Why was part of a human scalp found in a Department of Justice official’s desk? To whom did it belong? Did government officials put a target on the back of a man they mistakenly identified as Nazi concentration camp Treblinka guard Ivan Demjanjuk, also known as “Ivan the Terrible”? And did a vigilante actually murder a former SS soldier in New Jersey? Is it possible that the government wrongfully accused naturalized citizens of being notorious Nazi war criminals? The government learned, however, that it could keep its Cold War activities related to former Nazis a secret only for so long. Once things began to unravel, it was only a matter of time before someone found the thread, pulled it, and then ran with it.
In November 2010 the New York Times obtained a copy of, and released to the public, a previously confidential report written by the Department of Justice (DOJ), which held shocking secrets regarding the government’s botched attempts to hunt down and prosecute Nazis in the United States, as well as abroad, and its willingness to harbor and even employ some of these criminals after World War II.1 This exhaustive six-hundred-page report, “The Office of Special Investigations: Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” was written in 2006 by Judy Feigin, edited by Mark M. Richard (former assistant attorney general, Department of Justice, Criminal Division), and released four years later, after the DOJ’s unsuccessful attempt to keep it strictly under wraps. How had these alleged criminals operated under the radar for so long?
In the 1970s news broke that former Nazis had escaped prosecution and were living the good life in the United States. While some details of the investigations into these people’s pasts have slowly trickled down to the public over the years, much more has remained shrouded in secrecy by the U.S. government—until now. More than thirty-five years ago, Americans first learned that former Nazis who persecuted Jews and other groups resided in the United States. This enlightenment came as a result of publicity from a court case involving Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, who was ultimately stripped of her citizenship and deported. The government based its case on evidence that demonstrated that Braunsteiner Ryan, a housewife, had been a guard supervisor at the Majdanek Nazi death camp in Lublin, Poland, and that she had lied about never being convicted of a crime, although she had served three years in prison after her conviction in 1948 for her brutal treatment of internees at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Although Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan’s case was not included in the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) 2006 report, several of its investigations deserve special note because they provide examples of government overreach or of investigatory mistakes that had dire consequences. The cases in question concern Frank Walus, a Pole; John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian; and Tscherim Soobzokov, a Russian. Whether due to mistaken identity or efforts to mask mistaken prosecutions, each of these cases is scandalous in its own way and demand brief illumination. In addition they illustrate, in some ways, that popular myth does not quite hold up. Accusations of being a war criminal does not make it so, but the ramifications of those charges could still have long-term consequences.
First is the case of Frank Walus, the start of which actually predated the creation of the OSI by the Department of Justice. Although he was born in Germany of Polish parents, Walus was very young when his father died, and he returned to Poland with his family. Where he was and what he did during the war has been the subject of much debate. After the war Walus resided in Kielce, Poland, for seven years. In 1959 he came to the United States under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act but returned to Poland a short time later. Walus reentered the United States in 1963, set up residence in Chicago, and received naturalization status in 1970.
In 1974 Walus came to the attention of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) thanks to a letter from Simon Wiesenthal of the Jewish Documentation Center. According to Wiesenthal, Walus had betrayed Jews to the Gestapo in the Polish towns of Czestochowa and Kielce. The INS investigation initially failed to locate substantiating evidence. In addition, Walus claimed to have been a forced laborer in Germany during the war. Not willing to abandon the inquiry, the INS requested that Israel advertise for camp survivors who knew Walus to come forward. Of the six witnesses who provided testimony, five swore affidavits claiming to have witnessed atrocities committed by Walus. The INS subsequently located additional witnesses in the United States and decided to move forward with a case against him. The U.S. attorney filed suit. “In January 1977 Walus was charged with procuring his citizenship illegally, both because he concealed material facts (wartime atrocities and his membership in the ‘Gestapo, SS or other similar organization’) and because he lacked the good moral character required (as evidenced by his having committed war crimes and having concealed his membership in the Gestapo).”2
Eighty-two-year-old judge Julius Hoffman presided over the trial, which began in March 1978. During the trial the judge’s rulings made his bias against the defense clear: “At times the court was so antagonistic to defense counsel that the government joined with the defense in an effort to salvage the record.”3 Walus’s testimony remained consistent with what he told INS during its investigation—that the Germans forced him to work on farms in Germany during the war. While Walus was able to provide documentation to verify his testimony, the U.S. government was unable to demonstrate definitively the version of events that it had the burden to prove: “The Germans had no record of Walus having served in the military and the Polish war crimes commissions in Kielce and Czestochowa had no record of him either.” After a seventeen day trial Judge Hoffman “revoked Walus’ citizenship.”4 Following the trial Walus and his attorney uncovered additional evidence that provided further documentary and eyewitness proof that he had indeed been a forced farm laborer in Germany during the war. Consequently, they filed a series of motions requesting that the verdict be vacated. Unconvinced, the judge denied the motions, claiming that much of the testimony could not be considered “newly discovered,” and he failed to give any credence to the newly discovered documents.5 In each case—even when the Polish War Crimes Commission offered to provide corroborating evidence if ordered by the court—Judge Hoffman remained consistent and denied the motions.
