If the American public has access to the justice department's report on its
Nazi-hunting failures, we can avoid future mistakes
If nothing else, the revelations in Sunday's front-page story in
the New York Times on the Justice Department's continued refusal
since 2006 to make public a report summarising the efforts of its
Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations, clearly shows that
even more than 65 years after the end of the second world war,
Nazi crimes and the efforts to bring Holocaust perpetrators to
justice are still a source of controversy and public interest.
While there is little new information in the revelations, the more
interesting aspects are indeed infuriating and raise serious questions.
Though the themes are familiar, the ethical compromises involved
in the US policy in using former high-ranking Nazi officials as
informants and in putting to work Nazi scientists for the American
space programme or other classified military projects, as well
the sometimes-flawed implementation of government efforts to punish
such individuals, are worth re-examining.
The United States' record on this issue can basically be divided into four periods.
During the first, which lasted from the end of the war in 1945
until approximately 1948, the US government played a major role
in the prosecution of senior Nazi officials at the Nuremburg trials
and of other criminals in additional proceedings, some of which
were held in former concentration camps. During the second period,
from 1948 until approximately 1953, the exact opposite happened.
With the cold war already underway, the US lost interest in actively
pursuing Nazi war criminals, preferring to build up West Germany
as a bulwark against communism, and therefore adopting a far more
lenient attitude toward former Nazis, some of whom were enlisted
as intelligence sources or rocket scientists – their criminal Nazi
pasts ignored. Equally appalling was the fact that, during these
years, US immigration authorities allowed entry to the United States
as refugees to thousands of the worst of Hitler's east European
henchman.
During the subsequent years, until the mid 1970s,
nothing changed; it was only toward the end of the latter decade
that, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Congresswoman Elizabeth
Holtzman of Brooklyn and Congressman Joshua Eilberg of Philadelphia,
US negligence was fully exposed and the government finally decided
to take legal action against the Nazi war criminals living in the
US – and establish the Office of Special Investigations.
Holocaust crimes, however, could not be prosecuted
in the United States as they had been committed overseas and their
victims were not Americans at the time the crimes were committed.
So, instead, Nazi criminals were prosecuted for immigration and
naturalisation violations – that is, for concealing their wartime
past. Although this appeared to be a cop-out of sorts when announced,
the decision yielded relatively successful results.The good news
was that it was relatively easy to win such cases, compared to
war crimes prosecutions. The downside was that the punishments
– denaturalisation and deportation – were often grotesquely incommensurate
with the crimes.
During its 32 years of existence, the OSI had significant success
and successful pursued legal action against over 100 Nazi perpetrators
– a record that outstrips any other agency of its kind. There
were mistakes along the way – the prosecution of Ivan Demjanjuk
primarily for crimes at Treblinka rather than at Sobibor is,
of course, the most famous – but all in all, the US government
can be very proud of the OSI and its achievements.
This only makes the refusal to make public the
full report even more incomprehensible. If it were published, then,
no doubt, questions would be raised about its objectivity and reliability
– have been written in-house – but the public deserves to know
the truth about the OSI's work. Publishing it would be the best
way to help prevent the mistakes of the initial decades and ensure
future success in bringing the perpetrators of genocide, war crimes
and crimes against humanity to justice.
guardian.co.uk
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