Detective work and luck uncover 100 Nazis in US

WASHINGTON - Painstaking detective work, scouring historical records and an occasional lucky break have helped the United States government solve some of the coldest cases of the Holocaust era and find more than 100 Nazi collaborators.

"You get to put together some of the most intricate detective puzzles," said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the US Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations.

"We've got the coldest cases of all," he said, using the police phrase for old, unsolved cases. "If you can prove one of these cases, you can do just about anything."

He described how his investigators discovered Elfriede Rinkel, a San Francisco woman sent back to Germany last month after admitting she served as a guard at its Ravensbruck concentration camp during World War 2.

The US Holocaust Museum in Washington obtained copies of the personnel cards from the concentration camp as part of its efforts to preserve Holocaust records and shared them with his office, Rosenbaum said.

Of the 1000 names, his investigators found that the 83-year-old German native and citizen was the only one living in the United States. They did further research on her responsibilities at the camp for female prisoners.

As part of the investigation "we Googled her name," Rosenbaum said. The researchers found an article in a Jewish newspaper about the death in 2004 of her husband, a German Jew and a Holocaust survivor.

Rosenbaum interviewed Rinkel about a year ago and asked whether she ever told her husband about what she did during the war. "She waved it off and said, 'Yes, but he wasn't interested'." But he said Rinkel now claims she never told her husband.

She was the first woman deported since the office's creation in 1979. With an annual budget of US$5 million ($7.57 million), and a staff of 30 that includes 12 attorneys and 10 historians, it has deported or stripped the US citizenship of 103 individuals.

The office brought a record 10 new prosecutions in 2002, and has 17 cases in litigation. "We are swamped," Rosenbaum said.

"We found in the former Soviet Union and other communist countries a veritable treasure trove of evidence," he said in explaining the increase in cases.

Rosenbaum said his office is in a race against the clock to bring cases as soon as possible, with most of the suspects now in their 80s. "The grim reaper has been depriving us of suspects," he said.

The United States cannot prosecute the cases criminally, mainly because the events took place on foreign territory. But it can assist in the extradition of Nazi war criminals to stand trial abroad.

One of the office's most notorious cases involved John Demjanjuk, who was accused of being the sadistic Nazi death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible."

Extradited to Israel, he was tried and sentenced to death. But he was freed in 1993 after newly released records from the former Soviet Union showed another man was probably the sadistic guard.

Demjanjuk returned to the United States, and the office brought a new case against him. A judge ruled Demjanjuk could be deported to his native Ukraine for being a guard at three Nazi concentration camps, a ruling that Demjanjuk is appealing, Rosenbaum said.

He said the office's mission in the future will shift to investigate naturalised US citizens who have participated in more recent acts abroad of genocide, torture or state-sponsored murder, an expanded mission that Congress approved in 2004.

The office now has 46 individuals under investigation, mostly from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, Rosenbaum said. That for the first time exceeds the number of individuals -- 45 -- under investigation for Nazi activities.

"We are very aggressively pursuing the modern cases," he said. Of the Nazi cases, he said, "We are in the closing phase of this effort."

- REUTERS