There may not have been any headline-making discoveries and prosecutions of Nazi war criminals recently, but that doesn’t mean the effort has stopped.
Eli M. Rosenbaum said that the U.S. Justice Department is still “racing against the so-called ‘biological solution’ to the problem of fugitive Nazi criminals” — that is, the inevitable mortality of these people, many of whom are now in their 90s.
Rosenbaum is director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Justice Department and has worked for some 25 years in prosecuting Holocaust perpetrators.
He was the featured speaker at Milwaukee’s Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) commemoration on April 27 at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center.
The Yom HaShoah Commemoraion 2014 was a program of the JCC and The Nathan & Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. Leo Kleiner and Sara Minash chaired the planning committee.
“Notwithstanding the lateness of the date, investigations and prosecutions continue,” he said. “My office still has active cases and investigations, as do some foreign governments, and we work very closely with those governments. Important victories continue to be achieved.”
The department is not resting on its prior achievements, though they are significant, as Rosenbaum described to the approximately 600 people attending the event.
“For more than 30 years, the U.S. Justice Department has identified the perpetrators [of the Holocaust], investigated them and prosecuted them in our courts,” Rosenbaum said. “It is … universally agreed that over the decades the United States has had the most aggressive and successful law enforcement program of this kind in the entire world.”
His office, Rosenbaum continued, has “won cases against nearly 110 participants in Nazi crimes, ranging from death camp SS personnel to a cabinet-level official of an Axis country.”
He and his colleagues have “secured a measure of justice, however inadequate, in cases involving some two million Holocaust murders.”
Some of these cases have involved war criminals living in Wisconsin, he said. Rosenbaum recounted the story of Josias Kumpf, who in 2001 was found in Racine.
Kumpf was an SS member who served at the Sachsenhausen and Trawniki concentration camps. In 1943, he was involved in the murder by shooting of some 8,000 Jews.
“His job that day, he confessed to us, was at the killing pit, where he was assigned to, in his words, ‘shoot to kill’ any Jews who tried to escape — that is to say, shoot Jews who tried to live,” Rosenbaum said.
Kumpf had concealed his SS service in his applications for U.S. entry and citizenship. In 2009, he was deported to Austria and died there.
Rosenbaum said “it is the experience of meeting the survivors” of the Holocaust, “that gives us the strength to press on despite the many frustrations of our work — the outrageous lies of the defendants, the delaying tactics of some of their lawyers, the insensitivity of some judges and the depression that threatens to overcome us when we must ask survivor witnesses to reopen old psychic wounds … in order to testify in our prosecutions…”
Rosenbaum mentioned having worked with Milwaukee Jewish Federation president and CEO Hannah Rosenthal and thanked her for her efforts.
During her time as U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism in the U.S. State Department, Rosenthal “tenaciously pursued justice in support of our program… most memorably in her interactions with European leaders who just want the problem of fugitive Nazi criminals to go away,” Rosenbaum said.
But Rosenbaum does not only investigate the past. “A key lesson of the Holocaust is that one must not wait until those who harbor visions of mass violence and even genocide are able actually to realize their pernicious goals,” he said. “They have to be stopped before they can even start.”
Therefore, the Justice Department devotes time to “furthering the work of the Atrocities Prevention Board, which was created by order of President Obama two years ago,” Rosenbaum said.
According to a White House blog by Stephen Pomper on May 1, 2013, the APB “monitors emerging threats, focuses U.S. Government efforts and develops new tools and capabilities” for preventing “surges of violence.”
Therefore, on this Yom HaShoah, “I think we have a … message for today’s neo-Nazis and others who would fantasize about carrying on where [German Nazi dictator Adolf] Hitler left off,” said Rosenbaum. “This is not the 1940s… We will not let our leaders stand idly by while you make your murderous plans.”
In addition, the Yom HaShoah event honored Holocaust educators Amy H. Shapiro, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at Alverno College; and Laurie Herman, who teaches the subject at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School.
It also recognized the winners of the Holocaust Youth Essay Contest sponsored by the Habush Family Foundation: MJDS eighth graders Yoni Altman-Shafer and Anna McCormack; Mukwonago Baptist Academy 12th grader Michaela Pieczynski; and Christian Life School 12th grader Nicholas Redic.
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