Tuesday, November 16, 2010

With a tear in the Hunters eye they are searching for those that helped build Americas science and technology

The subjects of their life’s work — people with Nazi ties who lied on citizenship forms to enter the United States after World War II — are dead or dying. Current and former OSI employees say the unit is racing to extradite the few elderly Nazis still residing on American soil. Jonathan Drimmer, the lead trial lawyer in the government’s case against Demjanjuk, said that Demjanjuk’s expulsion is “a coda on a generation of work to bring major Nazi war criminals to justice.”

Since the OSI began operations in 1979, it has won deportation orders against 107 people and prevented 180 more from entering the United States through its watch list. Yet it remains to be seen how the close-knit group of lawyers and historians, accustomed to combing document-rich archives in the Eastern Bloc for clues, will recast its mission from capturing Nazis to catching criminals who fled murderous conflicts in such diverse places as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The OSI focuses on revoking the citizenship of Americans who entered the country on false pretenses by lying about their involvement in war crimes, rather than targeting wrongdoers based overseas. more

“America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became in some small measure a safe haven for persecutors as well,” says the 600-page document.  The New York Times obtained a copy of the report, which the National Security Archive, a private group, posted on its website. Earlier, the Justice Department had declared dozens of pages from the document off-limits to the public after the archive sued to get it.

The long-secret report provided new details of many of the major cases handled by Justice’s Office of Special Investigations. The report reflects the ways in which American officials, who were assigned to recruit foreign scientists after World War II, circumvented President Harry S. Truman’s order that they not bring in Nazi Party members or people who had actively supported Nazi militarism.




Arthur Rudolph, one of hundreds of scientists brought to the United States after the war, told investigators in 1947 of attending a hanging during the war of inmates accused of sabotage at a plant near Nordhausen, Germany, where Rudolph was operations director. The plant he ran manufactured V-2 rockets using slave labor. U.S. immigration officials knew Rudolph had been a Nazi party member.

The report also details a discussion at the CIA over whether former Nazi party member Otto Von Bolschwing should acknowledge his Nazi past if confronted about it when applying for U.S. citizenship. Reversing earlier CIA advice, the agency concluded that Bolschwing should tell the truth. The agency hired Bolschwing during the Cold War for his contacts among ethnic Germans and Romanians.
According to portions of the report that were deleted by the Justice Department:
_The department established in 1997 that Switzerland had bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
_Meetings in 2000 in which U.S. officials pressured Latvian officials to pursue Nazis were “a hideous failure.”
_In hopes of establishing whether Dr. Joseph Mengele, known as the Angel of Death at Auschwitz, was dead, a director of the Office of Special Investigations kept in his desk a piece of scalp thought to belong to Mengele. OSI was the Justice Department entity created in 1979 to deport Nazis.
Also deleted was a portion of a 1993 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit that raised ethics accusations against Justice Department officials.more
thank you for your help Battleskin

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