OUR 'GOOD NEIGHBORS'

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302170016-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 16
• Publication Date: February 17, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302170016-5
AT l. [ri i; r, TE iSED
ON
Our 'good'
neighbors'
I n search of Nazi
criminals disguised
as ordinary people
By Peter Gomer
Most of thein were ordinary people
until prosecutor Allan Ryan en-
tered their lives. They came to
this country after World War II
and lived quietly, calling no attention to
themselves. They became American
citizens, flew the flag, never talked about
the war or about the Jews. Never.
"They took on protective coloration,"
Ryan says. "Their neighbors never sus-
pected a thing. Time after time, we'd be
told, 'That sweet man? I can't believe it.
Not him. "
Hours after Ryan filed denaturalization
charges against Brookfield resident Al-
bert Deutscher, 61, the railway worker
was struck by a speeding train in the
suburb. His family called it an accident,
but the coroner ruled suicide. Deutscher,
Ryan charged, had been a Ukrainian
militiaman in Odessa who met trains
crammed with Jews and shot them as
they were drivep out.
In Boston, eight days after Ryan filed
suit against him, Michael Popczuk, a 63-
year-old carpenter, put a shotgun to his
head and pulled the trigger. Popczuk,
Ryan says, had been a Ukrainian auxilia-
ryman who, among other things, had
harnessed Jews to wooden carts and
forced them to pull cargo between villag-
es, whipping them as he would oxen.
Recently, Arthur Rudolph, a German-
born scientist who helped develop the
Saturn V moon rocket for the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration,
left voluntarily for West Germany after
he was accused of having worked slave
laborers to death at the Nazi V-2 rocket
factory in the Dora concentration camp,
From 1980 to 1983, Ryan was chief of
the Justice Department's anti-Nazi(unit,
the Office of Special Investigations tOSI].
He spearheaded the federal government's,
first concerted effort-albeit nearly 40,
years late-to identify, bring to trial and
deport Nazi war criminals from the U.S.
Ryan, 39, doesn't look like an avenger..
Calm, thoughtful, he puffs his pipe and
shows little emotion. He isn't Jewish and
was a baby when the Holocaust occurred.
Good grades in law school earned him a
clerkship with Supreme Court Justice
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
17 February 1985
Byron White. After that, Ryan became a
federal prosecutor and took the OSI job
as a challenge. He quit after 3' years to
write a book because the work was- get-
ting to him, he says. Next month, he will
become the assistant general counsel for
Harvard University.
"My most conservative estimate is that
at least 10,000 Nazi war criminals illegal-
ly came here after World War II," Ryan
charges.
"These weren't just Nazi sympathizers
or 'ex-Nazis.' They were war criminals,
the handmaidens of Nazism, who eagerly
took part in the persecution of millions of
people. They haven't been hard to find,
once we finally started looking."
Ryan's book, "Quiet Neighbors: Prose-
cuting Nazi War Criminals in America"
[Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $15.95], is a
volatile indictment of governmental indif-
ference and inaction. Ryan says war
criminals were "invited in" because no
precautions were taken to keep them out.
He places responsibility on the "brazen-
ly discriminatory".'Displaced Persons Act
of 1948, charging that it "'was written to
exclude as many concentration camp sur-
vivors as possible and to include as many
Baltic and Ukrainian and ethnic German
refugees as it could get away with."
This occurred, Ryan says, despite the
knowledge that such groups, while containing hun-
dreds of thousands of innocent war victims, were
"infested" with Nazi collaborators.... - .
Some 400,000 refugees entered this country under
the act between 1948 and 1952, and lax-.enforcement
procedures made it easy for the collaborators to lie
:about their past and sneak:through, Ryan says. Once
here, they just lay low; nobody came'after them.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952
loosened things up even more, abandoning the previ-
ous legal exclusion of former Nazis. Then the SS just
walked in, Ryan says. -
He believes that postwar discrimination against the
Jews was no accident. He quotes isolationist former
Sen. Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, as urging the nation to
'"seek good blood and keep out the rats; we've got
enough of them already." Former West Virginia Sen.
William Chapman Revercomb' was even less subtle:
"We could solve this DP problem all right if we could
work out some bill that would keep out the Jews."
