[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  Black had often thought of the marble halls of the Justice Department along Pennsylvania Avenue, looming over one of the most famous streets in the world, with lawyers and investigators eager to step back in history to bring Nazi criminals to account.

  But the Office of Special Investigations was set up in a dusty, noisy outpost of the Justice Department on the edge of Washington’s red-light district, across the street from a public square that had drawn the nickname “Needle Park” for the dopers and dealers who milled about the trees and benches. Once, the building had been a grand, Beaux Arts–style hotel designed by a local French architect, but by 1979 the guest rooms had been converted into drab government offices that smelled of fried food and antiseptic.

  Despite the nature of the work ahead, OSI had opened with little fanfare. “Agency Studying Nazis Is Upgraded,” the New York Times had reported on page eighteen after Elizabeth Holtzman persuaded the federal government to give the unit a new home inside the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

  None of that mattered to Black as he ducked inside the building, eager for the day ahead and anxious to make a good impression. He was led to a small room with a dropped ceiling and cheap wooden bookshelves. The head of investigations was waiting, and he frowned as he studied Black.

  The investigator was a classic gun-and-badge man, blunt, beefy, twenty years older than Black, and clearly put off by the thought of a pensive intellectual on the hunt for Nazi war criminals. He peered at Black, no patience for pleasantries.

  “Why would you want to come work here?” he asked, his voice flat. “You’ll never write any books here.”

  It seemed a scolding, not a question, and Black hesitated. He could analyze source material, place facts into historical context, hunt down records that had long ago been lost, but those skills seemed unlikely to mollify the man in front of him.

  “I can contribute to making solid cases based on my training,” Black said carefully.

  On the train back to New York, Black was all but certain that his brief stint as a Nazi hunter had abruptly come to an end. When the office manager at OSI called a few months later with a job offer, Black could scarcely believe his good fortune.

  For $23,000 a year he would become OSI’s first formally trained historian, working under a dozen investigators, who were working under a dozen lawyers, who were struggling under the weight of more than three hundred investigations that had long ago turned cold. Alleged Nazi war criminals were living in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Miami, Buffalo, Newark, Houston, San Diego, and Seattle.

  Black told Mary the news and made plans to move to a rented apartment across from the Potomac River in Virginia, a few miles from OSI’s headquarters. On the new job, there would be much to do, and the years were passing quickly. America had fought two major wars since the collapse of Nazi Germany. Suspects were growing older. Eyewitnesses were dying. Most people at OSI gave the unit a year or two, just enough time to investigate and prosecute with the goodwill and funding of the American public behind them.

  Black would have to dig in quickly.

  SITTING ON A southbound plane to Charleston in 1980, Black could not have known that the work of the historians at the Office of Special Investigations would one day help expose a group of Nazi collaborators behind the most lethal mass-murder operation in the Holocaust. He had been on the job in Washington for only a handful of months, and Black was frustrated.

  Though some OSI attorneys had turned to Black for guidance, he felt pegged at times as something of an office misfit, a high-browed scholar rather than a tenacious investigator essential to the unit’s mounting caseload. He was often excluded from interviews with defendants and witnesses, kept from meetings about critical cases.

  Black spent long afternoons in the National Archives and the Library of Congress, studying captured German documents for evidence about the auxiliary police officials, concentration camp guards, propagandists, and civil servants under investigation at OSI. He rarely found the names of suspects, but he could dig up information about their units, duties, commanders, and ties to agencies of the German occupation.

  Black had found an ally in another historian, a Brandeis University graduate brought on to OSI a few months after Black. On Fridays after work, Black and David Marwell took to commiserating in a pub that served cheap burgers to government workers and journalists from the Washington Post, which was headquartered just down the street.

  “What the hell are we doing at this office if we’re not taken seriously?” Marwell would grouse.

  He joined Black in the archives. Once, amid horrific descriptions of war and bloodshed, they came upon a plan by Heinrich Himmler, one of the most feared men in the Third Reich, to use migrating storks to drop Nazi propaganda from the skies of eastern Europe. Nazis, Black and Marwell decided in a rare moment of levity, said the darnedest things.

  What else was out there? They had no way of knowing. Tens of thousands of German documents were stashed behind the Iron Curtain, seized by the Red Army at the end of the war and deposited in Soviet and Eastern European archives. The Communist governments—in Prague, East Berlin, Kiev, Moscow, Budapest, Bucharest—had for years denied access to Western scholars. It was a monumental obstacle for the lawyers and historians at OSI, who worried that critical evidence was just out of reach.

  Though there wasn’t much money for travel, Black and Marwell had been given permission to attend a conference at the Citadel, in South Carolina, where a generation of prominent scholars was gathering to talk about the state of research on Hitler and Nazi Germany. OSI needed expert witnesses to successfully prosecute Nazi perpetrators in court, and Black knew the conference would be filled with qualified historians.

  As the plane made its way south, Black settled back in his seat. He was too new at OSI to raise concerns about the role of the unit’s historians, but something had to change. History needed to have a place in the deliberations, and the hodgepodge group of investigators he reported to were simply not experts on the strategies and practices of the Third Reich.

