Nov. 27 (Bloomberg)
-- German investigators trying to track down
Nazi criminals before they die may have had their
“best break” in years after discovering a trove
of Brazilian immigration files more than half
a century old.
Kurt Schrimm, the top German justice official hunting Nazi fugitives, said his
team stumbled on archives identifying “several
hundred” Germans who moved to Brazil in the decade
after World War II and who may be linked to Nazi
crimes. Though only a fraction is still likely
to be alive, Schrimm plans to follow up on the
lead with Brazilian officials.
“The discovery
will probably be our most important find in recent
times,” Schrimm said in an interview Nov. 24
from his office in the southwestern German city
of Ludwigsburg. Schrimm kicked off research in
Brazil in July and will report again on findings
after his team returns there in March.
The trial
starting Nov. 30 of alleged death-camp guard
John Demjanjuk in Munich underscores Schrimm’s
effort to hunt down remaining Nazi criminals
even if the search yields “order- takers, not
givers” 76 years after Adolf Hitler took power.
Demjanjuk, who is charged with aiding in the
murder of 27,900 inmates in the Sobibor Nazi
death camp in 1943, is the biggest catch yet
for Schrimm, who took his job nine years ago
expecting to close shop.
Instead, Schrimm,
60, a senior prosecutor in Stuttgart, doubled
staff at the Central Office of State Judiciaries
for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes
from four to eight investigators -- now down
to seven. As the number of clues filed to the
office dwindled through the 1990s, Schrimm pressed
the Central Office to seek new leads.
Soviet Archives
Those leads
included sifting through 1945 war trial documents
from Soviet archives involving German prisoners
of war and Soviet collaborators. A military-history
archive in Prague was found to contain complete
files on the Nazi Waffen-SS up to 1943. In 1990,
Italian court documents on SS atrocities were
discovered after having disappeared in the 1950s.
The Brazilian
files focus on suspected Nazi criminals entering
on provisional passports. Schrimm and his team
followed up leads from a Brazilian source who
came across letters warning the authorities of
Nazis trying to slip into the country with travel
documents issued by the Red Cross. Little was
done to bar their entry, Schrimm said.
South American
Refuge
South America
became the refuge of several high-ranking Nazi
officers after the Third Reich’s collapse, including
Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, death-camp
doctor Josef Mengele and Gestapo member Klaus
Barbie. While Eichmann and Barbie were caught
and tried, Mengele died in Brazil in 1979. Eichmann,
captured in Argentina, was hanged in Israel in
1962; Barbie, extradited by Bolivia, died in
a French jail in 1991.
“As hopeful
as we are about the Brazil findings, just 5 percent
of the suspects may still be alive and able to
stand trial,” Schrimm said. “The Nazi commanders
are all dead, but that doesn’t make the crimes
of their younger subordinates any less prosecutable.”
The Central
Office conducts pre-investigations that are then
handed over to state prosecutors once evidence
is sufficient for a formal probe. Schrimm’s unit
currently has about 20 investigations open.
Efforts Graded
Schrimm’s
Central Office works alongside such organizations
as the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The Wiesenthal Center graded Germany with a “B”
in its 2009 ranking of efforts to bring Nazi
criminals to justice. The U.S. received an “A.”
Schrimm dismissed
the rating, saying his Central Office doesn’t
like “being graded like a school kid.”
“As long as
there’s a possibility that these people are alive,
we’ll continue our work,” Schrimm said in an
earlier, Aug. 21 interview in his office, a baroque
structure built in 1790 to house a prison. “I
never would have thought it’d be nine years already
-- and it will still be some time in the future.”
Schrimm, whose
team taps on computers in two work rooms, gave
a tour of one of the dusty file spaces piled
to the ceiling with dog-eared documents detailing
Nazi crimes that took place more than six decades
ago. The quiet setting was a far cry from the
1960s and 1970s, when the unit was at its busiest
tracking down Nazis. Since its foundation in
1958, the Central Office has conducted more than
7,400 investigations.
The case against
Demjanjuk came about after an investigator accidentally
stumbled on a report on the Internet that the
U.S. was seeking to revoke his passport. Demjanjuk’s
name was known because he had been convicted
in 1988, charged with being the Treblinka death-camp
guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” --only to
be acquitted in 1993 by Israel’s Supreme Court
after doubt about his identity emerged.
The Central
Office, suspicious about his true identity, followed
up on clues gained from already scheduled visits
to Israel and the U.S. Once Schrimm’s team assembled
what it thought was enough information to convict,
they turned it over to state prosecutors.
“A few years
ago nobody talked about Demjanjuk any more --
he fell into the memory hole,” Schrimm said.
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