In Israel, Fewer Doubts on Prosecuting War Criminals

Just as retired Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk took the stand last week as the first defense witness in his war crimes trial, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was receiving a visitor from Los Angeles in his office about 200 yards away.

The visitor, Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was exerting pressure on Peres for a commitment in the case of another alleged war criminal--Antanas Gecas, a retired mining engineer who was born in what is now Soviet Lithuania and is living in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Hier wanted to know if the government of Israel would bring Gecas here for trial if the British do not try him or extradite him to the Soviet Union.

“This is not our first choice,” Foreign Minister Peres said, but added: “We will not let him go free. If the British will not do it, then we will have to. We cannot let a criminal of that nature run around free.”

This account of the meeting, based on notes taken by Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate of Hier, reflects a subtle change that has taken place here since last Feb. 16 when Demjanjuk went on trial accused of being a Nazi death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”

There is still some ambivalence about trying accused war criminals in Israel, but there appears to be much less than there was six months ago. And the questions that remain seem to be based not on any adverse fallout from the Demjanjuk trial but on what is seen as the great success the case has had in accomplishing a major goal of such trials: the education of a new generation about the horrors of the Holocaust.

“Whatever the outcome of this trial, it has already served a constructive purpose,” said Allan A. Ryan Jr., a former director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations and author of a book on the prosecution of war criminals. “It has served the purpose in this country, and to some extent in the U.S. as well, of putting the issue of war crimes back before the people. I think that’s to the good.”

Ryan, now general counsel to Harvard University, was in Israel as a private citizen to write an article about Demjanjuk.

Michael Hoppe of the Modiin Ezrachi organization said that a poll it conducted recently found that 65% of Israelis believe that the state should seek the extradition of any individual accused of war crimes as serious as those attributed to Demjanjuk.

And Efraim Zuroff, head of the Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem office, said of Rabbi Hier’s meeting with Foreign Minister Peres and with Justice Minister Avraham Sharir, “Peres and Sharir would not have responded as positively as they did if it hadn’t been for the (public) response to this trial.”

Originally, both the Israeli political Establishment and the Israeli public had doubts about extraditing Demjanjuk for trial. He is only the second accused war criminal to be tried here. The first was Adolf Eichmann, who was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina, convicted and executed 25 years ago.

A Cog in Death Machine

Eichmann was known as the architect of what the Nazis called the “final solution of the Jewish problem.” By comparison, many say that even if Demjanjuk is found guilty, he would only be a small fish, one of thousands of East European collaborators who served as cogs in the Nazi death machine. Many Israelis felt that putting him on trial would somehow diminish the significance of the Eichmann case.

Moreover, while there was no question about Eichmann’s identity, identity is the key issue in the Demjanjuk case. No one denies that “Ivan the Terrible” dealt sadistically with the predominantly Jewish prisoners at Treblinka, the Nazi extermination camp in Poland, or that he took part in killing about 850,000 of them. But Demjanjuk insists that he is not Ivan.

Finally, some Israelis were simply reluctant to reopen old wounds and risk contributing to a national sense of isolation and persecution, which they see as harmful to the country.

“Many Israelis will be waiting to be convinced that the holding of this war crimes trial was not a mistake,” the Jerusalem Post editorialized at the time.

A Changing Climate

What changed the climate, according to Daniel Elazar, director of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, was public reaction as the trial progressed, particularly among young people.

“I think the trial almost immediately changed people’s opinion, to think this is worthwhile,” Elazar said. “As young people showed how interested they were, older people became convinced.”

The Demjanjuk case has been so successful in spreading the message of the Holocaust among young Israelis that the question now, according to Elazar, is “how many times can we do that, how many times do we need to do it?”

But, on the other side, the Wiesenthal Center’s Zuroff argues that Israel is obligated to try former war criminals.

“People want Israel to be Israel,” he said, “to act on behalf of the victims (of the Holocaust). Who’s going to speak for the victims if not Israel?”

A Question of Justice

At issue, Zuroff said, is a question not of vengeance but of justice. And with most of those accused of war crimes already in their 70s, “time is running out.”

