Nazi Hunters in U.S. Expect Record Charges : War crimes: With new access to documents in the former Soviet Union, investigators are pursuing cases from World War II.

U.S. Nazi hunters, gleaning clues from documents long hidden behind the Iron Curtain, expect to file a record number of charges this year against persons suspected of atrocities against Jews and others in World War II-era Europe.

Neal M. Sher, who heads the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, said Monday that files made available since the breakup of the Soviet Union have led to breakthroughs in two cases.

He declined to detail the revelations, other than to say that one involves a local police unit that assisted Nazis in acts against Jews and the other involves a concentration camp.

Legally, the 13-year-old OSI has no power to bring charges against individuals it investigates. Instead, it seeks to strip U.S. citizenship from those who hid their Nazi links when they emigrated to the United States and to deport them, sometimes to nations that will try them for war crimes. It also adds the names of suspects to Immigration and Naturalization Service watch lists in case they try to enter the United States.

Since 1980, the OSI has relied on documents and other evidence from Soviet files. But the agency’s historians have not enjoyed direct access to the files until now.

“We couldn’t go there and research,” Sher said. “Because of the nature of bureaucracy, it took a lot of time to get responses” from the Soviets to requests for evidence.

But an OSI researcher now is at the archives in Riga, Latvia, while another returned earlier this year from Vilnius, Lithuania. Sher said that he hopes to send a third to the Ukraine this summer.

These are particularly promising areas, Sher said, because in 1941 and 1942, before Nazi death camps became fully operational, “a high percentage of crimes against Jews and others by Nazis and their collaborators were committed on soil that was part of what used to be the Soviet Union.”

Sher discounted critics’ contentions that the records are unreliable or might have been doctored by Communists to punish their opponents. He said that documents have been subjected to scientific testing to establish their authenticity and that “in the vast number of cases” defendants confronted with evidence have confessed.

As a result, Sher’s office expects to file as many as eight cases this year, topping its previous high of six cases in a single year.

Sher declined to discuss two cases in which the Justice Department is reviewing allegations that the OSI improperly handled evidence against two men who subsequently were stripped of their citizenship and extradited for war crime trials abroad.

They are John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker convicted in Israel of being “Ivan the Terrible,” the operator of the gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp; and the late Andrija Artukovic, a Seal Beach man who died in a Yugoslav prison in 1988 after being extradited there and identified as a Cabinet minister in a Nazi puppet government that executed thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies.

But other department sources said that both cases are under “active” review and that there could be developments in at least one of them in the next few weeks.