Office of Special Investigations
The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) was founded in 1979 and the United States Department of Justice assumed authority that the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals conducted that in the United States are immigrants. In March 2010, the OSI was merged with another department of the Ministry of Justice to form the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section (HRSP).
Investigation of Nazi crimes
In the immediate post-war period, the occupation authorities in Germany prosecuted war criminals and brought them to justice. In particular, members of the concentration camp guards were searched and these were subsequently convicted in several series of trials (e.g. Dachau trials ).
After the consolidation of the new German states, which took on the prosecution of war criminals on their own, the activity of the American judiciary shifted from Germany to its own territory. In the post-war refugee flows, various Nazi perpetrators also managed to immigrate to the USA.
During the heyday of the Cold War , people in the United States repeatedly appeared who were accused of war crimes during World War II . Usually these were not Germans, but members of the former allies of the National Socialist German Reich . However, many of these cases could not be adequately prosecuted, be it for political reasons in the context of the Cold War, as with the former Croatian Interior Minister Andrija Artuković, or due to a lack of expertise among the investigators.
In the absence of criminal law regulations and due to the constitutional prohibition of retrospectively enacted criminal laws, the judiciary made use of the legal provisions of the immigration authorities . The Displaced Persons Act of 1948 and the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 prohibited entry into the United States for those involved in the persecution of people on the basis of race , religion, or political affiliation during the war . If such persons were found, their citizenship was usually revoked and they were then deported or extradited, provided that a corresponding application had been made.
Since the USA had liberalized its immigration regulations after the Second World War in order to obtain human capital from devastated Europe willing to migrate, around 600,000 immigrants came into the country between 1948 and 1956. Although immigration regulations excluded these people from legal entry into the USA, many accomplices of the Nazi regime, for example former members of killing squads or concentration camp guards, managed to enter the USA. The reason was the lack of experience of the employees of the Counter Intelligence Corps of the US Army , who were tasked with filtering the flow of people for undesirable people. Most of the experienced investigators had left the corps after the war, and their successors lacked knowledge of the organizational structures of the National Socialist terror apparatus.
The Braunsteiner-Ryan case and the establishment of the OSI
In 1964 it was discovered that Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan , a former SS overseer in the Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camp , was living in the USA. The case caused a considerable stir and as a result a special working group was set up at the immigration authorities to identify other war criminals from the Nazi era who lived in the USA. This working group was under great public pressure and poorly prepared to deal with a large number of complex investigations. Between 1977 and 1979 the department initiated five lawsuits, all but one of which were lost. In the one won case - an alleged Gestapo officer - it later emerged that the accused was in fact a former slave laborer .
As a consequence of this embarrassment, the New York Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman called for the creation of a special department to prosecute war criminals. In 1979 the Office of Special Investigations was established in the US Department of Justice . The task of the special department was to deal with the accumulated cases and to resume the search for war criminals in the United States. The OSI has been given greater powers than any other department. His employees were able to carry out all the necessary steps - from initial investigations to litigation - themselves, negotiate with foreign governments and request the support of other US authorities.
The work of the OSI
Even in phases in which American- Soviet relations were at a low point - as in 1980 - the OSI investigators succeeded in reaching agreements with the Warsaw Pact states , after which they could hear witnesses and receive archive copies. Poland in particular supported the work of the OSI before 1989 by largely releasing its archives. OSI officials did not stop at cases in which American authorities had collaborated with Nazi war criminals. In 1983, for example, the CIA's recruitment of Klaus Barbie , the butcher of Lyon , was made public.
However, the investigation was not always easy. A low point was the acquittal of Ivan Demjanjuk , who as Ivan was charged with the terrible crime in various concentration and extermination camps , before the Israeli Supreme Court, when it turned out that the alleged could not be associated with "Ivan the Terrible". Deliveries of documents from the Eastern Bloc countries were also often inadequate and lengthy. The OSI was already aware in the early 1980s that the former Saugumas boss Aleksandras Lileikis was in the United States. However, the archive materials made available by the Soviet authorities were nowhere near enough to bring charges to bear.
After the collapse of the socialist states, more and more archives were opened after 1991. The OSI investigators now had direct access to the original sources for the first time. It turned out that the inventory was not only much more extensive than assumed, but also in a chaotic state. At least now, with these new possibilities, cases could be dealt with which up to now could not be pursued further due to a lack of evidence, including the Lileikis case. The indictment in this case took place in 1994, and in May and June 1996 US courts ruled that he should be deprived of his citizenship. Research on the people who had already been persecuted resulted in new cases. By 1997 the OSI had investigated more than 1,400 suspected war criminals, 60 people had their citizenship revoked and 48 had been expelled from the United States.
structure
The OSI reports to a Deputy Assistant Attorney General , who in turn reports to the Chief of the Criminal Division in the Justice Department. Eli Rosenbaum has been director of the OSI since 1995 . Rosenbaum had already worked as a litigator for the department from 1980 to 1984 and as principal deputy director since 1988 . The staff consists of about 20 investigators, lawyers and historians .
Individuals who have been the subject of an OSI investigation
- Josias Kumpf , concentration camp guard in Trawniki, start of the OSI investigations in 2001, verdict 2005, deportation 2009
- Arthur Rudolph , German rocket engineer, started the OSI investigation in 1982
- Stanislau Stankewitsch , Mayor of Baryssau, start of the OSI investigations in 1980, premature death in 1980
literature
- Michael MacQueen: The Office of Special Investigations at the US Department of Justice . In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): Dachauer Hefte , Verlag Dachauer Hefte, Dachau 1997, 13th year, Issue 13: Court and Justice, 123-134.