A week before the creation of the OSI, the Seventh Circuit Court heard the appeal, in which Walus cited bias in both his trial and pretrial motions. The court rendered its verdict seven months later. Although the court decided not to reverse the earlier verdict based on bias, it did rule that the government’s case was weak. It had not presented enough evidence to support the verdict. The court ruled that it could not affirm Judge Hoffman’s decision and ordered a new trial in a different court. At this point OSI deputy director Allan A. Ryan Jr. recommended reopening the investigation before proceeding to a new trial. The OSI conducted an exhaustive seven-month investigation in Germany and Poland. In addition, Israel was asked to review the evidence and weigh in on its authenticity. Two OSI attorneys—Jerry Scanlan and Robin Boylan—reviewed the case and concluded that only one of the original government witnesses was reliable. The evidence overwhelmingly supported Walus’s claims, not the government’s. Although Boylan was convinced that there was no case and the government should not pursue Walus, there was debate over whether or not the government should admit its mistake. Boylan admitted that if the government acknowledged that it was wrong about Walus, it would be opening a Pandora’s box, and it would be difficult to replace the lid. Doing nothing, as some advised, was not a good option either, according to Boylan. He “believed Walus was innocent, and that ‘no reasonable person who has examined the file could conclude otherwise.’ A failure to admit the government’s error would therefore create the false impression that Walus was a war criminal. This would be particularly egregious since the government had the evidence in hand, before trial, to realize that the case against Walus could not stand.”6
Ryan concurred with Boylan’s recommendation and consulted with the U.S. attorney. They agreed to release a joint statement, which they did on 26 November 1980. They did not, however, let Walus off the hook. In fact, they blamed him for confusion caused by the embellished “stories” that he had told family, friends, and neighbors over the years. On that same November day the U.S. attorney, supported by the DOJ Criminal Division, moved to dismiss the case against Frank Walus. The court agreed and dismissed the case. In Walus’s case the OSI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) made the honorable decision. They recognized that without the eyewitness testimony (proven unreliable) and corroborating documentary evidence (nonexistent) they had no real case and that pursuit of one could lead to a miscarriage of justice. As other cases would demonstrate, however, they would not always choose the honorable path. For Frank Walus, the nightmare was finally over—or was it? Despite the final result, there would be those who would not believe that he was innocent and would remain suspicious of him. Once the label of “war criminal and murderer” had been applied to Frank Walus, it was difficult to completely erase it, and to some extent it would haunt him for the rest of his life.
John Demjanjuk would learn that same lesson when he was accused of being “Ivan the Terrible.” John Demjanjuk—also known as Ivan Demjanjuk—was born in the Ukrainian village of Dubovi Makharintsi on 3 April 1920. Two years later the Soviet Union incorporated the Ukraine and extended its policies to its new Soviet state. Growing up in the Ukraine exposed Demjanjuk to much hardship and horror—millions dying because of famine or Stalinist purges. In fact, because of his family’s dire circumstances, they came very close to succumbing to the famine as well. As might be expected, Demjanjuk received little schooling—only four years of formal education. Before the war he got a job driving a tractor on a collective farm, but the outbreak of war earned him an invitation to join the Soviet Red Army. Demjanjuk’s career as a soldier was short-lived. He was wounded, recovered, returned to the front, and was captured by the Germans in May 1942.
