America's Top Nazi Hunter Seeks Justice for Genocide Victims

WASHINGTON — Every day, Eli Rosenbaum pulls a 26-inch blue suitcase past photographs hanging in his office suite of starving children behind barbed wire, a pit filled with naked bodies, a frail elderly woman blocked by a German soldier's whip.

The images are reminders of the victims he has spent almost three decades avenging.

Rosenbaum, 52, is America's top Nazi hunter. He runs the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, a small band of prosecutors and historians who use musty World War II records to track Nazis living undetected in America.

Inside Rosenbaum's rolling suitcase are files documenting the world's worst human woes, not just the Holocaust but modern-day atrocities such as the mass killings in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Last week, Rosenbaum's office connected those records to an 85-year-old Lawrenceville, Ga., man. Investigators say Paul Henss is a former SS guard who trained attack dogs at the Dachau and Buchewald death camps to "kill without mercy." He has denied knowing what was going on at the camps and says the government has exaggerated his role.

Since its inception in 1979, the special investigative unit has won cases against 106 former Nazis and removed 64 from the United States, including Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, an adviser to Adolf Eichmann, the SS official entrusted with carrying out the mass murder of Europe's Jewish people. By comparison, just two Nazis were expelled from the United States during the 34 years between the end of World War II and the creation of the office.

Rosenbaum's drive to nab Nazis runs deep. The son of an Army intelligence officer, he loved to hear tales of his father's World War II experiences in Africa and Europe. Some of the stories were exciting, like arriving in Paris immediately after liberation. But one day, his father tried to describe a far darker experience than he had ever shared — an intelligence mission to Dachau soon after it was discovered.

"My father's eyes welled with tears. And his mouth opened like he was going to tell me something and it just stayed open for what seemed like an eternity," says Rosenbaum, his voice wavering even now, at the memory. "That was it. He couldn't tell me. He never did."

With no words at all, Rosenbaum's father conveyed to his 15-year-old all that he needed to know. The memory of his father, rendered speechless by the horror he had seen, imprinted Rosenbaum for the rest of his life.

Sitting in his office recently, Rosenbaum picks up a document from one of his most difficult and haunting cases. Some 65 years old now, it is the death warrant of a little girl named Fruma Kaplan. She was executed in December 1941, her body dumped in an open pit.

She was 6 years old.

"I have often thought about the nightmare that she knew even before arriving at the pit to be executed," says Rosenbaum.

Confinement in a ghetto, escape, concealment by a Christian family. And, finally, the terror of being discovered and hauled away by the SS.

Rosenbaum's own daughter was 6 when he learned of Fruma's fate. "The one thing I knew I would do," he says, " was avenge Fruma Kaplan."

It would take him more than a decade.

BEGINNING THE HUNT

Rosenbaum made his first discovery for the Office of Special Investigations even before he left Harvard Law School.

He had worked as the office's first intern, in the summer of 1979. Returning to school for his final year, he happened upon a book about a secret Nazi camp where prisoners were forced to help the German army build missiles. The author, a survivor, alleged that the very same people who directed the underground factory at the camp had helped develop a rocket ship that put Americans on the moon.

Rosenbaum was fascinated.

Soon after, he found another book. This one glowingly described the German engineers and scientists who had helped build the American missile and space programs. Arthur Rudolph, a German engineer, was quoted in the book expressing frustration at having to leave a lavish holiday party during the war to deal with an unexpected rocket parts shipment.

Rosenbaum was struck by his audacity. He wanted to know who this guy was. He looked at the sources listed in the back of the book and discovered that the author had interviewed Arthur Rudolph in Huntsville, Ala.

The man who had directed production at the V-2 missile factory at the secret Dora-Mittlebau concentration camp was the same man who had helped America develop its space and missile programs. And he was living in America.

After graduation, Rosenbaum returned to the Office of Special Investigations as a trial attorney. He told his boss, Neal Sher, what he had learned. "He looked at me and said: Paperclip?" recalls Rosenbaum.

Project Paperclip was the top-secret program to bring German and Austrian scientists and engineers to America toward the end of the war. "Eli, you know those Paperclip cases never go anywhere," Rosenbaum recalls Sher saying. The message was clear: Don't spend a lot of time on it.

But Rosenbaum was determined. The following summer, he discovered there had been a trial at Dachau involving the senior officials from Dora-Mittelbau. The records were stored at the National Archive, just down the street.

An intern who could speak German began reading the microfiche documents. One day, he raced into Rosenbaum's office with news. He had uncovered a document showing that Rudolph had forced prisoners to watch others slowly hang as a crane lifted them, inch by inch, from the ground.

They had the proof: Rudolph was more than just a German scientist caught in wartime Nazi Germany. He was part of the system of abuse.

Rosenbaum arranged to interview him on Oct. 13, 1982. He was nervous. He had interviewed "trigger pullers" before. But never a rocket scientist, a former Nazi listed in Who's Who in America.

