Nazi-hunting unit chases a dwindling corps of suspects

PHILADELPHIA -- Johann Breyer, 77, landed work the day after arriving in America in 1952 and quietly supported his family for the next 40 years as a tool-and-die maker.

Andrew Kuras, 80, grew blueberries and raised his sons in New Jersey.

Ildefonsas Bucmys, 81, worked in an Ohio foundry for 27 years before retiring in 1985 to enjoy bingo, church and Lithuanian social gatherings.

These three men, say federal prosecutors, are former guards at Nazi concentration camps who helped Hitler's Third Reich kill 6 million Jews. Despite their advanced age, prosecutors say they should not be allowed to live -- or die -- in the United States.

"We race the clock against the Grim Reaper. Sometimes the Grim Reaper wins," said Eli Rosenbaum, who directs the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations.

Congress established the office in 1979 to root out and deport war criminals from World War II who made it into the country. But with its targets reaching their 80s and 90s, some question its mission.

"To continue the prosecution of octogenarians -- and soon nonagenarians -- is, to be sure, a political decision," Senior Judge Ruggero J. Aldisert of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a 1996 dissent in a Nazi deportation case.

Others complain that the office -- having flushed out the more egregious cases -- is now chasing men who were mere pawns in the battle over Europe and have been law-abiding members of American society for decades.

"Time after time you find these people have led exemplary lives as citizens," said Martin Lentz, a Philadelphia lawyer who represents Breyer.

'Especially cruel'

But Rosenbaum said these immigrants never should have been allowed to enjoy the benefits of U.S. residency and citizenship.

"The bottom line is they simply shouldn't be here," he said, "and it is especially cruel to require survivors of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes who have made new homes here to require them to share their adopted homeland with their former tormentors."

The Justice Department builds deportation cases against these men by showing they lied about their wartime activities when they entered the United States.

The OSI's work has led judges to strip 71 people of their citizenship and deport 51. Many of those deported could face criminal charges in Europe, but few have ever been prosecuted.

The OSI staff has 24 lawyers, historians and investigators and a $5 million annual budget. There are about 150 people now under investigation and 19 cases pending in court.

The office has lost only a few cases in the past decade, thanks in part to the cache of documentary evidence -- including signed oaths and employee lists from Nazi death camps -- that became available with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

None of the attorneys for suspected guards would let them be interviewed for this story.

Rosenbaum's father joined the U.S. Army and was sent with other American soldiers to inspect Dachau after the death camp was liberated.

"I asked him, when I was a kid, 14 or 15, 'What did you see?'" Rosenbaum said. "His eyes welled with tears. He never said anything. I never pressed it."