There is some question about what Demjanjuk did for the rest of the war. Following the war he was sent to a displaced persons camp, where he met and married his wife Vera Bulochnik in 1950 and where he worked as a driver for the U.S. Army for a short time. Two years later Demjanjuk came to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act, settled in Cleveland, and got a job as a mechanic at Ford Motor Company. Six years after landing in Cleveland—in 1958—he became a U.S. citizen and changed his name from Ivan to John. It was not until 1975 that Demjanjuk came on the INS’s radar. The INS received a communication from the New York editor of Soviet Weekly. The editor claimed that Demjanjuk, who had received guard training at Trawniki, Poland, had subsequently worked as a guard at the Sobibór death camp. In 1977 the Soviet Weekly publicly outed the Ukrainian in an article that included Demjanjuk’s Trawniki identification card. The card noted the Ukrainian’s posting to Sobibór. The article also included an interview with a fellow guard who claimed to have served with Demjanjuk at Sobibór and Flossenbürg. Based on these factors, the INS determined that an inquiry was warranted.
As part of its investigation into Demjanjuk and other Ukrainians accused of war crimes, the INS sent a photograph bank to Israeli investigators. The Israelis compiled a photograph album, which they showed to survivors of the Treblinka concentration camp. Unfortunately for Demjanjuk, his photograph was on the same page as Feodor Fedorenko, another Ukrainian, who was under investigation for his participation at Treblinka. When viewing the album, several Treblinka survivors, as well as witnesses in Germany and the United States, identified Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible,” a Treblinka guard who had committed unspeakable atrocities. If true, this was even worse than INS had imagined and demanded immediate action.7
In 1977, based on the eyewitness identifications, the USAO in Cleveland filed a denaturalization suit against Demjanjuk. According to the suit, the government accused Demjanjuk of entering the United States and obtaining citizenship under false pretenses—unlawfully—by concealing his connection to Treblinka. Although the government stopped short of calling Demjanjuk “Ivan the Terrible,” the attorneys leveled serious charges against him: “‘cruel, inhumane and bestial treatment of Jewish prisoners and laborers’ at Treblinka. And while there was no allegation that he had served at Trawniki, Sobibor or Flossenbürg, the complaint charged him with falsely listing Sobibor on his visa application as a place of residence during the war.”8
Because these events occurred at the same time that the DOJ created a new division—the Special Litigation Unit (SLU)—the decision was made that the USAO and the SLU would combine their resources and try the case together, although the DOJ appointed the SLU as lead counsel. Before the case came to trial, however, the OSI replaced the SLU. As part of their investigation, the OSI requested information about Demjanjuk from the Soviets, who had interviewed Treblinka guards and survivors, and from Poland. The Poles provided a partial guard list for Treblinka. While the name Ivan Marchenko appeared on the list, Demjanjuk’s did not. Despite that, two factors convinced one OSI attorney that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible. First, the Ukrainian had listed “Marchenko” as his mother’s maiden name. Second, eighteen survivors and a medical aide from Treblinka had all identified Demjanjuk’s photograph as Ivan the Terrible. Another OSI attorney, however, remained unconvinced, particularly since evidence seemed to suggest that the time when Demjanjuk was supposedly at Sobibór and at Treblinka overlapped and witnesses testified that Ivan the Terrible rarely left the camp. Despite the attorney’s appeal to the OSI director, the government chose to move forward with the case against Demjanjuk, after amending the complaint to include his guard service at Trawniki and Sobibór.
The DOJ proved—yet again—not to be deterred by contradictory evidence. Bringing a Nazi war criminal to trial and gaining a conviction was more important than a possible miscarriage of justice. The case went to trial in 1981. Demjanjuk denied the charges, but his nightmare continued. Although the government’s case was not rock solid, Demjanjuk’s defense was even weaker. According to the defense, following his capture, Demjanjuk was compelled to become a member of a “German-sponsored anti-Soviet army.”9 In addition, the defense claimed a case of mistaken identity and argued that the Trawniki identification card had been forged. Although it hurt his case, Demjanjuk admitted that he had lied on his immigration documents. He had feared that honesty would have resulted in his return to the Soviet Union, where he would have paid the ultimate price for fighting against the Soviet army—his life. Because the court felt that the government’s contention that the Ukrainian was in fact Ivan the Terrible was compelling, the judgment went against Demjanjuk, and the judge ordered his citizenship revoked. Vehemently denying that he was Ivan the Terrible—the guard in charge of the Treblinka gas chamber—Demjanjuk filed several appeals, all of which were rejected by November 1982. The handwriting was on the wall. Next step: deportation. In July 1982, even before Demjanjuk’s appeals had been exhausted, the government filed a deportation action against him. For almost two years Demjanjuk fought deportation to the Soviet Union, but his efforts ended in failure in May 1984, when he received a notification for his deportation to the USSR.