  They had been pulled from agencies across the federal government: one from the Fish and Wildlife Service, another from the Internal Revenue Service, a third from the US Marshals Service. Some had applied to be part of the operation even though they had little training in Nazi war crimes. Black had begun to suspect that others had simply been assigned to the unit.

  In Charleston, Black and Marwell dropped their bags at the hotel and set out for the conference. Finally, Black thought, he would be among like-minded thinkers, scholars and researchers who had mined the most abominable moments in world history to gain a better, deeper understanding of human behavior.

  Dozens of people milled about the conference room, but Black found himself captivated by a speaker with a disarming Southern drawl. Charlie Sydnor, a history professor from Virginia, had authored a best-selling book about the work of the SS Death’s Head Division, formed from SS guard units in prewar concentration camps. Black listened to him deliver appalling details about genocide in simple, striking prose.

  On the second day of the conference, Black and Marwell followed Sydnor into the men’s room.

  “Don’t be nervous,” Marwell quipped, flashing his Department of Justice credentials as Sydnor stood at a urinal. “We’re not here to arrest you.”

  Sydnor didn’t flinch. “You didn’t get that wet, did you?”

  Black laughed, straight from the belly. For years afterward, Sydnor would take great pride in eliciting laughs from the younger historian, who considered distinguishing between right and wrong no less than a moral imperative for a sober student of history.

  Black and Marwell described the mission of OSI. “We’re going to bring cases against people who got into the country through fraud, by not revealing their true backgrounds,” Marwell said. “These are people who were auxiliary policemen and local collaborators.”

  “What the hell are they doing here?” Sydnor asked.
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  “They lied about their backgrounds,” Marwell said. “They were very good at posing as victims.”

  “We think there are hundreds of these people,” Black added.

  The Office of Special Investigations needed help. Federal law prohibited the government from waging criminal cases against defendants who had committed crimes on foreign soil during the war. But in civil court, under the rules introduced by Elizabeth Holtzman, OSI could seek to denaturalize and then deport anyone who had assisted in persecution and then concealed their activities during the immigration process.

  It wasn’t the toughest, most dramatic solution, but pursuing criminal cases against alleged Nazi perpetrators in the United States would have likely required a Constitutional amendment and new federal criminal laws. And potential sponsors in Congress had decided that there was simply no time for a state-by-state ratification process, given the advanced age of suspects.

  OSI, Black and Marwell told Sydnor, needed a seasoned, likable historian who could serve as an expert witness at civil court hearings, explaining the origins of mass murder to American judges who generally knew very little about the sweeping network of collaborators involved in Nazi crimes. It was an uncharted field involving an entirely new set of legal issues and questions that would be aired not only before the courts but before the entire world since no other country in 1980 was actively and aggressively pursuing Nazi criminals.

  Sydnor, a Southerner and a Christian, would be a charming, frank, and unlikely spokesman.

  “If American citizenship is to have any meaning at all,” Marwell said, “we have to take it back.”

  Sydnor moved to the sink and studied the two men. He nodded and grinned.

  “You two,” he said, “have become gumshoes.”

  Chapter Five

  Darkness Comes My Way

  Detroit

  1982

  The defendant swept into the federal courtroom wearing a cleric’s cassock that brushed the floor. His hair was white and his face was round, fixed with a thick right eyebrow that lurched upward, as if he held a great secret.

  Some men blamed for inciting the murders of hundreds of Jews might have appeared indignant, but the sixty-eight-year-old Romanian Orthodox archbishop remained still and inscrutable as he sat between three defense attorneys in the federal building that stretched across a full city block in downtown Detroit.

  From behind the prosecutor’s table, Peter Black studied the man he had come to know only through what history had left behind: a trail of clues, decades old and long forgotten, scattered across two continents.

  Finally, the Office of Special Investigations had turned to Black to play a major role in what would become one of its most infamous cases. For most of 1981, Black had retraced the steps of Archbishop Valerian Trifa from more than forty years earlier, when he had been a prominent leader of the Romanian Iron Guard, a violent, fascist, and antisemitic movement whose members greeted each other with the Roman salute—arms extended and palms down.

  As editor of an Iron Guard newspaper, Trifa in January 1941 had printed a call to arms against the regime of Romanian military dictator Ion Antonescu, whom the Iron Guard believed was moving too slowly against so-called enemies of the state.

  A group of Jews and Jew-lovers are ruling everything.

  In the streets, Jews were stabbed, beaten, shot, doused with gasoline, and set on fire. In a Bucharest slaughterhouse, they were murdered in a fashion intended to mock kosher butchering techniques, then left to hang on meat hooks. Others were assembled before a burning synagogue and forced to dance to the sound of gunfire. Afterward, Trifa fled to the Reich to avoid capture by Romanian authorities, who tried him in absentia and sentenced him to life in prison.

  He had spent four years as a guest of Reich authorities before fleeing to Vienna and eventually to Paris. In 1950, he made his way to the United States and quickly rose in the church, settling into a sprawling farmhouse in the suburbs of Michigan.

