[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  As the general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, Rosenbaum made a formidable partner. He had become a trial lawyer at OSI only months out of Harvard Law School, just as Baltic and Ukrainian émigré groups were mobilizing against the unit. In native-language newspapers, the groups called on Congress to impose a statute of limitations on war-crime prosecutions and accused OSI leaders of collaborating with the KGB.

  “We are getting evidence wherever it can be found,” Allan Ryan said early on as he stood before the Ukrainian American Bar Association during its annual convention in New Jersey.

  FBI analysts would forensically examine fingerprints on Nazi records sent by the Soviets. Document examiners would study handwriting samples and confirm that the paper was used during the war. Chemists would use hypodermic needles to withdraw and analyze the age of the ink. Still, Ryan received death threats, a handful of anonymous letters with a map to his house in northern Virginia that he had turned over to the FBI.

  Frustrated by the pushback and drained by a succession of wrenching interviews with survivors, Rosenbaum left OSI for a New York City law firm and, later, the World Jewish Congress. From his new offices in New York, he had often wondered why Pat Buchanan and others had taken such a contemptuous, public stance against OSI.

  Rosenbaum could at least in part understand the resistance from émigré groups. Many OSI defendants came from the Baltic States and Ukraine, and some of the evidence against them had been sent by the Soviets, who after the war had imposed hard-line Communism throughout much of Eastern Europe. But Buchanan, who had once chastised the Justice Department for “wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime,” was another matter entirely. His words made Rosenbaum cringe.

  ELI ROSENBAUM’S MOTHER had been born in Berlin and his father in Dresden. They had both fled Germany as teenagers in the 1930s when anti-Jewish hysteria mounted across the region.

  His father returned five years later to fight with the US Army’s Third Infantry Division but was transferred to a psychological-warfare unit in the Seventh Army when his supervisors discovered that he spoke fluent German. He questioned high-value prisoners and monitored German radio broadcasts, including some transmitted from Dresden on the night Allied warplanes leveled the city of his birth.

  In New York after the war, he had regaled his young son with light stories about the army—how his comrades once convinced him to drink too much and climb into a boxing ring even though he wasn’t a fighter, how he had changed his name from Rosenbaum to Rowe in case he was captured by the Germans.

  But talk about the fate of the Jews was decidedly off-limits, even in a dining room with an oil-burning menorah that the family had managed to take out of Germany. In a split-level house humming with the lyrical voice of WQXR-FM classical-radio host Duncan Pirnie—“Tonight, we wake up to Sleeping Beauty, by Tchaikovsky”—Irving and Hanni Rosenbaum monitored the radio for news from Israel, where Hanni’s family lived during the war.

  Rosenbaum desperately wanted to understand his father’s silences. But his boyhood marched on, a blur of five-cent baseball-card packs with bubble gum that cracked when Rosenbaum chewed it, of fingers smudged by the fresh ink of the Friday afternoon paper, with Gimbels department store ads and comics that appeared in glorious full color.

  One winter day in 1970, Rosenbaum and his father were inching up a snow-covered highway in the family’s Cadillac, heading north to a ski outing. Irving Rosenbaum had lapsed into one of his silences.

  Finally, he spoke. “You know I was sent to Dachau the day after its liberation?”

  The question came suddenly, and Rosenbaum was quick with a reply. “What did you see?”

  He waited for an answer, but there was only more silence. He looked at his father, whose eyes were wet. His mouth was open as if he was about to explain, but the question hung in the air. Rosenbaum would never get his father to talk about Dachau, with thirty railroad cars filled with corpses.

  At OSI, Rosenbaum had been a measured, meticulous prosecutor, brown hair parted down the side, mustache neatly clipped. He had spent hours strategizing with Neal Sher, who began to call the younger lawyer “Roosevelt” after a telephone operator once botched his last name.

  Rosenbaum had launched and led the development of OSI’s case against NASA scientist Arthur L. H. Rudolph, who was accused of overseeing slave laborers at a factory that produced rockets for the German war machine. Rudolph, one of more than a hundred German rocket engineers who were secretly brought to the United States after the war, had agreed in 1984 to give up his citizenship and move back to Germany.

