64 Friday, February 26, 1982 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Author Rejects Wiesenthal Plan for Handling War Crimes Cases By CHARLES R. ALLEN, JR. (Copyright 1982, JTA, Inc.) (Editor's note: Charles R. Allen, Jr. is a con- tributing editor to The Churchman and a former editor of The Nation. In 1963 he wrote "Nazi War Criminals Among Us." He is finishing a new book, "America's Nazi War Criminals — A His- tory, A Documentation and an Indictment.") NEW YORK — At first glance, a proposal recently advanced by Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, to "speed up" the cases of some 217 accused Nazi war crim- inals havening in the United States appears to be a welcome situation to a long-vexing problem. Wiesenthal would apply a novel twist on the extradi- tion treaty between West Germany and the U.S. He would simply declare that the hundreds under inves- tigation for possible legal action by the Justice De- partment's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) as well as 20 of the 22 individuals now on trial facing de- naturalization or deporta- tion would be declared "German"; that they would be promptly amenable, as- sertedly, to the extradition treaty and the slow-moving cases would be quickly expedited. In point of fact, the vast majority of these individu- als are not German at all, but rather from Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union. From its outset, Wie- senthal's approach is fraught with dangers in an issue whose com- plexities and fragilities vis-a-vis our own legal safeguards, civil liberties and as yet unresolved in- ternational obligations to the Nuremberg prece- dents ought never be ex- posed to undue haste and short-cuts, no matter how well intentioned. The proposal also flies in the face of history. Its prop- onent allows that suspected Nazi war criminals may be neatly divided into two "categories": those who. acted in behalf of a sover- eign state, such as Romania, and those who acted "under the direct or- ders" of the Nazis them- selves. In any case, the lat- ter would be "re- categorized" as "German." Consider the case of Vale- rian Trifa, the de- naturalized Archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in America who now faces deportation for having concealed his role in the destruction of the Jews of Bucharest in 1941. Trifa lives in Grass Lake, Mich., near Jackson. Most assuredly, he "worked directly" for the Nazis as a leader of the in- digenous Iron Guard. At the same time, he was an oppo- nent of Romania's fascist government whose dictator, General Ion Antonescu, was shot as a war criminal in 1946. Both were eager ser- vants of their Nazi masters; one is not now "German." Indeed in the judgment of both Romanian and Ameri- can courts, each is a Roma- nian war criminal. There are many major cases now pending before the OSI which have the same char- acteristics as the Trifa mat- ter. (Trifa is currently awaiting for deportation hearings to be scheduled in Detroit. See story below.) A high Justice De- partment aide told me: "The bottom line of (Wie- senthal's) proposal is his notion that we can change persons' nationalities like hats. As a lawyer, this is repug- nant. If it's possible to work something out strictly in terms of our ex- tradition treaty with West Germany, fine. But I'm not so sure the pres- sures on them from their own Right and Left would let them go that route. "You know, they've still got more than a few Nazi criminals over there them- selves." Precisely. And this brings us to another flaw: West Germany's record in the VALERIAN TRIFA post-war trials of Nazi genocidists. The 1979 report of the Central Office of Land Judi- cial Authorities for the In- vestigations of National Socialist Crimes ("Zen- tralstelle") of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) claims that 85,802 "pre- liminary inquiries" had been conducted of "primary suspects" through 1979. About 10 percent were or- dered to trial. Some 76,750 inquiries were dropped. Some seven percent (6,440) of the triable suspects re- ceived "non-appealable sen- tences." Twelve (not one- tenth of one percent) had been given death sentences, 156 life imprisonthent and 114 were "fined." (One was sentenced as a "juvenile of- fender.") However, a close analysis of the official re- port raises doubts. Curi- ously, the FRG takes full credit for all war crimes proceedings on its terri- tory before 1949 when it became a sovereign entity; those proceedings had been conducted by the Americans, British and French. Thus the net of proceedings actually undertaken by the FRG is reduced by 2,413; the number of "non- appealable sentences" becomes 3,021 rather than 6,440, or a bit better than a three percent rate of success in prosecuting Nazi war criminals over 30 years. Most historians generally agree that from three to five million persons were in- volved directly or indirectly in implementing the Holocaust and other genocides of World War II. They further agree that most got off scot-free. Prob- ably the single largest rem- nant have lived untouched in West Germany for the past 36 years. Even upon assuming the dubious constitutionality of the Wiesenthal proposal, the dumping of some 217 triable cases of our own sus- pected war criminals into the lap of the West Germans would mean neither swift nor certain justice. There is another yet more disquieting facet to this scheme. Quite patently, it is designed to avert the ulti- mate question: what will we do when, inexorably, the time comes to deport a Nazi war criminal from our shores? Where would he, or she, be sent? Thus far under present legal proceedings, not a single one has been deported. Under the complexities of immigration law, it is conceivable that a pro- ven genocidist could re- main here as a stateless person. One may well ask if there is life after a de- portation order for a criminal of the Holocaust in post-Nuremberg America. Actually, we do not have to accept such an eventual- ity. Nor does the Wiesent- hal approach help as it com- pletely ignores the Nurem- berg context of this issue. SIMON WIESENTHAL At the height of the Holocaust, numerous