Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

For DeVito and Schiano, the Braunsteiner story had a “happy” ending. A Düsseldorf court convicted her of murdering eighty women and children, abetting the murder of another 202 children, and collaborating in the murder of still another one thousand prisoners. She was sentenced to life in prison but won release after fifteen years due to a severe case of diabetes and a resulting leg amputation. She died at home in Germany in 1999, at the age of seventy-nine.

Schiano’s story did not have such a satisfying ending. The INS wanted to silence him once and for all. This time, it didn’t reassign him to Alaska. Instead it threatened to open a public investigation into alleged “irregularities” in his conduct during the Braunsteiner case. The INS never specified what irregularities. More than likely, they were Schiano’s unauthorized requests to Bonn, Vienna, and Warsaw. Win or lose, public hearings would smear Schiano’s reputation, kill any future career in government, and seriously hurt his chances of landing a decent job as a private attorney. Schiano understood the all-too-familiar Washington game. If he quit, the threat would go away.

He quit. Again.

Schiano went to Wall Street. In his office, he kept his well-fingered file on Nicolae Malaxa and a huge Nazi SS organizational chart.

One morning in 1972, Anthony DeVito got a cryptic phone call from Otto Karbach. The Braunsteiner case was still bogged down in court. “I have some useful information,” Karbach said. As an INS investigator, DeVito was used to calls from whistle-blowers convinced their phones were tapped. Given the way the Braunsteiner case was going, maybe Karbach’s actually was. But if Karbach said he had “useful information,” DeVito knew he did. Every Braunsteiner lead the Nazi hunter had given him had turned out to be gold.

DeVito canceled an important lunch date with Schiano and agreed to meet Karbach at an East Side restaurant. After some small talk, the Nazi hunter got to the point. He had been following the Braunsteiner case with both interest and skepticism, he said. And he simply didn’t trust the INS. Why should he? Immigration had done nothing about Nazi war criminals living in America for nearly twenty years, and now when it had an indisputable deportation case with Braunsteiner, it was doing everything it possibly could not to deport her. If the United States ever did send her packing back to Germany or Austria, it would be because of DeVito, not the INS.

What troubled Karbach was why DeVito was being such a bulldog on the Braunsteiner case. Unlike Karbach, the investigator wasn’t a Jew who had lost family in the Holocaust. So why would an Italian Catholic from Brooklyn be so committed to smoking out a Nazi war criminal when his INS bosses, his church, and the majority of non-Jewish Americans couldn’t care less? Could DeVito be trusted with a secret?

“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 Platz were thousands of prisoners with color-coded patches on their gray rags identifying them as Poles, Czechs, Jews, homosexuals, political enemies, common criminals, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. They chattered and shouted in a babel of tongues. One group was stoning to death a fellow prisoner who apparently had been a stoolie. The stench of rot, blood, and death hung over the camp like mustard gas.

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 knew. He slid two pieces of paper across the lunch table.