Nazi hunters warp justice, should be cut from budget - ineffective work of the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations - Column

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 7, 1993 | by Samuel Francis

If you thought the second trial of the Los Angeles cops who subdued Rodney King was a thick wad of justice to swallow, you're likely to strangle on what the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations is about to serve up: According to the Washington Post, the OSI is trying to strip two U.S. citizens of their citizenship on the grounds that they were Nazi war criminals, but even the agency's own director concedes that there is not a shred of evidence to incriminate them.

The OSI is the federal Nazi posse set up in 1978 to search out supposed war criminals among Europeans who immigrated to this country after World War II. Its major accomplishment has been to pluck the citizenship of retired Cleveland autoworker John Demjanjuk, purport he was a sadistic guard at the Treblinka concentration camp and deport him to Israel, where he was convicted and sentenced to death. But in the past couple of years evidence has come to light that Demjanjuk is innocent and that at least some people in the OSI knew it all along.

Despite Demjanjuk's identification by concentration camp survivors as Treblinka guard "Ivan the Terrible," so many discrepancies emerged in the evidence against him that the Israeli Supreme Court has been reconsidering his case. Evidence from Soviet archives shows almost certainly that Ivan the Terrible was another man.

But the court has been so slow to reach a decision that some friends of Demjanjuk's suspect the court is simply waiting for him to die. Last winter, Demjanjuk, 72, went on a hunger strike in his isolated cell in an Israeli prison, and some say he fears the Israelis may poison him to avoid the embarrassment of having to acknowledge his innocence.

Meanwhile, the OSI is under investigation by a U.S. federal court because some of its attorneys and investigators may have deliberately withheld documents that would have exonerated Demjanjuk. A separate investigation within the Justice Department is considering whether OSI witch-hunters may have committed perjury in the Demjanjuk case.

None of this inspires confidence in an agency that spends $3 million a year in an interminable quest for perpetrators of crimes committed 50 years ago during wartime under a government that no longer exists. Yet the Post recently reported that the OSI is "busier than ever," with investigations of 500 more Americans as possible war criminals.

At the top of OSI's most-wanted list are two decrepit citizens: Kazys Ciurinskas, a 75-year-old retired home-builder in Crown Point, Ind., and John Grabauskas, a retired chemist in Chicago. Neil Sher, head of the OSI since 1983 and a zealous partisan of its work, is unable to name any particular crime either man committed. Their only offense, it seems, was serving in the Lithuanian 2nd Battalion, a Nazi-run unit that is supposed to have murdered Jews, Soviet POWs and civilians. But even if both men served in the 2nd Battalion, there's no specific evidence that either ever did anything wrong.

"Sher acknowledged," reported the Post, "that OSI's complaints against [Ciurinskas and Grabauskas]...allege no specific atrocities were committed by either defendant as individuals. Nor does OSI charge that Ciurinskas ordered or directed any crimes.

"But Sher says that doesn't matter. 'The information we have on that battalion is they all participated,' he said. 'Their role was to murder civilians; they were roving bands of executioners.'"

But under American law and any civilized system of justice, a person can't be charged with crimes simply because he belonged to a group whose other members committed crimes. No one is or should be indicted because he's a "member" of La Cosa Nostra, the Crips or the Bloods; one is indicted, convicted and punished only because of the crimes he himself committed.

OSI, however, has a clever excuse for skirting law and justice. It doesn't actually try those it accuses. It merely seeks to show that when they entered the United States, they lied or failed to tell the truth about their supposed role as Nazis or Nazi collaborators. Having shown that in immigration courts, OSI is then able to strip its victims of citizenship and deport them to whatever country wants to hang them. In the past, such countries included the Soviet Union and communist Yugoslavia, where presumably the victims received trials under standards of justice that even the OSI would not condone.

OSI has no doubt discovered some real war criminals, but the down-the-rabbit-hole procedures and standards by which it operates are offensive and unjust under American concepts. If President Clinton is looking for $3 million to cut from the federal budget, here it is.