Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

For their part, the Soviets tried and convicted as many as one thousand Trawniki men well into the 1960s. Some were executed. Others, like Ignat Danilchenko, were sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor in a Siberian gulag.

In the final analysis, the Trawniki men had been indispensable to Operation Reinhard and its extermination processes and machinery. For the most part, they were good at their jobs. Supervised by fewer than two hundred SS officers, they helped rob and kill 1.7 million Polish Jews in less than three years (approximately two thousand a day).

In his letter recommending SS Captain Karl Streibel for a promotion to major, General Globocnik wrote: “These units have proved themselves in the best way… especially in the framework of the resettlement of the Jew.”

In 1979, the Department of Justice (DOJ) decided that it wanted Walter Rockler to be the first director of its new Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Rockler, who was working as a tax attorney in Washington, didn’t want the job. He had served as an intelligence officer during World War II. Afterward, he prosecuted German bankers for the Nuremberg Military Tribunal. Like other veterans, he had tried his best to put the war behind him, and he didn’t relish the thought of revisiting it.

Rockler explained to Justice that, although he had experience prosecuting Nazi bankers, he knew little about Nazi SS camps and SS guards. Besides, his wife was a former Estonian slave laborer and he didn’t want to bring SS camp atrocities into his home. Furthermore, he had college-age kids. How could he support them on a paltry government salary? Finally, he was involved in several tax cases against the Internal Revenue Service. Working for the government while prosecuting the government would be a conflict of interest.

Rockler’s arguments did not dampen the Justice Department’s enthusiasm. OSI needed someone with Rockler’s credentials to guide its baby steps. As a former Nuremberg prosecutor, he would send a message to the world—OSI was not going to be another Washington eunuch. It would be aggressive in finding and expelling Nazis and Nazi collaborators in the United States.

DOJ worked out a compromise. Rockler would take command of OSI for six to eight months as a part-time contract employee on an hourly basis. He could still work part-time at his law firm, Arnold & Porter. The department would sign a conflict-of-interest waiver and Arnold & Porter would continue to pay his full partnership draw, less his government fee.

Martin Mendelsohn, a career Justice Department attorney, would be Rockler’s deputy director. A protégé of Elizabeth Holtzman, Mendelsohn had been the director of OSI’s predecessor, the Special Litigation Unit (SLU). As Rockler’s assistant, Mendelsohn would now direct OSI litigation, supervise prosecutors, prioritize cases, and assign personnel to work on them.

When Walter Rockler agreed to helm the new OSI, he brought with him his own agenda. Besides finding Nazis and European Nazi collaborators, he wanted to hunt American Nazi collaborators who were not part of OSI’s mission. While investigating German financiers, Rockler had stumbled on a list of thirteen Wall Street banks that had collaborated with German banks in laundering the stolen property and dirty money that helped finance the Holocaust and made Wall Street richer. Back in the United States after the Nuremberg Tribunal was dissolved, Rockler refused to do business with any of the banks on the list. Although he never went public with the list, he shared the names with John Loftus, a new OSI attorney.

A graduate of Suffolk University Law School, Loftus joined the U.S. attorney general’s honors program for newly minted lawyers for one year with the blessing of the Boston law firm that had hired him. A young attorney with contacts in the Justice Department could be useful to the firm.

“Welcome to the Justice Department,” Loftus’s new boss had told him. “You now represent the most corrupt client in the world—the United States government.”

Loftus thought he was joking.

One day in 1979, Loftus had spotted a memo on the bulletin board. A new DOJ Office of Special Investigations was looking for volunteers to hunt, prosecute, and deport former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. Loftus applied and got a job on the OSI team. The Nazi investigation Rockler assigned him to was the Belarus Project, which—along with its high-level security clearance—came with unprecedented access to secret State Department, Defense Department, CIA, and FBI intelligence records. Rockler asked Loftus to keep his eyes open for any documents relating to the thirteen banks while he was rummaging through highly classified government documents.

In the eighteen months he spent on the Belarus Project, Loftus didn’t find much about Wall Street banks, but he uncovered a government secret that would soon make him the whipping boy of the CIA, the Department of State, and the Justice Department.{Members of Walter Rockler’s family do not recall him talking about a specific list of thirteen American banks that allegedly had collaborated with the Nazis. And a search of his papers failed to turn up such a list. Walter Rockler died in 2002.}

Soon after he had agreed to direct OSI, Rockler told his superiors at Justice that he wanted to replace Martin Mendelsohn, who he believed was withholding materials from him. Mendelsohn denied the charges, but under the circumstances it would be difficult for the two men to work together. The Justice Department chose Allan J. Ryan Jr. for the deputy spot. Mendelsohn stayed on as an OSI prosecutor.

Ryan had stumbled into his new job. Like John Loftus, he was Catholic. And like everyone already on the OSI team, he was young—early thirties—and well credentialed with degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota Law School, and a clerking stint for Supreme Court justice Byron White. What made Ryan stand out in the search for a new OSI deputy director was his courtroom experience on cases ranging from veterans’ rights to the law of the sea.

Ryan had been serving as assistant U.S. solicitor general when his boss put the Feodor Fedorenko appeal on his desk. After studying Judge Roettger’s opinion and the government’s brief, Ryan didn’t think the botched case was winnable on appeal. But after reading the trial transcripts, he changed his mind. What swayed him most was one simple fact. Fedorenko admitted he had been an armed guard at Treblinka. Like Roettger, Ryan found the survivor stories of Fedorenko’s alleged brutality bone-chilling. But unlike Roettger, he found the eyewitnesses both credible and irrelevant. As Ryan understood it, immigration law did not require the government to prove Fedorenko committed atrocities against private citizens. U.S. v. Fedorenko was a denaturalization case, not a war crimes trial.

Ryan won the appeal but, like DeVito with Dachau and Private Galione with Dora, he couldn’t push the case out of his mind. Although he was savvy and skeptical, he was shocked to learn that Nazi collaborators were actually hiding in America. So, when Philip Heymann, assistant attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division at Justice, asked Ryan if he would join OSI as Rockler’s deputy director, Ryan was intrigued. True, the future of OSI was uncertain and the task impossible given the ages of the alleged Nazis and eyewitnesses, but the job sounded exciting.

Ryan talked over the tempting offer with his wife. “Forget [job] security,” she told him. “What do you really want to do?” Ryan took the job.

Walter Rockler left OSI after a year of service, much longer than he and his law firm had agreed to when he signed up. He wouldn’t miss the Justice Department job. Rockler hated political arm-wrestles and thought public relations work was a waste of his time. And he certainly could do without the death threats from Eastern Europeans who believed he was operating a Jewish witch hunt.