The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the U.S. Justice Department was created in 1979 to identify and expel, from the United States, those who assisted Nazis in persecuting "any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion." This involved gathering, verifying, and presenting in court eyewitness and documentary evidence of decades-old crimes. The evidence was incomplete and scattered around the world. Much of it was then in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain.Feigin p.1 Nonetheless, the OSI investigated 1,700 persons suspected of being involved in Nazi war crimes. Over 300 have been prosecuted with at least 100 stripped of their U.S. citizenship and 70 deported, the most recent in 2021. Others have left voluntarily, fled, or have been blocked from entering the United States.Faigin, p. 315 In the 1980s, at least seven men facing investigation or prosecution from the OSI committed suicide.
Immediately after World War II, Americans chose not to dwell upon the war's atrocities, and Cold War threats caused governments to recruit former Nazis for intelligence work. Newly formulated U.S. immigration policies and prejudice created obstacles for entering the United States by people displaced by the war. As a result, it became easier for former Nazis and their collaborators to enter the U.S. than for Holocaust survivors. Sometimes protected by U.S. Intelligence officials, war criminals found a safe haven in America. OSI was founded to ferret them out. It operated as a separate unit until 2010 when it was merged with the Domestic Security Section of the Justice Department Criminal Division to form a new unit, the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section (HRSP). According to The Washington Post, the United States has successfully prosecuted more Nazis than all other countries combined and is "widely deemed to have the world's most aggressive and effective Nazi-hunting operation." While efforts continue to prosecute those involved in atrocities during World War II, the principal focus of HRSP's human rights enforcement work is now on prosecuting war criminals from postwar conflicts including those in Bosnia, Serbia, Rwanda, and Guatemala.
A thorough history of OSI was produced by legal historian Judith Feigin of the Justice department in 2006. It concluded that, in addition to having obtained some measure of justice for wartime atrocities, OSI set international standards for prosecuting perpetrators of genocide and made substantial contributions to the historical record that "stand as a permanent and irrefutable response to those who would deny the Holocaust and its horrors." Further, "the message resonating from OSI's cases is that the United States does not choose to add to its populace persons whose actions victimized innocent civilians."Feigin, "The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust", p. 557-59.
Founding of OSI
Braunsteiner-Ryan case In 1964, it was discovered that Hermine Braunsteiner, a former SS guard in the concentration camps Ravensbrück and Majdanek, was living in the United States. She had met Russel Ryan while he was on holiday in Austria, and she entered the United States in 1959 shortly after their marriage. The case caused an outcry and, as a result, the Special Litigation Unit was set up at the immigration authority. This group was to identify other war criminals from the Nazi-era who lived in the United States. The unit was transferred from INS to the Justice Department in September 1979.Feigin, p. 4-6
Initiative by Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman New York Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman called for and actively promoted strengthening the special unit to prosecute war criminals residing in the United States.Feigin p.2-3 The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) was established in 1979 within the US Department of Justice. Its task consisted of processing the accumulated cases and the resumption of the search for war criminals in the United States. The OSI was equipped with broad powers that enabled it to take all necessary steps to accomplish its mission including investigation, litigation, negotiating with foreign governments, and calling for support from other U.S. authorities.
Early leadership As an assistant to the US solicitor general, Allan Ryan had been arguing cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. By chance, he was assigned a case already lost by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to strip Feodor Fedorenko, of his US citizenship and deport him to the Soviet Union. Fedorenko was alleged to have been a guard at a Jewish ghetto and at Treblinka extermination camp, where a total of 800,000 Jews had been murdered by the Nazis.Feigin p.48 Ryan considered himself a prosecutor rather than a Nazi-hunter, but he came to believe the case was important and recommended that it be pursued. He won the case in the court of appeals, and the Supreme Court later upheld the appeals court's ruling. That case, Fedorenko v. United States, became OSI's seminal case that set important legal precedent and led to Ryan's being asked to serve as the second Director of OSI, following the brief tenure of Walter Rockler.Feigin p.18 & 59Feigin p. 419 In 1984, Fedorenko was deported to the Soviet Union after being denaturalized. There, he was arrested and put on trial for treason, war crimes, and collaborationism for working in Treblinka extermination camp. Fedorenko was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in 1987.