A spate of recent war crimes news has cast an unusually bright spotlight on the subject:

-- Karl Linnas, a 67-year-old native of Estonia deported by the United States last April to stand trial for war crimes during the time he ran a Nazi concentration camp, died in prison in the Soviet Union on July 2.

-- Klaus Barbie, 73, the “Butcher of Lyon,” was sentenced in France on July 4 to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity.

-- Andrija Artukovic, 87, convicted by a court in Yugoslavia of ordering more than 1,000 deaths during World War II when he was police and justice minister in the Nazi puppet state of Croatia. Artukovic, a former resident of Seal Beach, Calif., was extradited from the United States in February, 1986. His death sentence is still pending.

-- And on July 28 the Soviet Union announced that Fyodor Fedorenko, 79, had been executed. Fedorenko was deported from the United States as an alleged war criminal in December, 1984. He was convicted in the Soviet Union in June, 1986, on charges of treason and taking part in mass executions at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.

Files May Be Released

The United Nations recently agreed to release some of the 40,000 individual files in the archives of its War Crimes Commission. Australia and Canada have announced their intention to change their laws so that war criminals can be prosecuted in those countries.

Along with the United States, Australia and Canada admitted more World War II refugees than other countries, and as a result these three countries are believed to have the largest concentrations of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators.

Ryan, former director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, estimates that there were at least 10,000 war criminals among the 400,000 displaced persons who entered the United States in the first four years after the war. The OSI has started denaturalization or deportation proceedings against more than 60 individuals since it was created in 1979.

No Prosecution Provision

Linnas was the 14th accused war criminal forced to leave the United States as the result of action by the OSI. There is no provision in U.S. law for prosecution on war crimes charges.

The OSI experience demonstrates, Ryan said, that the prosecution of war criminals is slow going.

“There are complex decisions involved for any government to start trials like this,” he said, and the reaction of many is, “Who wants to import America’s old Nazis?”

Even in Israel, Ryan said, “I doubt that any decisions would be made (about future extraditions) until this trial is over.”

The files of the U.N. War Crimes Commission may turn up some useful evidence, he said, but “people should not expect that this is going to be a telephone directory of war criminals all over the world.” The commission was never very well organized, he said, and the files “are not any better now than they were when they went into cold storage in 1948.”

More Prosecutions Seen

Nonetheless, Zuroff said, the recent publicity given to war crimes cases is bound to generate more prosecutions.

“There’s no question there’s a cumulative effect,” he said.

Rabbi Hier said in an interview that the Wiesenthal Center is investigating more than 240 alleged war criminals. It turned 17 names over to the British government, and Home Secretary Douglas Hurd has confirmed that nine of the 17, including Antanas Gecas, are living in Britain.

The Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles is concentrating its efforts on Gecas, now 71 years old. It has produced a dossier implicating him as a member of the World War II Lithuanian Police Battalions, which were allegedly responsible for murdering the overwhelming majority of the 220,000 Lithuanian Jews killed during the German occupation. Gecas has denied any involvement in war crimes.

Britain Reluctant

The British government is clearly reluctant to act. It has no law permitting prosecution for war crimes, and it has always refused to extradite anyone to the Soviet Union for trial. Still, Hier hopes that publicity will force London to act.

“What we don’t want is for Gecas to escape the bar of justice,” Hier said. “If it’s a question of his going free or Israel extraditing, we want Israel to extradite.”

Zuroff said: “The tragedy is that (prosecution of Nazi collaborators) could have been done 30 years ago. It wasn’t done because it wasn’t on the agenda.”

Now that it is, he said, there are a lot of people like him with a special interest in keeping it there.

In Pursuit of Nazis

Zuroff, 39, a former OSI investigator, has spent much of his adult life pursuing Nazi war criminals. He says he learned about the Holocaust as a boy growing up in New York.

He said: “I asked my parents, ‘What did you do?’ Maybe it’s their answer that motivated me to dedicate many years of my life to this subject. Because my sense was they felt they didn’t do what should have been done.

“I think 25 years from now our children are going to ask us, ‘Where were you when these (criminals) were still alive?’ just the way we asked our parents, ‘Where were you during the Holocaust?’ ”

He is determined, he said, to have a better answer than his parents had.