pro- nouncements, declarations, covenants and agreements dealing with Nazi criminals who had fled the scenes of their crimes were solemnly entered into by the U.S. and its allies. Churchill Winston authored the pertinent re- solves of the 1943 Moscow Declaration which pro- claimed that "most as- suredly, the Allied Powers will pursue them (Nazi militarists and party lead- ers) to the uttermost ends of the earth and deliver them to their accusers so that jus- tice may be done." The 1945 London Agree- ment affixed this principle in the Nuremberg war crimes trial and the sub- sequent proceedings through the late 1940s when it was considerably broadened to include those found guilty of crimes against humanity: "Murder, extermina- tion, enslavement, depor- tation and other in- humane acts . . . against any civilian population . . . or persecutions on political, racial or reli- gious grounds . . ." Much of the world com- munity has since incorpo- rated these precedents into their national corpus juris. The U.S. as yet has not. The original members of the United Nations War Crimes Commission continue to support explicitly the Nuremberg system. No party to the London Agree- ment has repudiated it. Even the U.S. State De- partment (the foremost stonewaller of the Nazi war criminal issue) acknowl- edges that it remains in force. On several occasions, the United Nations has reaf- firmed exactly this point (for example, UN Resolu- tion 170, Oct. 31, 1947): "members of the United Na- tions forthwith take all necessary measures to cause the arrest of those (wanted) war criminals . . . and to cause them to be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done, in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of those countries." Most of those alive and well in America today are accused of crimes against humanity. In one manner or another, many have been the subject of demands that they be returned to their own homelands where al- legedly they carried out „,' their crimes. The problem is that the ,,J1 countries insisting upon their return are Com- munist. Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were the places where the dispro- portionate share of such at- rocities took place. Moreover, the Wie- senthal proposal is palp- ably designed to pre- clude the deportation of any Nazi war criminal to a "Communist natio n. As such it is clearly vie: of a basic precede_ tablished at Nuremberg as well as contrary to the spirit of that interna- tional achievement. Furthermore, it would short-circuit the truly his- tonic developments which have been taking shape within our own jurispru- dence by way of the de- naturalization - deportation trials. The highest court in the land has already ren- dered a landmark decision (U.S. v. Federenko, 1981) in stripping a former Treb- linka death camp guard of his ill-gotten American citi- zenship. There well may be addi- tional rulings in the future affecting not only immigra- tion law but, in effect, kneading further elements of the Nuremberg system into our own body of law. This sense of a civilized process must be allowed to make its way to an un- equivocal resolution, re- 1 gardless of the time re- quired. This process is con- cerned with justice, not vengeance. Let it go for- ward. Bishop Trifa's Deportation Case to Be Scheduled in Near Future' Deportation proceedings for Romanian Orthodox Ar- chbishop Valerian Trifa of Grass Lake, Mich., near Jackson, will be scheduled in Detroit "in the near fu- ture." According to Acting Dis- trict Director Ronald Brooks of the U.S. Immigra- tion and Naturalization Service in Detroit, a hear- ing will be scheduled as soon as the INS can assign a new judge to hear the case. Adolf Angelilli, the only INS judge in Detroit, has disqualified himself from hearing the case because of his previous involvement with it. Trifa voluntarily gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1980 after five years' of legal proceedings. Now 67-years old, he is ac- cused of concealing his ties to the fascist Iron Guard when he entered the U.S. in 1950 and when he applied for citizenship in 1957. As an Iron Guard official, Trifa is accused of leading a Bucharest pogrom in January 1941 which took the lives of hundreds of Romanian Jews and Chris- tians. If deported by the U.S. to Romania, he could stand trial for war crimes. New York dentist Dr. Charles Kremer has been pushing the government on the Trifa case for nearly 30 years. His efforts led to the original court action against Trifa in 1975. The case has been winding through the courts ever since. In the fall of 1980, after voluntarily renouncing his citizenship and agreeing not to appeal his decision, Trifa appealed anyway. U.S. Justice Department lawyers said the appeal was "frivolous" and a means of "buying time." Last No- vember, the U.S. Sixth Cir- cuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati rejected the ap- peal. Since 1953, Bishop Trifa has been head of the 35,000-member Roma- nian Orthodox Episco- pate in the U.S. and Canada. He was tried in absentia in June 1941 by a Romanian military tribunal for his al- leged part in the Iron Guard's revolt, and was given a life term at hard labor. That term was later commuted. Along with several hundred Iron Guard mem- bers, Trifa was given sanctuary by the Nazis in Germany. He came to the U.S. from Italy in 1950. Trifa argues that he was not a member of the Iron f l Guard, that he was not in- ' volved in a pogrom, and that he would not receive a fair trial in Romania because of his anti-Communist activi- - ties. Schools Focus on Holocaust NEW YORK — A Holocaust curriculum for,' Jewish schools developed by the Jewish Education Serv- ice of North America (JESNA) is now in use at 20 - schools throughout country. The curriculum, being used by a public school and a Catholic junior high school in addition to 18 `- Jewish schools, was de- veloped under a grant from '- the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. The 10-unit curriculum features the work of such noteV scholars as Dr. Lucjan Dob- roszycki, Rev. Franklin Lit- tell, Dr. Henry Feingold and Dr. Jack Wertheimer.