Where Justice Has Failed
RUDIN, MARCIA
Where Justice Has Failed Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America By Howard Blum Quadrangle. 256 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Marcia Rudin In 1965, Boleslavs Maikovskis was convicted in absentia by a...
...For example, Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, at her deportation trial, retained expensive legal counsel that would appear to be beyond the means of a middle-class Queens housewife...
...He has been accused of personally murdering 1,239 people...
...He was a leader of the consequent four-day pogrom that resulted in the slaughter of approximately 16,000 Jewish men, women and children...
...The same with Trifa- the routine of unexplained delays, unusual INS procedure...
...In searching for the cause of the INS's negligence, De Vito came upon Odessa, an underground organization of S.S...
...help put pressure on the United States government to act more vigorously against them...
...And he, his wife and his fellow investigators received threatening phone calls...
...But he knew he would only be able to proceed if he succeeded in his other investigation...
...Orders were given to De Vito by high offioials in the INS to stop his inquiry...
...Here the enemy was unseen, its name and face only suspicions...
...On April 30, 1941, he signed the "Decrees of Racial Affiliation," which led to the brutal extermination of thousands of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews in what is now Yugoslavia...
...Trifa is not about to be deported to stand trial for his crimes...
...These are three of the four histories of former Nazis described in Howard Blum's gripping new book...
...Now 68 years old, Maikovskis, a retired carpenter, lives in safety and comfort at 232 Grant Avenue, Mineola, Long Island...
...These frightening suggestions do not go undocumented...
...On the night of January 20, 1941, young Viorel Trifa incited the Iron Guard Revolt in Rumania by delivering a highly anti-Semitic speech...
...A volunteer in the mobile murder unit S.S...
...After the War Trifa, a layman, emigrated to the U.S...
...Not only has it failed to act—the extradition of Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan in 1973 is the single exception—but, De Vito charges, the government has actively participated in a massive cover-up of evidence...
...By 1960 just one of the original 200 was still in jail...
...Simon Weisen-thal in his memoirs, The Murderers Among Us, remarks that immediate postwar attempts to deal with Nazis were "often frustrated by a lack of cooperation among the Allied powers...
...Key files and materials in her case mysteriously disappeared...
...they failed to discover Franz Murer when he was living openly on a farm in the British Zone only a few miles away from the concentration camp where he had committed atrocities...
...and was ordained a Bishop of the Rumanian Orthodox Episcopate of America...
...Yet not until February 4 of this year did the National Council of Churches remove him from its governing board...
...Andy" Artukovic currently lives in a secluded beaoh community in Southern California...
...It is supported by funds smuggled out of Germany as early as 1944 by some industrialists who realized Hitler was losing the War, as well as by buried treasure—some of it still not unearthed—and illegal trade and weapon sales...
...and Joshua Eilberg (D.-Penn...
...The details of Trifa's activities in the Iron Guard have always been fully known...
...members formed in 1947 to provide escape routes and financial assistance to former Nazis and their families...
...It was an enemy which managed to steal files, lose department memos, and influence Congress...
...His reasoning is described by Blum: ". . . the pursuit of Nazis in America required two simultaneous investigations...
...They are all saddening and frustrating, but at least some action has been taken in the fourth case since Wanted...
...Moreover, thousands of Nazis—many of them men who were in positions of authority and were directly responsible for countless deaths—are living peacefully throughout the world...
...Now called Valerian Trifa, he lives in this luxurious 25-room mansion with a group of "priests" from Rumania who are also former Iron Guardists, and controls 46 churches with 10,000 parishioners...
...It was all, concluded De Vito, a large mystery...
...Eienstazgruppen, Tscherim Soobzokov executed Jews during the German advance through Russia...
...And while the action was commendable, it was largely symbolic...
...Whatever the ultimate solution to the puzzle, the general laxity toward former Nazis—at best a product of sloppy bureaucratic inefficiency and apathy—is neither new nor unique to the United States...
...Tom" now resides in Pater-son, New Jersey, is active in state Democratic politics, and is the self-appointed leader of the Circassians, an ancient Russian ethnic group with many members in the Paterson area...
...The first centered on 59 names, faces and file numbers which could be identified and tracked down...
...The noncooperation of some of the Axis powers has made matters worse...
...The simple fact that they lied at their citizenship hearings—when they swore to never having killed anyone or been members of organizations like the Iron Guard—is itself grounds for deportation...
...Trifa is highly esteemed as a brave anti-Communist figure: He has spoken on Radio Free Europe and Vice President Richard M. Nixon invited him to deliver the opening prayer before the U.S...
...And Artu-kovic—refusal to prosecute, stolen court records, State Department inaction, Congressional influence...
...was published...
...Two hundred of them were hung from meat hooks in the municipal slaughterhouse and stamped Came Kosher ("Kosher Meat...
...Reviewed by Marcia Rudin In 1965, Boleslavs Maikovskis was convicted in absentia by a Latvian court of having been the "organizer, inspirer and leader" of a World War II massacre in the town of Audrini and of killings in the Riga Jewish ghetto...
...The Austrian government has been notoriously lax...
...Senate on May 11, 1955...
...That they have not been apprehended and extradited to the countries where they committed their crimes is baffling...
...The British were more concerned about stopping illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine than about apprehending War criminals...
...Weisenthal himself had to battle incredible apathy in his search for Adolph Eiohmann, an Austrian...
...And the same suspicious elements were present in the Maikovskis case-INS inaction, transferred files, missing memos...
...As the Nazi-appointed Croation minister of interior, Andrija Artuko-vik interned 30,000 Jews, most of whom died...
...He is a prosperous man...
...De Vito ran up against similar stumbling blocks in his pursuit of other ex-Nazis: ". . . there was the Soobzokov case—again stolen files, Congressional influence, CIA employment...
...According to Weisenthal, of 200 top Nazis tried in the Soviet Union and later repatriated to Austria, only three were prosecuted in their native land: "All other trials had been quashed by presidential decree," or by Austria's policy of nonrecogni-tion of sentences passed in foreign courts...
...De Vito is convinced Odessa has infiltrated the INS and has blocked government action against Nazis in this country...
...is on the whole a well-written, exciting and convincing exposition of the American side of this dilemma...
...More important, it should contribute to a public awareness of "the murderers among us," and—along with the efforts of such members of Congress as Representatives Elizabeth Holtz-man (D.-N.Y...
...But it was a mystery . . . which would allow 59 Nazis in America to escape punishment...
...This strategy could be planned...
...Anthony De Vito, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) investigator and the man who, according to Blum, has gathered most of the evidence against the ex-Nazis, claims the INS is aware of their existence and of overwhelm, ing and legally-admissible proof of their crimes...
...Although Howard Blum's style of presenting his material in short, separate sections occasionally becomes tiresome, Wanted...
...Fifty-nine of them are in the United States...
...In 1946-47 the Americans let many Nazis slip through their fingers because of a growing preoccupation with the Cold War...
...In 1952 he seized by physical force the headquarters of the Church—a 200-acre estate in Grass Lakes, Michigan known as the "Vatra...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 5
