Rosenbaum, who spent much of the past 40 years leading the U.S. government’s pursuit of Nazis, was named head of the Justice Department’s War Crimes Accountability Task Force, which was created in June to help bring war criminals to justice for the atrocities in the Ukrainian conflict. Widespread outrage over Russian mass killings and deportations, as well as the targeting of political infrastructure, has generated bipartisan support for justice for victims of war crimes. The legislation would transform US law so that suspected war criminals captured in the US or extradited elsewhere can be prosecuted even if neither they nor their victims are Americans. The change will finally align US law with the 1949 Geneva Conventions. “It means that if a war criminal comes here, we have jurisdiction. It would not only be US victims and perpetrators, but any war criminal who sets foot in the United States,” Rosenbaum told the Guardian. “I know firsthand the frustration of having war criminals here and all you can do is revoke their citizenship and deport them unless a country wants to extradite them, which in the case of the Nazis almost never happened.” . Another bill is being drafted that would recognize crimes against humanity and allow them to be prosecuted in US courts, a statute adopted by every other NATO country except Italy. And there are bipartisan discussions underway on legislation that would allow the US to provide evidence to the international criminal court (ICC). “Congress must strengthen our laws so that perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity can never find sanctuary in the United States,” Dick Durbin, Senate Majority Whip and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the Guardian . “I am determined to ensure that those who commit these heinous crimes are held to account. Our nation led the first prosecutions for such crimes at the Nuremberg trials. It’s time for the United States to take the lead once again.” The Justice for War Crimes Victims bill is co-sponsored by the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Chuck Grassley. His office did not respond to a request for comment, but a Democratic aide on the Judiciary Committee said bipartisan support was so solid that there were solid hopes of passing the bill before the end of the year, regardless of the results of the next general election. of the month. Rosenbaum comes to the job of counsel for war crimes accountability with a reputation as the world’s most effective Nazi hunter. The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which he worked for and then headed, identified more than a hundred ex-Nazis who had tried to reintegrate into American society. Both his parents were Jewish refugees from Germany, and his father, Irving, joined the US Army and returned as part of a psychological warfare unit, ending the war by interrogating top Nazis. Photos showing victims of Russia’s war in Ukraine are seen in the background as Eli Rosenbaum answers questions during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on war crimes in Ukraine in September. Photo: Rex/Shutterstock Rosenbaum joined OSI as an intern soon after the unit was founded in 1979, then returned as a lawyer in 1980, becoming director in 1994. One of his first cases began with a book he happened to pick up at a store while he was still an intern, regarding the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp which provided slave labor for the Nazi V2 missile program at the Mittelwerk. Up to 20,000 prisoners are estimated to have died during the manufacture of the V-2 rockets there, far more than were killed by weapons when they rained down on Britain. The book led him to ask questions about the guilt of Wernher von Braun and other Nazi rocket scientists the US removed from Germany after the war as part of Operation Paperclip, with the aim of securing their expertise for the US and denying it in the Soviet Union. . Von Braun died in 1977, but Rosenbaum began to scrutinize another engineer, Arthur Rudolph, who had gone on to run the Saturn V program that propelled the Americans to the moon. From Rudolph’s earlier statements, he clearly had knowledge of Dora-Nordhausen and at one point complained that he had to leave a New Year’s party in late 1943 to oversee the movement of some equipment. Quick guide

Suspected Nazis in the US

projection Hermione Brownsteiner Ryan The first suspected Nazi extradited by the US for war crimes was convicted in 1973 in West Germany of multiple murders while a guard at the Majdanek concentration camp. He picked prisoners to send to the gas chamber and trampled an old woman to death. Released from prison in 1996 due to ill health, he died three years later aged 79. John Demjanjuk The Ohio auto worker was deported to Germany in 2009 and convicted in 2011 of helping to kill more than 28,000 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp. He died in a Bavarian nursing home in 2012 aged 91 while appealing. His conviction was unprecedented in German law, as it was based solely on his serving as a camp guard, without any evidence that he was involved in a specific murder. Feodor (Fyodor) Fedorenko He was deported from the US to the Soviet Union in 1984 and executed by firing squad in 1987 at the age of 79. A Soviet court found the former Treblinka death camp guard guilty of treason, voluntarily joining the Nazis and participating in mass murders at the camp in Nazi occupied Poland. Fedorenko fought a seven-year battle to stay in the US, where he had worked in a Connecticut factory before retiring to Miami Beach. Karl Linnas The concentration camp chief was stripped of his American citizenship and sent to the Soviet Union in 1987, where he was convicted in absentia of the deaths of 12,000 people at the Tartu concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Estonia. Investigators said he ordered guards to shoot prisoners who knelt next to ditches that became their graves. He died of heart failure before he could face a firing squad. Arthur Rudolph The Nazi rocket scientist was transferred to the US after the war and played a role in the Apollo moon landings, for which Nasa awarded him a distinguished service medal. Decades later he was accused of working slave laborers to death in V-2 factories. He reconciled with the US in 1984, renouncing his citizenship and moving to West Germany, where he died in 1996 at the age of 89. Valerian (Viorel) Trifa The former US archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church renounced his US citizenship in 1980 after admitting he lied to immigration authorities to hide pro-Nazi activities and moved to Portugal, where he died in 1987 aged 72. Trifa was a staunch Nazi supporter who made anti-Jewish speeches as a member of a Romanian fascist group. Associated Press Photo: Keystone/Hulton Archive Thanks for your response. “I knew by then that the men who gather to move the rocket components at the end of winter would not be volunteer citizens. They would be slaves.” Rosenbaum said. When questioned by the OSI in 1983, Rudolph agreed to renounce his US citizenship and return to Germany. Another of Rosenbaum’s early cases was Valerian Trifa, a former member of Romania’s fascist Iron Guard who had become archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the US and Canada. As part of the investigation into the case, Rosenbaum had to go to the headquarters of the American Nazi Party in Arlington, Virginia, in 1981, as the only place he could find a specific book about the Iron Guard was in his bookstore. “They had a swastika on an enamel plate over the door, and during the day they put up a Nazi flag and an American flag,” he recalled. “It was pretty creepy in there, and the guy who ran their bookstore was pretty creepy too. They had these giant flattering photo portraits of Hitler and George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi party.” The Nazi headquarters is no longer there. The party broke down as he could no longer afford the rent and printing costs. Volunteers lower a coffin containing one of the 15 unidentified people killed by Russian troops into a grave in the city of Bucha, Kyiv region, on September 2. Photo: Reuters “Today, you don’t need a building, you don’t need a printing press. You just need an Internet access account or a library card and a library that has Internet terminals and you can reach far more people than the Nazi party ever could,” Rosenbaum said. Technology has also improved for those hunting war criminals. The U.S. has helped Ukraine build a state-of-the-art war crimes database, and one area where Rosenbaum’s team is expected to provide critical case-building assistance is providing electronic and radio intercepts. However, he was cautious about the role of US intelligence in providing such evidence. “Obviously the United States has had its eyes on the Soviet and now the Russian military for many decades, and we have a lot of resources that other governments may not be able to duplicate,” Rosenbaum said. “So I can only say: stay tuned. We are working closely with all departments of the US government that may be able to help.” He acknowledged that it may take many years to bring justice for the crimes now being committed in Ukraine, but he said the OSI showed that he and his colleagues were undaunted by the long pursuit or the war criminals. “Our watchword is: we will be relentless,” Rosenbaum said. “So the message to perpetrators or would-be perpetrators is: if you act on criminal warrants or issue criminal orders, you may have to spend the rest of your life looking for…