During this same time, however, the DOJ had another ace up its sleeve. It had been negotiating Demjanjuk’s extradition to Israel, where he would face additional, more serious charges. While his deportation to the Soviet Union was under appeal, the court ordered the Ukrainian extradited to Israel to stand trial for murder. Things went from bad to worse for Demjanjek, or so he thought. Still he chose to fight extradition. Losing his final appeal in February 1986, Demjanjuk found himself bound for Israel. Based on the premise that he was Ivan the Terrible, Demjanjuk was “charged with crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes against persecuted people.”10 For the next fourteen months the case against Demjanjuk played out. The Israelis presented much of the same evidence that the OSI had used in its case against him, but the defense, which had acquired discarded OSI notes that undercut some of its case, argued that the OSI had concealed and falsified information in the U.S. litigation. Unconvinced, the Israeli court found Demjanjuk guilty and sentenced him to death. He spent the next five years in solitary confinement while his conviction was under appeal. Then fate intervened.
The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in access to new evidence that Ivan Marchenko—not Ivan Demjanjuk—had operated the gas chambers at Treblinka. There was also corroborating eyewitness testimony. This time the eyewitness testimony benefited the defense. By July 1993, following a review of all available evidence, the Israeli Supreme Court had concluded that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible. This opened the door to his return to the United States, but the nightmare was not yet over. He would soon face new charges. Although the courts vacated the 1981 deportation order in 1998, the U.S. government didn’t waste much time in filing a new denaturalization suit in 1999, citing the fact that Demjanjuk had been a guard at several concentration camps—Majdanek, Sobibór, and Flossenbürg. He lost his citizenship for the second time in 2002. In April 2004 the ruling was upheld, and in November 2004 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case. The government initiated deportation proceedings a month later. In June 2005, when Demjanjuk again received notice of deportation, he petitioned the court to take the Ukraine off the table. Because he believed that the Ukrainians would both prosecute and torture him, he argued that sending him there would be in violation of the Convention against Torture. Although the court denied his motion, Demjanjuk appealed. In 2009 he both won and lost. He was deported, not to the Ukraine but to Germany, where he was convicted in 2011 of “28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder” and received a five-year prison sentence. Demjanjuk died at the age of ninety-one while awaiting the outcome of his appeal. For John Demjanjuk, the nightmare that began with a case of mistaken identity was finally over, but only because he was no longer around for the accusations to affect him. The questions about his identity and his culpability, however, remain. Unlike in the Walus case, the DOJ and OSI did not give up when their first efforts failed. They just tried again. While the initial judgment against Demjanjuk was a false start, the subsequent litigation resulted in a slam dunk. At the end of the day, the DOJ got its man even though he wasn’t the horrible monster Ivan the Terrible.11
As the case of Tscherim Soobzokov proves, however, even when the OSI and DOJ do not get their man, unintended consequences and unanswered questions can result from an investigation and litigation. Much uncertainty surrounds Soobzokov—who he was, what he did during the war, what work he did for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and who killed him. Tscherim Soobzokov was born in Tachtamukai, Russia, in 1918 (according to the 2006 OSI report). Tachtamukai, like Circassia, was in the North Caucasus region.12 Like Demjanjuk, Soobzokov grew up in Russia during a difficult time, when new agricultural and industrial programs, purges, and efforts to eliminate opposition to the Communist Party made life quite difficult, if not disastrous, for many Russians. With the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Soobzokov had a choice to make—fight or join the invaders. There is no indication if he willingly made a choice, but by August 1942 he was recruited by an SS (Schutzstaffel, or Protective Corps) or an SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or SS Intelligence Agency) officer. As reward for his enlistment, Soobzokov received appointment as police chief of Tachtamukai, and he became a member of the Field Gendarmerie. Attached to the SS, he admitted, during a CIA polygraph, his role with an execution commando that scoured the area for Jews and communists. The rewards continued—recruitment into an SS-sponsored Caucasian Legion and promotion to first lieutenant in the Waffen-SS in 1945.