  There had been talk since the early 1950s about Trifa’s Nazi past, and the federal government eventually filed a complaint against him, repeatedly pressed by a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Romania who had emigrated to the United States after the war. OSI took over the prosecution, and Black had helped prepare for a hearing, organizing Trifa’s articles and speeches as well as German Foreign Office and police documents found in Bonn, Vienna, Bucharest, and other cities. Black had discovered the original leaflet written by Trifa and dispersed to a crowd in Bucharest on the night before the rioting.

  All told, OSI prosecutors had a trove of 750 documents, along with a five-hundred-page report written by Black that chronicled Trifa’s activities during the war. “Trifa’s speeches, articles and newspaper editorials,” Black had concluded, “had pounded home the themes of hatred towards Jews and foreigners.”

  The deportation hearing for an archbishop who had once delivered the benediction before Congress had drawn intense interest, and journalists, Jewish leaders, and lawyers packed the courtroom. The diocese had hired its own attorney, who sat at the defense table alongside Trifa.

  Black wondered whether the archbishop would take the stand, a tantalizing thought after so many months of research, burrowing inside the mind of a stranger. Black often wished he could talk to the dead, and now he found himself sitting only a few feet away from a historical subject.

  The OSI prosecutor on the case was Kathleen Coleman, a meticulous lawyer who had joined the unit after working as an assistant attorney general in the US Virgin Islands. Months earlier, Black and Coleman had traveled to Israel together to prepare for another case, sharing the short highway between Tel Aviv and Haifa with Israeli troop convoys that were headed to and from the battle inside Lebanon, which had been invaded by Israeli forces a week earlier.

  On a break, Black visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance center, lingering before an exhibit that showcased a postcard written by a Hungarian Jewish boy. In 1944, the boy had been deported to Auschwitz, the largest and deadliest concentration camp complex, about sixty kilometers west of German-occupied Krakow.

  “I’m okay,” the boy had written to family in Hungary. “They are putting us to work.”

  He had used big, looping letters, the careful cursive of a grade-school child. Black stood there for a long while, thinking about his own son, Aaron, born just two months earlier, and knowing that the Hungarian boy was likely already dead by the time his note reached home.

  Immigration judge Bellino D’Ambrosio called the Trifa hearing to order, and Coleman stood up. She would summon a leading expert on Romanian history and several historical witnesses to the stand, but the heart of the case rested on Trifa’s speeches, newspaper editorials, and articles.

  Looking at the archbishop, who had once proclaimed that “Yid” blood was vile, Black wondered what had moved the son of a Transylvanian schoolteacher to such a hateful place. Coleman turned to the judge.

  “Had the truth been known about Viorel Trifa,” Coleman said, using Trifa’s given name, “he would have been excluded from the United States.”

  “I think the government has vastly overstated what the evidence will show,” Trifa’s defense attorney countered. “The government’s characterizations are historically incorrect.”

  Black knew with absolute certainty that wasn’t the case. He had documented every stage of Trifa’s life, and the work had been grueling. At home at night, he often sat with Mary watching Perry Mason reruns, trying to free his mind from grim, dark spaces.

  TWO DAYS IN federal court passed quickly. On the morning of the third day, Black glanced across the room at Trifa, whose eyes were hidden behind horn-rimmed glasses. Coleman had spent hours probing Trifa’s involvement in the Iron Guard, and overnight there was talk among the lawyers about a settlement in the case.

  From the prosecutor’s table, Allan Ryan stood up. Though some members of the Jewish community had balked at the idea of an Irish Catholic leading the new Office of Special Investigations, Black c
onsidered the thirty-seven-year-old former assistant to the solicitor general a fierce advocate for the unit. Broad shouldered, with a thick mustache and beard, the ex–Marine Corps captain had gathered the OSI staff together a few months after Black moved to Washington.

  No federal judge, Ryan warned, was going to revoke the citizenship of an older, law-abiding immigrant simply because of falsified information on a visa application.

  “These are war-crimes cases. These are not immigration cases,” Ryan had insisted. “What we have to do is show the judge and whoever else is watching that this sixty-five-year-old guy who works in a factory or who owns a motel in Florida, we’ve got to show what this guy did in 1941, ’42, ’43, ’44, and ’45. We need the witnesses. We need the evidence. We need the documents. We need to paint the whole picture for the judge, and we’re going to have to start at the beginning.”

  Ryan had decided that historians needed to play a central role in the investigative process. He gradually reduced the number of criminal investigators and hired more historians. “I want all the historians to think like lawyers,” Ryan said, “and I want all the lawyers to think like historians. That’s the only way we’re going to make progress here.”

  Black had been grateful for the focus on context and history.

  For two days in federal court, Ryan had sat quietly next to Coleman. Now he turned to face the judge. “We have agreed to a settlement of the case.”

  The archbishop, Ryan said, would admit that he had been a member of the Iron Guard and had perjured himself to come to America. He would leave the United States within sixty days of obtaining travel documents from a country willing to accept him. In exchange, the Justice Department would no longer pursue the case.

  The judge turned to Trifa, and Black leaned forward in his chair, eager, for the record of history, to hear the man’s voice and even the briefest explanation about his work and mindset during the war. Trifa stood up and made his way to the lectern in the middle of the courtroom.