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I /*** I Karl Linnas, deported shaken that Neal had methodically deconstructed his analysis." The witness appeared so physically shattered, Rosenbaum says, that Sher ordered one of his paralegals to check on the man outside the courtroom. As a government official, Sher was careful to follow guidelines. As OSI director he would not comment on politics, citing the 1939 Hatch Act restricting the political activity of government employees. And Rosenbaum remembers being chided by his former boss for dressing too casually on a day they were traveling on official Justice Department business. But Sher's acquiescent streak had its limits. "People here know that Neal has put his career on the line on a number of occasions to achieve a just result," Rosenbaum says. One such case involved Karl Linnas, a Long Island man accused of heading the Tartu death camp in Estonia. Even though the OSI had obtained a court order to deport Linnas to the Soviet Union, Rosenbaum says, Sher was privately ordered by his superiors at the Justice Department to send Linnas to Panama—considered a more politically palatable place to send a former American citizen. Sher would not go along with the change, and Linnas was sent to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1987 just months after his arrival. One common question Sher confronts in many of his speaking and teaching engagements is what he has come to call "the small-fry argument"—that hunting anybody but the master schemers of the Holocaust is a wasted effort, especially because most of the alleged war criminals are old men living out their lives in relative obscurity. That argument, he says in a rebuttal polished from years of use, "reflects a lack of sensitivity to what was going on. People almost naturally get desensitized because of the numbers killed in the Holocaust. Six million. You can't visualize individuals. You just see a statistic." He points to the OSΓs prosecution of Bohdan Koziy, a Fort Lauderdale man accused of killing Jews and other civilians as a Ukrainian police officer. (Koziy fled to Costa Rica after losing his citizenship, but before deportation hearings could begin.) Among the specific charges against Koziy, Sher says, was that while confronting a 4-year-old Jewish girl pleading for her life, "he put a gun to her head and blew out her brains." Some of the girl's surviving relatives attended Koziy's trial in Florida. "The point I make is that for that girl and her surviving family, the Final Solution, the Nazi regime, was not Hitler or Himmler or Eichmann, it was this guy. It took hundreds of thousands of these people, these so-called 'small-fry/ to turn what would otherwise have been a maniacal dream into a reality." Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, says U.S. Nazi-hunting efforts serve an important purpose for the nation's future. "If you leave (suspected Nazi criminals) alone, you're sending the younger generation the wrong signals," Breitbart says. "What you're telling them is Ίf you are smart enough to avoid detection and capture for a long time, society will reward you by letting you get away with the most heinous of crimes.'" CORNELL MAGAZINE 40 Perhaps that's why Sher regularly returns to <strong>Cornell</strong> to teach his craft to students, many of them aspiring attorneys. The Near Eastern studies department frequently offers his class, "Jurisprudence and the Holocaust." He has also taught two more specialized courses: one on world response to the Holocaust, and one on the case of Final Solution mastermind Adolf Eichmann, who was tracked down in Argentina, kidnapped by Israeli agents and spirited to Israel, where he was tried and executed. "It's always stimulating to deal with undergraduates who clearly have a real interest in this subject," Sher says. "I think that to these people, many of whose parents or grandparents lived through the war, the subject matter is very compelling. There's a sense that this is something that cannot be forgotten." he long lines at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the box-office success of the film Schindler's List suggest an enduring quality to the memory of the Holocaust. What is undeniable, however, is that the day is coming when Nazi hunters like Neal Sher will not have any targets left to pursue. "It's very important, while we still have the chance, that the record be as voluminous as possible—to document what happened, who is responsible, who suffered," he says. "Because there are too many people who are willing to deny what happened or to minimize what happened. That, I'm sure, will increase when there are no longer survivors around. It's important that we build as strong a record as possible so we don't give Hitler a posthumous victory." a Laurence Arnold '88 is a reporter for the Asbury, NJ, Park Press.
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