A confident Rudolph strode into the interview thinking that he could talk his way out. He even brought space program memorabilia to impress Rosenbaum and Sher. But they had him cold.

Rudolph's voluntary return to Germany was only one of the satisfactions Rosenbaum took from the case. While the special investigations staff was investigating Rudolph, Rosenbaum had gone to the newly built Air and Space Museum to look at the V-2 missile Rudolph built. There was no mention of the slave labor. After Rudolph was exposed, the Smithsonian displayed a photo of the missile's true builders: the concentration camp workers.

GATHERING THE EVIDENCE

Rosenbaum's band of eight prosecutors and 10 historians is a rare breed in law enforcement. They prove 60-year-old crimes without the aid of weapons, fingerprints or, in most cases, eye witnesses. Most of the office's prosecutions come from locating surviving records from Germany and its allies and comparing them to U.S. immigration records.

"These are the ultimate evidentiary jigsaw puzzles," Rosenbaum says.

The most frustrating part of the job is that the office's targets are rarely prosecuted in other countries after their deportation. "No one wants them," Rosenbaum says. "It should be the opposite. Germany and Austria in particular have a moral responsibility."

Germany has prosecuted two of the 25 Nazi criminals returned there. Just 9 of the 64 expelled from the United States have been prosecuted on criminal charges in other countries.

To date, the office's investigative historians have identified 70,000 suspected Nazi and Imperial Japanese war criminals. Border agents have stopped more than 180 suspected war criminals from coming into the United States — including two Nazis in recent years at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

UNCOVERED DOCUMENTS AND MORE CASES

The release of documents after the fall of the Soviet Union has kept the volume of cases constant at the Office of Special Investigations, despite the passage of time. Those documents helped Rosenbaum solve one of his most challenging cases — the one involving 6-year-old Fruma Kaplan.

Aleksandras Lileikis was the chief of the Lithuanian security police in Vilnius province during the Nazi occupation. Records show that men, women and children were marched to a wooded hamlet nearby called Paneriai. They were told to remove their clothes, lined up and shot, their bodies falling into sandy pits, atop other rotting bodies.

In 1983, at age 28, Rosenbaum believed he could prove that Lileikis was responsible for directing some of the executions there. He went to Lileikis' home in suburban Boston, ready to take on the senior Nazi official. Rosenbaum believed he possessed a secret weapon: a copy of an order from Lileikis dated August 22, 1941, to take 52 Jews to the "commander of Special Detachment," an order widely known as a death sentence.

The order bore Lileikis' printed name. But it did not contain his signature. "Maybe real, maybe not," Lileikis told Rosenbaum, almost baiting him.

Rosenbaum's pursuit of Lileikis continued for another decade. With Lithuania's independence in 1990 came the release of more documents — and a turning point in the Lileikis case: Files linked his signature to more than 300 deaths at Paneriai, including little Fruma Kaplan and her mother, Gita.

"I got those files and thought: Gotcha!" Rosenbaum says. "Now we will prove it."

On Sept. 21, 1994, 11 years after Rosenbaum first confronted Lileikis at his home, the Justice Department announced the charges against him. His citizenship was revoked, and he returned to Lithuania.

Rosenbaum never saw him again. An effort to put him on trial in Lithuania failed after the 89-year-old fell ill. He died in 2000 without ever facing the consequences of his actions.

A POWERFUL MISSION

The arrest of Henss and other aging Nazis has prompted questions about the value of expending government resources — more than $5 million a year — looking for criminals who will soon die. But Rosenbaum says the passage of time in no way lessens the horror of the crimes: 6 million Jews and millions of other innocent victims wiped off the earth.

"It also would be cruel for the Holocaust survivors who have made new homes here to have their government tell them in effect that they will henceforth have to share their adopted homeland with people who were part of the Nazi machinery of annihilation."

Rosenbaum likes to think that the work of his staff can also serve as a deterrent. "These cases," he says, "send the message that anyone who dares to contemplate participating in crimes against humanity can reasonably expect to be pursued for however long it takes — even if that is the rest of his life."

The impact of Rosenbaum's work is, of course, deeply personal as well.

He recalls sitting in his office late one night reading a record found in the former Soviet Union. It described the interrogation of a Nazi soldier who had helped shoot Jews.

Truckloads of men, women and children were taken to a forested area, the record says. As they marched away from the trucks, they realized their fate and the "fear-crazed Jews threw down their belongings, and the women and children began to scream and cry," the record states.

Something about those words — "fear-crazed Jews" — socked Rosenbaum in the gut. He felt their terror, the panic they all must have felt in that moment just before the sound of rapid machine gun fire. He just sat there and cried.

"I don't look forward to crying," he says, "but it is comforting when it happens because it assures me that my immersion into this depressing subject for so many years has not hardened me to the reality of what happened."