  That year, Rosenbaum left the Justice Department and found himself free to publicly denounce OSI’s detractors. He had maintained a high profile, directing the World Jewish Congress investigation that in 1986 helped unearth the Nazi past of United Nations secretary general Kurt Waldheim.

  Rosenbaum had already heard about the plan to deport Karl Linnas to Panama when Elizabeth Holtzman called in April 1987. It occurred to Rosenbaum that the decision had been made on the first day of the Jewish holiday of Passover, when Jewish organizations that would surely oppose the plan were closed.

  “The Passover plot,” Holtzman said wryly.

  Before dawn the next morning, Holtzman and Rosenbaum caught a flight to Washington and took a cab to the Panamanian embassy. Rosenbaum hoped they weren’t too late. Reporters were set up outside the building when they got there, alerted by the Jewish groups that Rosenbaum and Holtzman had scrambled to call the night before.

  Rosenbaum reached for his leather briefcase, tightened the belt of his camel-colored overcoat, and climbed the stone steps to the embassy’s front door. A flustered aide showed them inside, where senior embassy officials were waiting. There was no need for discussion. Panama was withdrawing its offer to provide refuge to Linnas. The aide shook his head, glancing outside.

  “Embarrassing,” he muttered, adding that the embassy hadn’t seen so much media attention since the negotiations over the Panama Canal in the 1970s.

  Rosenbaum thanked the aide and left. He went to find a pay phone. “Chief,” Rosenbaum sighed when Sher came on the line.

  Linnas would not be leaving for Panama.

  ROSENBAUM WANTED TO catch the first flight home to New York, to banish all thoughts of Linnas and his killing pits. But in a matter of hours, Pat Buchanan planned to appear live on national television, and Neal Sher needed Rosenbaum to defend the unit.

  The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major television networks had extensively covered the Linnas case, and two months earlier Rosenbaum had appeared on CNN’s nightly live debate show, Crossfire, to square off with a member of an Estonian émigré group lobbying to keep Linnas out of the Soviet Union.

  Sher wanted Rosenbaum to appear again, opposite Buchanan. Rosenbaum tried to say no, but officials at the Department of Justice had declined CNN’s invitation. Rosenbaum took a cab to the CNN studios in Washington and sat down on the set, pressing his palms to his pant legs to straighten the wrinkles from the suit he had put on before dawn that morning.

  Rosenbaum shifted in his seat, squeezed between Buchanan and conservative commentator Robert Novak, who would make a last-minute pitch to keep Linnas out of the Soviet Union. Why did I let Neal talk me into this? Rosenbaum thought as he waited. He was about to be doubled-teamed by two of Washington’s most experienced debaters.

  The cameras started rolling. “Mr. Rosenbaum, Mr. Rosenbaum,” Novak said when the show began. “How would you feel if you had a client, or if you yourself were stuck in a position where you were placed by the instrumentalities of the US government on the tender mercies of the Soviet Union? Do you trust Soviet justice? Isn’t it an oxymoron—Soviet justice?”

  “It’s not a matter of trusting Soviet justice,” Rosenbaum quickly replied. “Karl Linnas has been tried.…The important thing to remember about Karl Linnas is that…he admitted…that he had been at the Tartu Nazi concentration camp, that he served in a supervisory capacity, that he had
the guard detail…under his command. What would you have the viewers think that Mr. Linnas was doing…while people were dying?”

  “To be a guard at that camp,” Buchanan interrupted, “is not an offense for which you should be hanged, which is what would happen to him in the Soviet Union. What is your objection to sending him to Panama? He loses his citizenship. He’s out of the country.”

  “In Panama, he will spend the rest of his days living very comfortably under palm trees,” Rosenbaum shot back.

  “And the Soviet Union will hang him.”

  “Mr. Linnas was found by an American court to be responsible for these crimes.”

