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ΊT GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT SO MANY WILL GO TO THEIR GRAVES HAVING NEVER BEEN CALLED TO ACCOUNT FOR WHAT thousands of World War II files are becoming available for the first time to U.S. investigators. Sher expects them to be a major boost to the OSΓs work. But with the Holocaust Conrad Schellong, deported now nearly 50 years old, its surviving perpetrators are entering the final years of their lives. "Time is our biggest enemy," Sher notes with some regret, "and there's nothing we can do about that." Sher spent much more time hunting Nazis than he thought he would when he joined the OSI. Raised in Queens Village, New York, Sher learned about the Holocaust more through reading than through the personal experiences of his Jewish family. (Sher's father, Benjamin, was wounded in World War II.) After graduating from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 1968 and New York <strong>University</strong> Law School in 1972, he moved to Washington, DC, where he served as a law clerk and then spent six years with a small law firm, Cole and Groner, which specialized in federal litigation. In 1979, he joined the year-old OSI as a senior trial attorney and six months later was named deputy director, in charge of all litigation. In 1983 he became the office's director. When Sher took charge of the OSI, he predicted that the office would be around just five to seven more years. The biggest reason was the age of defendants, which Sher calls "the biological statute of limitations," but there were also ques- tions about how many investigations would yield viable cases. Now, nearly 11 years later, Sher makes the same prediction: five to seven more years. "No one expected the office would be around this long," he says. "No one expected we'd bring this many cases, no one expected that we'd find so many individuals in the United States, and no one expected that we'd be as successful as we have been in winning our cases in court." As a trial attorney, Sher won the first OSI case to reach court, in 1980. His target was Wolodymir Osidach, a Philadelphia man accused of directing the murder of Jews while he was police chief in the Ukrainian town of Rava-Ruska. Sher spent five weeks in Ukraine taking videotaped depositions from witnesses—the first time, he says, that a federal prosecutor planned a case around videotaped testimony. The court admitted the evidence and eventually ordered the removal of Osidach's citizenship. Osidach died while appealing the decision. Sher ranks that case among the office's most significant victories because the decision seemed to sanc- CORNELL MAGAZINE 38 tion the OSΓs methods. He also points with great satisfaction to the investigation of Arthur Rudolph, a German scientist welcomed into the United States as part of President Harry S. Truman's so-called "Paperclip Project." Under that program, German scientists deemed potentially valuable to the United States in its post-war technological race with the Soviet Union were given special treatment as war refugees. Government investigators marked the files of those men with paperclips to alert officials that they should be allowed into the United States. In theory, even desirable German scientists were to be turned away if they were former Nazi war criminals. But as several investigations have concluded, that guideline was routinely ignored by eager military officials. Such was the case, Sher says, with Rudolph, who had served during the war as operations director of Germany's Mittelwerke V-2 rocket assembly plant. Rudolph ordered the delivery of slave laborers to the facility from the nearby Dora concentration camp and literally worked tens of thousands of the prisoners to death, says Sher, adding, "It's just a classic case of a man who exploited his talents for evil." In 1982, OSI officials confronted the retired Rudolph about his wartime use of slave labor. Admitting he requisitioned the prisoners, Rudolph agreed to give up his U.S. citizenship and departed for Hamburg, Germany. To those he calls Rudolph's "apologists," who now claim the scientist was coerced into the agreement, Sher insists that he was present when Rudolph agreed to the conditions and that Rudolph went so far as to negotiate the wording of the OSI press release announcing the deal. Rudolph even demanded that Sher be present when he left the United States for good, Sher says. "I watched that big Lufthansa flight take off with that Nazi SOB on it," he recalls.