Specific exclusion hinged on a clause in the act that
said only refugees who had arrived at the 900 DP
camps in Germany, Austria and Italy by Dec.. 22,
1945, would be eligible, Ryan says.
"This looks innocuous," he says, "but it was under-
stood at the time to be an exclusion of the Jews. In
1946, about 100,000 of the surviving Jews left the DP
camps in Germany and went back to Poland. But
they were driven back to the camps by pogroms.
However, they missed the cutoff-their time had not
been continuous. Others went to Palestine in 1946 and
1947. Only about 10,000 Jews, roughly 1 percent of the
DP population, had been in the camps before the
cutoff and thus were eligible to come here."
Conversely, Congress extended America's hand to
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 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302170016-5
the Balts, Ryan says, requiring that 40 percent of the
immigrants be from countries that had been "de facto
annexed by a foreign power-a diplomatic euphem-
ism for Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, whose incorpo-
ration into the Soviet Union in 1944 had never been
recognized by this country, and indeed is still not."
The third discriminatory provision, Ryan says, was
an outright preference given to farmers, who were
entitled to 30 percent of the available slots.
"This provision favored Ukrainians and Poles at the
expense of Jews, fewer than 4 percent of whom were
farmers," he says. "Many war criminals we've
prosecuted had claimed to be farmers."
Finally, according to Ryan, the law expressed
preference for Volksdeutsche, the German ethnics of
the East who had left their homelands to fight Hitler's
war, if they had managed to get back to Germany.
About 50,000 emigrated.
Once in this country, the collaborators, like the
innocent refugees, became "model citizens and quiet
neighbors," Ryan,says. The U.S. in the 1950s was
much too concerned about communists to care about
Nazis.
Starting in the mid-1970s there was a rebirth of
interest in the Holocaust, and the House Judiciary
Committee held hearings on what the Immigration
and Naturalization Service had done about charges
that Nazis had come to America after the war. The
answer, Ryan says, was virtually nothing. In 1979,
Congress appropriated $2.3 million to the-Justice
Department to create the unusual OSI.
Since then, a rush to justice has occurred. By
'Ryan's count, about 50 cases have been-filed by the
OSI. Of these, 16 have come to trial; the government
has won 14, with verdicts pending in the others.
Such expertise got Ryan assigned to the Klaus
Barbie case, which the prosecutor investigated for the
federal government. As Gestapo chief in Lyon,
France; Barbie earned the title "the Butcher of Lyon"
for having murdered thousands of Jews and French
Resistance fighters. After the war, Barbie was re-
cruited into the American intelligence network, which
facilitated his -escape to Bolivia, where he lived for 33
years until his expulsion in 1982. He is in a French
prison awaiting trial. On Ryan's recommendaton, the
U.S. issued a formal apology to France.
The success of the OSI has even extended its
mandate. The unit recently was assigned to look into
charges that U.S. intelligence officers arrested,
Allan Ryan: "My most conservative estimate is that at
least 10,000 Nazi war criminals illegally came here
after World War II."
questioned and released Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef
Mengele in Vienna in 1947.
Deporting war criminals from the U.S. is not easy,
Ryan says. Defendants cannot be tried for crimes
committed abroad. They may be deported only if it is
proved they lied about their past to enter the country.
In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court further prohibited
deportation without "clear and convincing" evidence,
a burden of proof higher than, in other civil cases.
Even when deportation is ordered, some other coun-
try must be willing to accept the deportee.
"The process is exceptionally slow," Ryan says. "A
naturalized citizen determined to exhaust all his
appeals can go before seven separate forums before
actually being deported. This is as it should be.
American citizenship, and the stripping of it, should
not be taken lightly."
But the OSI has been nothing if not busy. Going
back to captured original records kept by the Nazis,
the OSI staff of 50 lawyers, historians and investiga-
tors use a basic list of 50,000 concentration camp
guards and SS officers and check it against the names
of American immigrants. This tedious work is done
by hand. -
Hearsay accusations are checked out and usually '
dismissed-"My-neighbor-is-a-Nazi letters," Ryan
calls them. When federal eyebrows are raised, the
OSI interviews the actual suspects. Witnesses are
located and their testimony weighed.
