Reviewing: “Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America” by Debbie Cenziper. Hachette Books. 2019. 302 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0316449656.
For three decades after World War II, the Office of Special Investigation (OSI), a unit in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, relentlessly sought to identify and bring to justice a number of notorious concentration camp guards, auxiliary police officials, Nazi collaborators, propagandists and civil servants who illegally entered the U.S. by lying about their backgrounds and posing as victims.
Federal law precluded the American government from filing criminal cases against the defendants for crimes they committed in Europe during the war. Brooklyn congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman helped pass legislation allowing OSI to seek to denaturalize war criminals in civil court. Then they could be deported on the basis of having assisted in persecuting Jews and others, and hiding their actions during the immigration process.
The members of the OSI found themselves in uncharted waters with a completely new set of legal concerns and questions that would be aired in front of the American courts and the whole world. In 1980, the U.S. was the only country vigorously engaged in tracking down Nazi war criminals. “If American citizenship is to have any meaning at all,” asserted David Marwell, OSI’s chief of investigative research, “we have to take it back.”
Deporting Nazi War Criminals
Deporting Nazi war criminals was not any easy task. When the officials of the West German embassy in Washington, DC, were asked by OSI director Neal Sher to accept Archbishop Valerian Trifa as a deportee, with the hope that Germany would put him on trial for war crimes for his leading role in the Romanian Iron Guard, an embassy official responded: “Why should we take back your garbage?” Sher replied, “We’re just returning the garbage that you created.”
In 1954, the West German Foreign Office signed an agreement to accept Nazi perpetrators found in the U.S. after the war. The Austrian government signed an almost identical pledge. Yet, this technical agreement had not been invoked until OSI learned of dozens of Nazi collaborators illicitly living in the U.S. Without these and other governments’ willingness to readmit Nazi war criminals, OSI could not deport them. In late 1988, the Austrian government agreed to cooperate with the OSI. Eventually so did the German government.
One OSI investigation that especially intrigued Debbie Cenziper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, involved the men of Trawniki. In July 1941, the Germans built a concentration camp and a training center to prepare police auxiliaries in the abandoned sugar factory in Trawniki, an obscure village in southeastern Poland, about 20 miles southeast of the city of Lublin.
Trawniki Men
From September 1941 until July 1944, the SS recruited 2,500 auxiliary police, practically all of whom were Soviet prisoners of war. They were to be deployed in Operation Reinhard, the German’s master plan to murder the approximately 2 million Jews living in the Government General (Krakow, Warsaw, Radom and Lublin) in occupied Poland. In the autumn of 1942, as the number of Soviet prisoners of war began to dwindle, the SS began recruiting young civilians, mostly young Ukrainians. Between 1941 and 1944, approximately 5,082 men had been trained at Trawniki.*
The men of Trawniki, who entered guard forces (Wachmannschaften), served as guards at Operation Reinhard extermination camps: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II. Some units served the SS Death’s-Head units that secured Majdanek and Auschwitz. Trawniki men were also deployed in the Warsaw, Czestochowa, Lublin, Lvov, Radom, Krakow and Bialystok ghettos.
These men, who provided the Germans with the armed forces required to execute the Final Solution, were cruel and vicious murderers. Before WWII, there were 3.3 million Jews living in Poland. In less than 20 months, 1.7 Jews were murdered with the active participation of the Trawniki men.*
Unsung Heroes
In this fascinating and compelling work, Debbie Cenziper reveals how an extremely dedicated group of lawyers, investigators and historians exposed men like John Demjanjuk and Jakob Reimer from the Soviet Ukraine, Liudas Kairys and Vladas Zajančkauskas from Lithuania, Feodor Fedorenko from Crimea who all gained illegal entry into the U.S., although they were significant accomplices in the destruction of European Jewry.
There are a number of dedicated people who should be acknowledged for their tenacious quest to bring these Nazis to justice. They include Peter Black, Barry White, Bruce Einhorn, David Maxwell, Eli Rosenbaum, Ned Stutman, David Rich, Allan Ryan, Jonathan Drimmer, Ellen Chubin, Patrick Treanor, Todd Huebner and Michael Bernstein.
Bernstein was killed as a result of the terrorist bombing of Pan American World Airways Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He was returning from Vienna, Austria, where he had concluded successful negotiations with the Austrian government to have Austria accept the return of certain participants in Nazi persecution.
The determination by the U.S. Department of Justice to pursue those who participated in some way in the murder “speaks well of American justice that it will not close the books on bestiality until the last participant has felt a frisson of fear and is routed from the land of the free,” observed George F. Will.
*Statistical Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC
Alex Grobman, who has an MA and PhD from the Hebrew University, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