Early challenges Ryan led the organization during its formative years, from 1980 to 1983, navigating a difficult political landscape. He established the importance of historical research in addition to criminal investigationFeigin p. 7, 24 and won precedent-setting cases. OSI's approach was to identify those who met the criteria for being Nazi war criminals, determine whether they had lied about their wartime activities when applying for entry into the U.S or for U.S. citizenship and, if so, strip them of their citizenship and deport them. Initial leads came passively from existing INS cases, Jewish organizations also searching for war criminals, and individuals who by chance come across their former tormentors. OSI emphasis on historical research soon enabled the organization to become proactive in developing leadsFeigin p. 27 and it ultimately becoming a resource for Holocaust and other World War II research well beyond OSI's mandate to prosecute.Feigin p. 7,28
Disagreements over OSI operations As the work began, OSI faced widespread disagreement on many important issues. Some felt the effort to expel World War II war criminals was important both to achieve justice and to set precedent for the future, while others felt that the time had passed for pursuit of these aims. Some Justice Department officials felt OSI should have a Jewish Director, while others did not want the office to be viewed as a Jewish organization and favored Ryan as director in part because he was not Jewish.Feigin p. 4, 9, 10 Eastern European nationality groups opposed OSI's use of evidence from the USSR, which had an interest in discrediting Baltic State, Ukrainian, and other emigre groups and might well provide false information and forged documents to achieve their aims.Feigin p. 211-12 These emigre groups also challenged the use of the lower standard of evidence involved in civil trials compared to criminal trials, even though citizenship revocation and deportation were civil issues and US law at the time did not provide for criminal penalties for crimes committed on foreign soil unless against US citizens.Feigin p. 33 The emigres also feared that OSI might seek to deport anyone who had lied on their entry applications, not just the wartime persecutors that OSI sought to expel. In contrast, Jewish groups were pressing for more determined action by OSI than INS had demonstrated. It became clear that leading OSI was going to involve a lot of public relations work as well as research and prosecution.Feigin p. 8
Disagreements over who should be prosecuted From the beginning, OSI had to deal with disagreements over who should be prosecuted. In contrast to the Fedorenko case, which the INS had lost and OSI had won on appeal, the Walus case had been lost on appeal by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago with the court ordering a retrial. Director Ryan counseled against pursuing the case.Feigin p. 81 The documentary evidence was weak and the eyewitnesses, forty years after the fact, were unconvincing. It was even possible that this was a case of mistaken identity. According to Judith Feigin, OSI's historian, it took courage in 1981 for OSI to dismiss the Walus case. Frank Walus had come to the attention of INS in 1974 by a letter from Simon Wiesenthal,Feigin p. 71 a highly respected Holocaust survivor and acclaimed Nazi hunter. Several Holocaust survivors had traveled to America from Israel and emotionally confronted Walus, whom they believed to be their former tormentor, in court. Furthermore, OSI had not yet won the confidence of the Jewish community, whose support could be important for the organization's success. OSI could expect a negative reaction for not pursuing Walus.Feigin p. 85, 88
Representative cases prosecuted By the middle of 1984, forty cases had been filed by OSI against war criminals then living in America.Ryan, Quiet Neighbors p. 353-61 Through the next few years, OSI successfully prosecuted over 130 other cases involving persons complicit in Nazi war crimes and subsequently living quietly in America. Many of these cases are discussed in detail in the OSI history produced in 2006. Three such cases in which OSI sought expulsion reached the Supreme Court.Feigin p. v
Most cases involved relatively low level camp guardsFeigin p. 45 who had beaten or executed prisoners or had led them to places of execution. Juozas Kungys, for example, was prosecuted because OSI determined he had "rounded up and transported thousands of Jews to an execution site, distributed firearms and ammunition to an execution squad, forced the victims into a mass grave, shot some of them, and exhorted the execution squad to do the same.Feigin p. 127 Other cases involved high-ranking officials and prominent Nazi collaborators.
In many cases, the individual charged left the U.S. voluntarily rather than face deportation proceedings. In many other cases, naturalized individuals agreed to give up U.S. citizenship but were allowed to remain in the U.S due to ill health rather than be deported. In some cases deportation was complicated by there being no country willing to accept the deportee.
Not every case was brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Case law evolved over time with various court rulings regarding legally complex matters of interpretation of statutes and sufficiency of evidence. Sometimes compromises were required. In the case of Kungys, an agreement was reached for him to give up his citizenship but not be deported.Feigin p. 131 Due to the delayed pursuit of justice, many subjects of OSI prosecution died before their cases could be taken to completion in the U.S. or in other countries.
Some representative cases are included below. The dates in parentheses indicate the period during which INS, OSI, or HRSP were pursuing legal action against the individual.
Andrija Artuković (1951–1986)