Investigators work with the famous Nazi hunter
Simon Wiesenthal and others. In 1980, Ryan obtained
the cooperation of the Soviet Union and its satellites.
In 1944, he says, the Soviets captured the records of
many Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian collabora-
tors, some of whom later came to America under the
Displaced Persons Act. Documents have been sent to
this country, and in a unique arrangement, deposi=
dons from purported witnesses are videotaped in the
U.S.S.R.
Such cooperation has made Ryan and the OSI
controversial. Members of ethnic nationalist groups
have charged that, the prosecutors are dupes of the
K~$_because .the Soviet Union has aided the U.S. in
"~gatherng evidence for prosecutions. Many Americans
who legally came here after the war accuse Ryan of
anti-
Semitic. Other tarthem-and their ring even asserththattlRyannhhas sand-
Sesought to build his career on outrage over the
Holocaust.
"Baloney," he replies to such charges. "Obviously
not' all refugees were collaborators. But the fact is,
without any doubt, that the collaboration in the Baltic
states and in the Ukraine was as high as anywhere in
Europe. And refugees from those 'countries went to
the head of the line for immigration to the United
States."
Moreover, Ryan says that when he began his work,
he wrote to as many nationalist groups as he could
locate, asking for their cooperation.
"Only the Poles responded and offered to help," he
says. "From the others, absolute zero. Nothing. If you
ask them why, they'll say we're all KGB.pawns. But
I'm talking about a time before we i~ maven estab-
lished our cooperation with the Soviets. So that
doesn't explain it."
Some of Ryan's targets have been notorious. A
current case involves Andrija Artukovic, the 85-year-
old former interior minister of the Nazi-occupied
puppet state of Independent Croatia, now part of
Yugoslavia. Artukovic for years has been accused of
complicity in the murders of nearly 800,000 Jews,
Serbs and Gypsies. Backed by powerful friends, Ryan
says, and . a government that refused to hand him
over to the communists, he has been allowed to live
peacefully in California since the war. He is fighting
extradition to Yugoslavia.
Also known to lackadaisical authorities, according
to Ryan, was the prominent Romanian Orthodox
Bishop Viorel Trifa, who formerly was ensconced in
his church's palatial headquarters in Grass Lake,
Mich. Then the OSI proved that Trifa had been a
leader of the viciously anti-Semitic Romanian fascist
Iron Guard and as a newspaper editor in Bucharest,
had incited his countrymen to the 1941 riot in which
Jewish men, women and children were skinned alive
and left hanging on meat hooks in a slaughterhouse.
Before being deported to Portugal last year, Trifa
complained to the press that he was a victim of the
times. "The point was to revive the Holocaust he
said. "But all this talk by the Jews about the
Holocaust is-going to backfire--against the Jews.
"Something'" he says, darkly, "will be done."
Such a telling response is unusual, Ryan says. Most
of the people he prosecuted have admitted to nothing.
The lack of contrition, he says, began to haunt him in
1981 when he proved that John Demjanjuk, a
Cleveland automaker, was in truth "Ivan the Terri-
ble," the infamous Ukrainian sadist who manned the
pumps for the Nazi gas chamber at the Treblinka
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3.
"He was absolutely impassive in court," Ryan
says."His family didn't know about his past. They
were being tortured in court every day. The evidence
was overwhelming. I was looking for some sign ...
some acknowledgement ... some conscience. But
there was nothing.
"Demjanjuk was not special, no more unique than a
cockroach. But the Nazi attitude he represents is
significant. In his smug silence he was telling us
something: 'I did it once and got away with it. I won't
explain how or why, for if I did, you might understand
it a little better than you did before and learn to
recognize it when it rears its head again.'. "
Ryan says that a few dozen prosecutions is statisti-
cally meaningless but symbolically important. Most
of these war criminals, he admits, will retire to
collect Medicaid, Social Security, pensions and never
be caught.
"But they don't know who will be next," he notes.
"One of the most important things we've done by
prosecuting people like Artukovic is to cause a lot of
guilty people in this country to have sleepless nights.
If that's true, I'm all for it"'
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/11/08: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302170016-5