  “Being a supervisor in a concentration camp is not a hanging offense,” Buchanan countered.

  Later, Rosenbaum would think about the parents and children torn apart at the gates of Nazi-run camps.

  “What I want to know,” Buchanan said, “is why the World Jewish Congress is collaborating with an antisemitic regime like the Soviet Union.”

  “If we are collaborating with anyone, it is with the US judicial system, which you obviously don’t trust. It’s with the United States Department of Justice.”

  “Look,” Buchanan said. “… Do you want this guy hanged without a trial?”

  “We want him sent to—”

  “To the Soviet Union,” Buchanan said flatly.

  “Any country that will do something other than to allow him to live in peace for the rest of [his] life. He committed a capital offense.”

  Rosenbaum went on. “This man has been before at least ten courts in seven years in the United States. He’s had more due process than any person in American history, at least that I can think of. The court found specifically that he had committed acts of mass murder, time and again.”

  “You can sleep well at night,” Novak asked, “knowing you are sending a man into a Soviet execution chamber?”

  “The only thing that keeps me up at night is reading the district court’s account of what Karl Linnas did, the atrocities that he perpetuated.”

  Buchanan interrupted. “Because you hate him so much you would send him to Moscow…to be executed? Okay. I think you ought to examine your conscience.”

  Rosenbaum left the studio certain that no other unit in the history of the Department of Justice would face a more sustained, intensive, and public attack than the Office of Special Investigations.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, Neal Sher called the immigration office at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Though Linnas was preparing an emergency appeal to the US Supreme Court, Sher wanted to be ready with travel plans. Unless the court stepped in or another country agreed to provide refuge, Linnas would be deported to the Soviet Union as planned.

  Sher needed to identify an airline that flew directly to an Eastern Bloc country so that Linnas would have no chance of claiming political asylum when he stepped off the plane. Sher found a direct flight to Czechoslovakia. The next morning Sher called the Czech embassy in Washington to alert local officials.

  Four days passed. Finally, Sher’s phone rang. The Supreme Court had declined to hear the final appeal, clearing the way for deportation.

  Sher raced to call immigration officials at the airport. “It’s a go.”

  Less than an hour later, Linnas, in a gray suit and brown cap, with a thick white beard that stretched from ear to ear, was taken to the plane. Linnas struggled at the door of the aircraft, yelling, “Murder! Kidnapping!” before federal agents pushed him inside.

  Sher stayed in his office late, until the plane was well over the Atlantic Ocean. After thirty-six years in the United States, Linnas was finally going home to answer for his crimes.

  Chapter Eight

  God’s Grace

  Washington, D.C.

  1988

  Michael Bernstein weighed 155 pounds on a full belly, but at thirty-six he was a storied prosecutor at the Office of Special Investigations who spent long afternoons in the records room, a lone figure hunched under the fuzzy glow of fluorescent lights, files from cold cases spread across the table.

  No one was much surprised to find him there, searching for clues that may have been missed and then wandering back to his office, where he had taped an adage from a fortune cookie to the door: The law sometimes sleeps but it never dies.

  After particularly grueling days interviewing indignant old men who had once been armed and eager to kill, Bernstein would tell his wife, “This is not what I imagined doing as an attorney.”

  But his work consumed him, and Stephanie Bernstein learned to forgive the heap of yesterday’s clothes on the side of the bed or the day she had to catch a taxi to her job as a clinical social worker because the Chrysler sedan that she shared with her husband was still sitting in the OSI parking lot. Bernstein forgot he had it and rode the bus home.

  “I’m sure one day I’ll find this amusing, Mickey,” she said, eyeing her contrite husband, whose brown hair was slicked back and parted down the side. “But right now, I am pissed off.”

  Bernstein would have been a history professor if law school hadn’t seemed more practical, and at OSI he spent hours with the historians, who were almost always mired in some dark mystery, fitting together clues—a roster from West Berlin, an identity card from Warsaw, a confession sent from Moscow—with a kind of deliberate order often missing from the frenetic pace of prosecutorial law. OSI had long relied on tips from outside sources, but now the historians were copying massive batches of archival records and cross-checking them against records of immigrants who had come to the United States after the war.