1EYVE DONE." he first thing a visitor to Sher's OSI office saw was a framed copy of a New York Post front page proclaiming, "U.S. to Bar Waldheim." It was the most prominent reminder of the time the OSI took on its most prominent target: Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, who is now on the U.S. "Watch List" of foreigners not allowed into the country. "Here was the duly elected head of state of a friendly country who was declared ineligible to come in," Sher explains with evident satisfaction. "It was very significant in that it demonstrated in almost a textbook sense that this is a country of laws." The case against Waldheim was prompted by a 1986 controversy in Austria about Alexander Loehr, the father of the modern Austrian Air Force, who after the war had been executed by the Yugoslavian government as a war criminal. During a nationwide debate over the propriety of building a memorial to Loehr, an Austrian magazine mentioned, merely in passing, that no less upstanding a citizen than Waldheim had served under him. The World Jewish Congress assigned investigators to the case. They quickly found both a damning photograph of Waldheim in a Nazi uniform and a U.S. Army document listing known war criminals: Waldheim's name was on the list. The OSI began its own investigation, which resulted in the addition of Waldheim's name to the "Watch List." That move stands as one of the OSΓs most celebrated achievements. Yet it also points up the limits inherent in its work. Despite the heinous nature of the crimes committed during the Holocaust, the OSI is limited to striking back with largely symbolic rejoinders, such as stripping citizenship or preventing entrance into the country. Even when holding evidence of murder or torture, the OSI cannot put a defendant in jail for a single day. "There's a general frustration in the work, because I can only do what I have authority to do under the law," Sher says. "When it comes to bringing to justice Nazi war criminals, it goes without saying that so many will go to their graves, so many perpetrators, having never been called to account for what they've done." But if the Waldheim case represents the high point of U.S. Nazi hunting, the nadir is the prosecution of Frank Walus, a Chicago man accused of murdering Polish Jews while serving in the S.S., Hitler's elite military force. A court of appeals overturned a 1978 denaturalization order against Walus, saying the government's case appeared questionable in light of evidence that arose after the trial. During the appeals process the OSI was formed to take control of Nazi cases, and one of its first major decisions was not to pursue a retrial of Walus. For his part, Walus became an angry critic of U.S. Nazi hunting and his case has become a rallying point for anti-OSI sentiment. "The constant caterwauling of the media calling (Walus) a 'Nazi war criminal' irreparably damaged his reputation," wrote the National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups Inc., in one of its many letters to public officials criticizing the OSI. "His entire life savings were expended in defending himself from the OSI scoundrels." Although Sher usually loses little sleep over the fate of the people he prosecutes, he acknowledges spending "sleepless nights" deciding whether to pursue a case against Jacob Tannenbaum, the only Jew targeted thus far by the OSI. While held at the Goerlitz concentration camp, Tannenbaum allegedly served as a "kapo"—a prisoner who cooperated with the Germans by JUNE 1994 39 overseeing fellow inmates. "We found dozens of witnesses all over the world who gave hair-raising testimony about his brutality," Sher says. Tannenbaum, who became ill during the litigation, agreed to relinquish his U.S. citizenship and died about a year later. "There's no question he started out as a victim," adds Sher. "But it seems to me that there's a line that has to be drawn between a victim and someone who becomes a cold-blooded murderer. No matter where that line was drawn, Tannenbaum stepped way over it." Sher micro-managed the work of the OSI, staying much more involved with individual cases than had his two predecessors. Rosenbaum, a close friend as well as Sher's principal deputy, describes Sher's management philosophy as "leading by example." "He got into the trenches in a number of our prosecutions, and an even larger number of investigations," says Rosenbaum, who as general counsel to the World Jewish Congress in 1986 directed the initial investigation of Waldheim. "He continued to find each new case to be an assault against human decency." Rosenbaum remembers watching Sher handle the case against Liusdas Kairys, a Chicago man who, after six years of litigation, was in 1987 ordered deported to Germany (the case is still being appealed). On Kairys's side was the former head of the Chicago police department's forensics lab, who was prepared to testify that the key piece of evidence—an S.S. identity card with Kairys's name and photo on it—was a forgery. When the witness took the stand, "Neal performed an aggressive, but not abusive, cross-examination," Rosenbaum recalls. "By the time Neal finished with him, [the witness had] admitted on the stand that this document was more likely authentic than forged. I watched the defense table and they were stunned. He left the stand quite
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