FORMER NAZI WAR CRIMINAL DEPORTED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120064-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 25, 2011
• Sequence Number: 64
• Publication Date: August 14, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/25: CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120064-0
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
14 August 1984
FORMER NAZI WAR CRIMINAL DEPORTED
BY PAULA SCHWED
WASHINGTON
STAT
An accused Nazi war criminal who lived in the United States for 35 years and!,
served as archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America has been
deported, the Justice Department says.
Department officials said Tuesday Viorel Trifa, 70, a leader of the
anti-Semitic Iron Guard government in Romania during World War II, flew from New
York to Lisbon Monday night after Portugal granted him a visa.
If he had not found a country willing to accept him, he was due to be
deported to his native Romania in October.
''This persecutor of countless innocent Jews before and during World War II
cannot consider the United States a haven,'' Attorney General William French
Smith said in a statement.
Author Elie Wiesel, head of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, applauded
the deportation, which he said ''signals once again that there is no room for
such war criminals in our midst. '
Trifa had been living in Detroit where he has been highly visible as the
archbishop of the Romanian-Orthodox Church in this country.
''He did not leave because he wanted to go to Portugal, '' said Neal Sher,
director of the Justice Department's unit that prosecutes war crimes. ''He left
because the United States exposed him. He was able to get to a country where I
guess he felt he would not be prosecuted.''
Sher said Trifa called for persecution of Jews in Romania as head of a
student group called ''the shock troops'' of the Iron Guards.
Trifa used his position as editor of the newspaper ''Libertatea " to spread.
Nazi propaganda inciting anti-Semitism with ''crude'' caricatures and .comments,
Sher said.
Trifa was protected by the Nazi Gestapo in Romania and Germany, Sher said,
and entered the United States in 1950, becoming a naturalized citizen seven
years later.
Sher said ''there was no involvement, no involvement whatsoever'' by the
CIA in Trifa's passage to America.
Nine years ago, the U.S. attorney's office in Detroit began proceedings to
strip Trifa of his citizenship. In 1980 he legally conceded he was deportable.
To avoid years of appeals, the Justice Department agreed to a compromise with
Trifa, giving him until October of this year before he would be deported to
Romania -- if the country would take him.
Continued
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''He was fearful of going to Romania clearly, and I'm sure the prospect of
going to Israel did not sit very well with him either,'' Sher said.
Sher and Stephen Trott, assistant attorney general for criminal
investigations, said Trifa is the third accused Nazi war criminal under
prosecution by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations to
depart the United States recently.
They said it is possible Trifa may never come to trial.
The State Department will not grant him a visa nor will immigration
authorities allow him back in the country, they said, and if he were to enter
under an assumed name, he would be ' 'subject to immediate arrest.''
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