  Bernstein and Peter Black had worked on investigations of former guards from the Mauthausen concentration camp, built on the bank of the Danube River near a stone quarry outside Linz, Austria. The only massive concentration camp on Austrian territory, it had been a horrid place where starving prisoners were forced to heave granite blocks up uneven steps to the top of the quarry.

  Other lawyers thrived inside the courtroom, but bluster made Bernstein cringe. Methodical and excessively patient, he had convinced every OSI defendant on his roster to voluntarily relinquish US citizenship, avoiding the hassle and expense of trials.

  At the chilly start of December 1988, Bernstein agreed to fly to Vienna on behalf of OSI. He would be home in time to celebrate Chanukah with his seven-year-old daughter and four-year-old son.

  IN AUSTRIA, BERNSTEIN would see about a matter that had been thwarting the mission of the Office of Special Investigations for years. In Bonn in 1954, the Foreign Office of West Germany had signed a critical commitment, neatly typed and bearing the coat of arms for the Federal Republic of Germany, a black eagle, wings extended wide against a golden field.

  The Foreign Office has the honor to inform the Office

  of the United States High Commissioner for Germany…

  The country had agreed to take back Nazi perpetrators discovered in the United States after the war. American diplomats also secured a nearly identical guarantee from neighboring Austria, which promised that Nazi criminals would be readmitted “upon demand of the American authorities.”

  US officials had tucked copies of the guarantees inside the immigration files of thousands of European refugees who entered the country in the mid-1950s, and no one thought much about it—a rather technical agreement between friendly nations—until the Office of Special Investigations discovered dozens of Nazi collaborators guarding ugly secrets in America’s cities and suburbs.

  In the early 1980s, juggling a growing roster of OSI defendants, Eli Rosenbaum and Neal Sher had pressed the matter at the German embassy in Washington. Without countries willing to readmit Nazi perpetrators, OSI could not enforce deportation orders.

  “We can’t find a copy of that guaranty in our files,” the German Consul General told Sher and Rosenbaum, frowning at the two men. Rosenbaum, fresh out of law school, watched his boss cringe.

  “It’s in US government immigration files,” Sher had replied sternly. Thousands of them.

 
More than two hundred thousand refugees were admitted into the United States under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, a sweeping immigration law passed by Congress to assist displaced eastern Europeans in the years after the war. Sher produced a copy of the agreement, but the German Consul General was indignant.

  “My government questions its authenticity.”

  The text, she pointed out, didn’t contain the umlaut, a character that appears over several vowels in the German alphabet. Rosenbaum frowned. “You can’t seriously suggest that this isn’t authentic.”

  She shrugged, and Rosenbaum knew that the conversation was over. He thought of the concentration camp guards and police commanders who had committed crimes in the name of the German state and then escaped justice by fleeing to the shores of America, home to tens of thousands of Jewish survivors and the veterans who had crossed an ocean to free them. How many Nazi collaborators would get to grow old in comfort while OSI pleaded with Germany to take them back? Unlike the US government, Germany possessed the legal authority to criminally prosecute Nazi perpetrators.

  The Austrians had resisted, too, arguing that the readmission guarantee was nearly three decades old and no longer valid. In truth, the agreements applied only to refugees who came to the United States in the mid-1950s. Hundreds of thousands had emigrated earlier in the tumultuous postwar years when Communism was advancing across Eastern Europe.

  Rosenbaum and Sher believed that Germany and Austria bore an ethical obligation to take back the criminals that the Third Reich had created, empowered, and armed, no matter when they had slipped out of Europe and crossed the Atlantic.

  Turned down by the West Germans and Austrians, OSI started encouraging Nazi defendants to leave voluntarily for West Germany, where they could step off the plane, renounce their American citizenship, and potentially continue to receive Social Security benefits. Rosenbaum also proposed sending defendants to the US occupation sector of West Berlin.