her citizenship. Not that it ever tried to find any. INS never bothered to ask officials in Berlin, Tel Aviv, Warsaw, or Vienna for any evidence that might be sitting in their files, and it seemed to have conveniently forgotten that Austria had already convicted Braunsteiner of a war crime, which made her ineligible for U.S. citizenship.

When the media wouldn’t let go of the mildly sensational story, the INS reopened the case in 1971—seven years later—because of “periodic and highly vocal interest.” It assigned the Braunsteiner case to Anthony DeVito, an INS investigator in the New York regional office, which had jurisdiction over Long Island cases.

DeVito had spent most of his twenty years at the INS looking in closets for suspected communist subversives. Braunsteiner was his first alleged Nazi assignment and it changed his life. From the day he wrote “Braunsteiner” on his case file folder, DeVito hardly had a good night’s sleep.

It all began with the list of eyewitnesses DeVito found with the help of Otto Karbach, an old Nazi hunter on the staff of the World Jewish Congress. At first, DeVito was pleased. With a dozen eyewitnesses to Braunsteiner’s war crimes, the case was turning out to be a slam dunk. But once the eyewitnesses agreed to actually testify against Braunsteiner, the investigation honeymoon abruptly ended. The government started mistreating and harassing the witnesses. It was as if Washington wanted to scare them off.

Besides witness intimidation, there were veiled phone threats to DeVito’s wife—made in German. Only the INS knew she was German and had her unlisted number. Since witness tampering was a federal crime, DeVito called the FBI. If the bureau ever investigated his allegations, it never bothered to interview him (the complainant), or his wife, or the Braunsteiner witnesses (the victims).

Then there was the money that mysteriously appeared. Enough for Russell and Hermine Ryan to hire a high-priced law firm that specialized in immigration cases. The Ryans were just scraping by. So who was paying their legal bills? DeVito concluded that the cash came from Odessa, the international Nazi network dedicated to hiding and protecting fellow Nazis from prosecution. But he was reluctant to air his suspicion publicly, for fear of being labeled a conspiracy fruitcake. Frederick Forsyth had just published his sensational novel, The Odessa File , and most people considered Odessa a myth. DeVito and Wiesenthal did not.

As it turned out, DeVito was partially right. A mystery person had set up a Braunsteiner-Ryan Legal Defense Fund, which collected thousands of dollars from right-wingers and neo-Nazis. Who knew? Maybe even from Odessa.

Strange phone calls, harassment, and untraceable money aside, it was the missing investigation reports that convinced DeVito that the INS was actually working for the Braunsteiner defense team. He had meticulously prepared summaries of his interviews with twelve Majdanek survivors who had identified Mrs. Ryan as Hermine Braunsteiner of Majdanek. He placed the investigative reports in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in the office of the prosecutor the INS had assigned to the case. Because the papers were essential to the Braunsteiner case, DeVito locked the drawer with a combination lock before he went home. When he opened the drawer the next morning, seven of the twelve summaries were missing. Only three people knew the combination to the lock—DeVito; the Braunsteiner prosecutor, Vincent Schiano; and Schiano’s chief clerk.

The thief had to be the clerk, and the why was obvious. Either the INS wanted the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the witnesses so it could intimidate them, which would be witness tampering, or the INS wanted to give the information to Braunsteiner’s defense team so they could harass the witnesses and/or prepare a strong defense, which would be obstruction of justice.