U.S. Sets Record for Civil Prosecutions of Former Nazis

The Justice Department set a single-year record by seeking to revoke the citizenship or deport 10 former Nazis in 2002. Investigators took advantage of recently opened archives in former communist countries and better computer databases to find suspects in the United States.

The latest case was filed Thursday, when the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, N.Y., asked a judge to revoke the U.S. citizenship of Jaroslaw Bilaniuk, 79, of Queens, N.Y. Prosecutors said in a complaint that he persecuted Jewish civilians while serving as an armed guard at a Nazi slave labor camp in Poland.

The previous record of nine civil prosecutions in a year was achieved twice, according to Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.

Seventy-one people who assisted in Nazi persecution have been stripped of U.S. citizenship and 57 others have been deported since OSI began operations in 1979. More than 160 suspected Nazis have been blocked from entering the United States, according to the office.

Rosenbaum, who has worked in the Nazi-hunting program since it began 23 years ago, said the record is remarkable considering old age claims many ex-Nazis every year. He attributed the success to several factors:

* Investigators have completed their time-consuming project to track down assets and property the Nazis looted from Holocaust victims.

* OSI has quick access to government records and commercial databases and can compare names, including variations of possible spellings in English.

* Investigators now are able to pour through the archives of the former Soviet-bloc countries, developing new leads.

Rosenbaum said investigators last year found documents in Europe that planned a massacre of Jews and listed the Nazis assigned to the killings in Minsk, Belarus. Back in the United States, the names were compared to databases, and a match was found with a Florida man, Michael Gorshkow, 79.

In July, a federal judge in Pensacola, Fla., stripped Gorshkow of his U.S. citizenship for failing to respond to a Justice Department complaint that he did not disclose his wartime activities when he became a citizen in 1963.

Rosenbaum said that in the past, investigators had to give officials in communist countries individual names of suspects and wait for a response -- a painstakingly slow process.

Even with the improved techniques, “time is our greatest enemy,” he said. “We race the grim reaper and Mother Nature, and sometimes Mother Nature wins.”

Efraim Zuroff, the Jerusalem-based Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, called the single-year prosecution record “an absolutely outstanding achievement.”

“My sense is OSI will be able to maintain the high level of activity over the next few years because of the opening of records in Europe and the documentation,” he said.

Zuroff said other nations have not duplicated the success of the U.S., partly due to a lack of will but also because some countries chose the more difficult path of criminal prosecutions.

The United States concentrates on stripping ex-Nazis of their citizenship and deporting them for crimes committed in other countries, he said.

Zuroff said thousands of ex-Nazis are still alive, but he could not give a more precise number.

In the latest complaint, the Justice Department said Bilaniuk trained for Nazi service at the infamous Trawniki Training Camp in Poland. Recruits there were part of “Operation Reinhard,” a plan to murder Jews in Poland.

According to the complaint, during his training at Trawniki, Bilaniuk was an armed guard at a slave-labor camp for Jews adjacent to the training facility.

The complaint also charged that Bilaniuk misrepresented his true wartime activities when he applied for a U.S. immigration visa in 1949.