After the war Soobzokov’s life took an interesting turn. In 1947 Soobzokov and a group of Circassians took advantage of help from the International Refugee Organization to emigrate from Italy to Jordan, where he initially worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company as an agricultural engineer before gaining employment with the city of Amman. During the 1950s Soobzokov was recruited by the CIA and worked under the code name “Nostril.” His role for the CIA was primarily informant and spotter. As a spotter, he was to recommend Circassians who might conceivably go on CIA-sponsored missions into the Soviet Caucasus. In 1955—after submitting the appropriate applications to the INS—he immigrated to the United States with his family. The CIA denied helping Soobzokov obtain his visa, although, apparently, after his arrival in the United States, his connection with the CIA continued on a part-time basis, and within three years the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) also employed him as a source. While Soobzokov and the CIA had a parting of the ways a few years later, the intelligence organization would play a role in the final hand that the Russian was dealt—or so it would seem.
Soobzokov settled into life in the United States. He became a citizen in 1961; lived in Paterson, New Jersey; joined the Democratic Party; and became active in the local Circassian community. Although he established himself as a leader in the Circassian community, he was a controversial one and made many enemies. Soobzokov had achieved what many immigrants, like most Americans, wanted. He was living the American dream, but he would soon learn that his dream life would not last.
All was not peaceful and happy between Soobzokov and his fellow compatriots. This contentious relationship chipped away at Soobzokov’s American dream and, eventually, helped turn the dream into a nightmare. In fact, beginning in the 1960s several Circassians decided to contact different government offices, suggesting that they take a closer look at the Russian. The first agency to receive such a notification was the INS. A brief inquiry did not, however, convince the INS that a deeper investigation was warranted. In 1972 things took a different turn. The Social Security Administration (SSA) was contacted by Soobzokov’s rivals, who made allegations of falsified birth certificates, bribery, and fraudulent government subsidies, which the government agency could not ignore. During the inquiry, rumors drew the SSA’s attention to Soobzokov’s wartime record. The accusation was that “Soobzokov had been in the SS and was involved in the killing of three Soviet officers” during the war. Because of these serious allegations, the SSA contacted the Berlin Document Center for information about the Russian. According to the director of the center, in 1945 Soobzokov had transferred to the Waffen-SS from a foreign army. Then came the damning bit. Although she admitted that there were no more records related to the Russian, the director was willing to make certain assumptions—“‘based on similar cases’ that Soobzokov transferred from a group that had either worked with SS partisan-hunting units or SS mobile killing units.”13 The SSA concluded that it had no choice but to turn the case over to the INS, which it did.
It was not long before Soobzokov learned that he was under investigation. His name was on the 1974 published DOJ list of people under scrutiny “for alleged war crimes.” In addition, the INS launched a “full-scale” inquiry that lasted approximately two years.14 What was quickly apparent was a power struggle in the Circassian community, which made it virtually impossible for the agency to acquire all of the facts and which, perhaps, should have sounded alarm bells. Frustrated, the INS announced in March 1976 that it was no longer scrutinizing Soobzokov, and the agency closed its file officially in January 1977.
While Soobzokov hoped that this was the end of the matter, life does not always work that way. This was not going to be the case. That same month Howard Blum’s book—Wanted: Nazi War Criminals in America—hit bookstores around the country. Although the author targeted several naturalized Americans, he focused on four in particular—one of whom was Soobzokov—all of whom he labeled war criminals. Blum specifically alleged that Soobzokov had “served as a first lieutenant in a mobile killing unit that had participated in the murder of 1,400,000 Jews on the Eastern Front.”15 The Jewish Defense League (JDL) joined the fray and organized protests outside the homes of Soobzokov and his attorney. Soobzokov vigorously fought against these claims and filed a series of lawsuits against government officials and members of the media. Although he won his libel suit against Blum, the media attention did not end and persuaded the USAO for the Southern District of New York to commence a criminal investigation of Soobzokov in May 1977. Investigating a number of allegations, including charges that he had lied to the INS, the USAO requested that the State Department approach the Soviet government for information about Soobzokov, whose nightmare had returned—with a vengeance. The death threats began, making life difficult for Soobzokov and his family.
Both the Soviets and Soobzokov provided conflicted affidavits regarding his wartime record. In 1979, the same year that the OSI acquired the case, the first assassination attempt occurred, when a pipe bomb in a cigar box was delivered to Soobzokov’s house. The attached note read, “Buddy. You didn’t kill enough of them. Have a smoke on me. Fedorenko.”16 Although the bomb brought the FBI to the case, the agency does not seem to have agreed to Soobzokov’s requests for protection. Consequently, Soobzokov’s life and those of his family members remained in danger.17
Meanwhile the OSI investigation continued. The OSI failed to substantiate Soobzokov’s claim that he had informed the U.S. vice consul in Amman about his SS connection when he applied for a visa to the United States, but they were able to corroborate his assertion that he had informed the CIA. Despite unwillingness to rely on the affidavits provided by the Soviets, the OSI was under pressure to proceed quickly against Soobzokov. The OSI needed to justify its existence, and achieving a victory in the Soobzokov case would go a long way in doing so. Other factors increased the pressure on the OSI. Not only did the DOJ expect immediate results from the OSI, but Soobzokov was also the only one of the four Blum targets who had not yet been charged—a situation that was quickly remedied.
