Tannenbaum (left) with unidentified woman and child in the late 1940s in Italy and (above) in recent TV interview in New York.

them to commit their atrocities.
The Detroit Jewish News has
located survivors of Goerlitz who say Tan-
nenbaum fatally beat their brothers,
fathers and other inmates. One survivor
said Tannenbaum ordered 300 Jews in
February 1945 to board trucks bound to
the death camp of Gross Rosen. Others
said Tannenbaum habitually beat
prisoners with a rubber hose, an iron pipe
— or his bare fists.
The Tannenbaum case is perhaps the
most sensitive to emerge from the Office
of Special Investigations (OSI), the Justice
Department's eight-year-old Nazi-hunting
unit. Never before has OSI accused a Jew
— kapo or not — of participating in Nazi-
inspired crimes.
And never before has it charged a kapo
with excessive violence. That a kapo was
violent was a given. Violence was inherent

in the task for which he had been recruited.
Kapos were surrogates of the Nazis. They
were ordered to beat and pummel inmates,
to starve and humiliate them. The Tannen-
baum case rests on whether he performed
these tasks perfunctorily enough to satisfy
the SS — or whether he did them with
relish and abandon and, most important-
ly, on his own, without urging by the Nazis.
In effect, the case takes OSI into a
nether world, one where morality was
almost moot and the persecuted could be
as inhuman as the persecutors. And since
one Goerlitz survivor, Leon Zelig, said, "I
was more afraid of Tannenbaum than of
the SS," the case may even take the OSI
into a realm where the brutality of Jewish
kapos exceeded that of the SS.
"When dealing with kapos, you need an
extra level of analysis," said Allan Ryan,
OSI's head from 1980 to 1984. "Some

kapos beat inmates to protect them froni
worse beatings from the SS. Others were
as brutal and as savage as the SS. I told
my staff we would prosecute them the
same as we would prosecute an SS
member."
"It is impossible to equate a kapo and
an SS member," retorted Rabbi Marvin
Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Los Angeles. "The SS volunteered for
their jobs and enthusiastically endorsed
the policies of Adolf Hitler. Kapos were
recruited. You can't say Patty Hearst
played the same role as her captors. The
same is true of any kapo. If Tannenbaum
is convicted, giving him the same penalty
as an SS member would be a distortion of
history."
Allan Ryan said the OSI investigated six
to ten kapo cases while he was at the
Justice Department. "After a great deal of

Courtesy of WABC-TV, New York