Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

The High Court further pointed out that the DPA did not grant the government the right to use equity considerations in making its denaturalization decisions. Therefore, the Court held, Judge Roettger erred when he ruled in favor of Fedorenko based on extenuating circumstances.

In sum, the Supreme Court ruled: Whether Fedorenko’s guard service was voluntary or involuntary was irrelevant; Fedorenko’s lie hid material facts; and if visa officers had known that Fedorenko had been a guard at Treblinka, they would have denied him a visa. Therefore, the government could strip Fedorenko of his U.S. citizenship.

Even though he faced deportation, Feodor Fedorenko held no grudge against the United States. “I am happy and satisfied with America,” he said. “America is not to blame that Jewish groups have brought this up.”

Fedorenko had learned that his first wife and son, whom he thought died during the war, were alive and living in Ukraine. He asked to be deported to the Soviet Union to join them. He left for Ukraine in 1984, six years after his trial in Fort Lauderdale and nine years after the INS received the Ukrainian list from Michael Hanusiak.

While the government was preparing for the trial of John Demjanjuk in Cleveland, Elizabeth Holtzman was sparring with Congress and the Department of Justice in Washington. At issue were three items on her to-be-done-yesterday list.

As a lawyer, Holtzman recognized that the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 (Public Law 414) had a loophole big enough for any Nazi who wasn’t brain dead to skate through. The congresswoman closed that loophole in 1978 with what would be called the Holtzman Amendment. It made inadmissible to the United States “ participants in Nazi persecution, genocide, or the commission of any act of torture or extrajudicial killing.”

As a result of the Holtzman Amendment, the names of sixty thousand known Nazis and Nazi collaborators were placed on a U.S. immigration watch list. Hundreds were eventually blocked from entering the United States. The amendment also made prosecutable those Nazis and Nazi collaborators who entered the United States after 1952, and closed a loophole whereby those ordered deported could avoid deportation by seeking “discretionary relief” from the court under a hardship provision in immigration law.

Holtzman also knew that the FBI and the CIA were protecting former Nazis already in the United States. Although she was eager for proof of federal meddling, she wasn’t about to waste even a day trying to find it. Let historians unravel the tangled strands of cover-up, conspiracy, and obstruction. Her mission was to help deport Nazi war criminals. Along with Immigration Subcommittee chairman Eilberg, Holtzman lobbied for a General Accounting Office investigation into the INS bureaucratic disaster.

The GAO opened its investigation of the INS in 1977, three years after Holtzman had asked to read the Karbach list files. The subcommittee had given the GAO a clear, no-nonsense mandate: Find out whether INS’s lack of Nazi deportations was “due to a conspiracy involving INS personnel and possibly other Federal agencies,” as Anthony DeVito alleged.

From the moment they opened the first INS file folder, GAO investigators ran into their own “iron curtain.” Citing national security, both the FBI and the CIA had refused to deliver the Nazi files and documents the GAO had requested.Tossing the GAO a crumb, the agencies did offer to provide good-faith summaries of files and documents, if they had any.

With one hand stapled to its back, the GAO selected fifty-seven INS Nazi cases for review. The findings were so totally predicable they constituted a nonevent. Only five, or less than 10 percent of the total, appeared to be thorough INS investigations. The real issue: Why was the INS record so shoddy? Was it because the FBI, CIA, and INS were protecting Nazi war criminals?

To answer those questions, the GAO relied exclusively on self-reporting from the three agencies:

• Without revealing any names for national security reasons, the CIA reported that it had used twenty-one former Nazis as “sources,” seven of whom had been paid. None of the twenty-one, the agency hastened to add, was a suspected war criminal.

• Also without revealing any names, the FBI admitted to having had a “confidential relationship” with two former Nazis who were not paid. It hastened to add, however, that it never “intervened in or obstructed any INS investigation or prosecution.”

• And the INS claimed that no government official ever attempted to “interfere” in any Nazi case.

Accepting those reports without challenge, the GAO concluded: “It is unlikely that widespread conspiracy has existed in Federal agencies—especially the INS—to obstruct investigation of allegations that individuals, now residents of the United States, committed atrocities before or during World War II.”

Holtzman wasn’t displeased. Even though its investigators had allowed the FBI and CIA to hide behind the shield of national security, the U.S. government had publicly admitted for the first time that it both coddled and employed former Nazis. The cat was now out of the bag.

If Holtzman was reasonably satisfied with the GAO report, former INS staffers Tony DeVito and Vincent Schiano were not. During an Immigration Subcommittee hearing, they accused the INS of caving in to the FBI and the CIA by accepting agency summaries and denials without even a hint of skepticism. They told the subcommittee 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.