NAZI-HUNT METHODS PROTESTED

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000404200021-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 6, 2010
• Sequence Number: 21
• Publication Date: March 23, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/06: CIA-RDP90-00552R000404200021-0
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i+'ASHINGTON POST
---3 :larch 1985
STAT NazFHUflt Methods Protests
Ethnic Coalition Objects to Soviet Evidence, Lack of Juries
By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
LOS ANGELES, March 22-A
coalition of American ethnic organ-
izations, alarmed by the Justice De-
partment's hunt for war criminals
among Eastern European emi-
grants, today launched a protest
against use of Soviet-collected ev-
idence and denial of jury trials in
such U.S. investigations.
Current and former department
officials said the 10-group alliance,
which claims potentially strong sup-
port in Congress and the backing of
35 million Americans of Eastern
European descent, could cripple the
recently revived effort to find for-
mer Nazis and Nazi collaborators in
the United States.
One former Justice Department
Nazi hunter, New York attorney Eli
Rosenbaum, said he is so concerned
about what he considers a rampant-
ly anti-Semitic campaign by the Co-
alition for Constitutional Justice and
Security that he has spent much of
his free time trying to alert Jewish
groups to it.
Eastern European ethnic commu-
nity leaders told a news conference
here today that, in trying to prove
their case, they plan to use testimo-
ny of former Soviet agents and re-
cent U.S. court opinions disallowing
the use of Soviet evidence.
Moscow "has infiltrated the
American justice system to get
even with former refugees, de-
fectors and 'anti-Soviet' activists,"
Anthony B. Mazeika, vice president
of the Los Angeles-based Baltic
American Freedom League, said in
an interview.
The coalition, after conversations
with Reagan administration officials
and a letter-writing campaign direc-
ted at the White House and the
State and Justice departments, is
preparing to lobby Congress for
hearings and changes in a 1978 law
that provides for deportation of
Nazi collaborators.
The group, founded Jan. 12 dur-
ing a meeting in Washington, has
won a Veterans of Foreign Wars
resolution calling for an investiga-
tion of the office of special investi-
gations (OSI) at the justice Depart-
ment, and a similar resolution is
expected to pass the Michigan Sen-
ate soon.
The OSI, established in 1979 to
investigate a rash of war criminal
reports, recently has intensified its
search for Auschwitz doctor Josef
Mengele, considered the most no-
torious surviving Nazi war criminal,
and for clues of possible postwar
connections between Menuele and
U.S. intelligence officers.
Justice Department officials, un-
der agreements worked out in Mos-
cow in 1977, 1978 and 1980, have
visited the Soviet Union to collect
depositions or videotaped testimony
from witnesses of wartime collab-
oration by persons who later immi-
grated to the United States.
Many of the incidents occurred in
Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine,
where anticommunist and anti-Se-
mitic sentiment led many people to
cooperate with German occupation
forces.
Martin Mendelsohn, a former
Justice Department official who
conducted the initial discussions in
Moscow, said careful checks
showed that evidence provided by
the Soviets was authentic. U.S.
courts, he said, remain free to dis-
regard it if they have doubts.
Baltic American Freedom
League president Val Pavlovskis, a
Latvian-born city planner and for-
mer U.S. Marine officer, called the
Soviet cooperation "official system-
atic disinformation."
Rosenbaum and OSI director
Neal Sher said the Soviet testimony
has satisfied U.S. judicial review in
nearly every case.
Sher told the Anti-Defamation
League of B'nai B'rith that the
"KGB defense" has been used sev-
eral times during war crimes trials
in West Germany and that "not once
to my knowledge" has a court there
"found that the Soviets supplied
forged documents or suborned per-
jury."
A few U.S. judges have rejected
Soviet evidence, however. Among
them is 9th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals Judge Thomas Tang, who
in January reversed an order to de-
port accused Latvian collaborator
Edgars Laipenieks.
"We find that the procedural ir-
regularities caused by the Soviet
participation in the procurement of
the deposition testimony cast the
reliability of such testimony into
doubt," Tang said. "The Soviet of-
ficer frequently and sharply cur-
tailed defense counsel's opportunity
to cross-examine the deposition
witness" and referred in the pres-
ence of the witness to "Nazi crim-
inal Laipenieks."
Imants Lesinskis, a Latvian-born
defector and former Soviet diplo-
mat, said Moscow is sophisticated
in dealing with U.S. prosecutors
and will select targets for damaging
testimony carefully but will make
sure that the Americans "are not
getting the true picture." He ac-
knowledged that he has no evidence
of specific Soviet fabrications.
Rosenbaum said that emigrant
leaders speak of "due process"
when addressing public forums in
English but that anti-Semitic sen-
timent "is rampant" in their native-
language newspapers. He cited ref-
erences in a Lithuanian-language
paper to Jews' being "the first to
torture and murder the hospitable
Lithuanians" and to the OSI's being
controlled by "the Jewish lobby."
Mazeika strongly denied that the
coalition is anti-Semitic. He said his
group and others seek Jewish sup-
port on grounds that Soviet officials
providing evidence to the OSI
"were the same ones who are send-
ing prisoners of conscience, includ-
ing many Jews, to the Gulags."
Nearly all U.S. hearings for ac-
cused collaborators have been with-
out juries, because the penalties
mWd
STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/06: CIA-RDP90-00552R000404200021-0