In December 1979 the OSI made its move and filed charges against Soobzokov. In its suit the OSI claimed that Soobzokov had “unlawfully” received a visa and citizenship because he had not been honest about his complete military and criminal history on his applications. “The complaint also charged that Soobzokov lacked the good moral character necessary for citizenship; the lack of good moral character was based on his misrepresentations.” Weighing in on the case, the media suggested that, because of his work for them, the CIA had helped the Russian obtain “asylum secretly.”18
The case was not a slam dunk for either side. Soobzokov was able to supply a copy of a document from 1952—State Department Personal Data Form V-30—that detailed all of the “supposedly” omitted information, which provided the basis of the OSI suit against him. According to Soobzokov, he had provided the completed form to the vice consul when he applied for his visa. While the State Department could not produce this document because some of their records had been destroyed, the CIA did so, along with other crucial documents. Here is where things get really interesting. These documents—all of which were Department of State generated—were not in the original file supplied by the CIA to the OSI when it commenced its investigation. When questioned about the discrepancy, the intelligence agency had a curious response. According to the CIA, because of the terms of the “third party rule,” the agency could not provide classified information to another agency. In its 2006 report, however, the OSI verified that Soobzokov “had been a CIA agent in Jordan and that the agency had misled the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service on Soobzokov’s Nazi past.”19
Although there seemed to have been some sleight-of-hand CIA action, the documents had to be entered into the record, and the OSI had to ascertain their authenticity. Once the OSI had done so, half of its case had gone out the window. There was no longer a “lack of moral character” case. The only thing left was Soobzokov’s failure to disclose his criminal past. According to the Soviets, he had been incarcerated for five years on the charges of “hooliganism and arbitrariness”—charges generally leveled against those who had a beef with the communist state. Despite OSI requests, the Soviets declined to provide additional information about Soobzokov’s “alleged criminal activity.”20 There went the rest of the OSI case. Consequently, in July 1980 the government filed a motion, which included a litany of information about inquiries made by the OSI to verify the facts of the case, requesting dismissal of the complaint against the defendant.
Although he had achieved victory with the dismissal of the government suit, Soobzokov did not see an end to the nightmare. The Jewish Defense Organization (JDO), an offshoot of the JDL, was unwilling to let it go and publicly continued to advocate a violent resolution. Multiple responses to the JDO’s rally cry occurred on 14 August 1985. According to police, Soobzokov reported that a car containing two people had tried to run him down. A few hours after he phoned the police, Soobzokov’s car, which was in front of his house, burst into flames. When a neighbor saw the burning car, he went to warn Soobzokov. When the beleaguered man opened the door, a bomb that had been wired to it went off and fatally injured Soobzokov, who died three weeks later. Three other people in the house—Soobzokov’s wife, his daughter, and his four-year-old grandchild—were also injured in the blast.
Who was responsible for the bomb that killed Soobzokov and injured three members of his family? The obvious culprit was the JDO. While the JDO and the JDL “denied responsibility,” neither group expressed sorrow regarding the tragedy. In fact, “the JDL applaud[ed] the action,” while the JDO claimed that the bombing was a “righteous act.”21 No one has yet been brought to justice. While the OSI did not have enough evidence to convict Soobzokov, at the end of the day, that did not matter. People like Blum, the media, and groups like JDO decided that he was guilty. Once the target was drawn on his back, it was only a matter of time before someone hit the bull’s eye. One could argue that the ultimate outcome was unforeseen by the OSI. It was an unintended consequence of the OSI’s mission—to root out and prosecute Nazi criminals, those who had persecuted Jewish and other disadvantaged groups before and during World War II. It was the OSI’s job to achieve justice for the millions of victims. Unfortunately, the OSI target made Soobzokov a victim as well.
Since the Braunsteiner Ryan case broke, numerous books on the hunt for Nazis have been published. Some of the more recent publications include Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most Notorious Nazi, by Neal Bascomb; Guy Walters’s Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice; and Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America, by Annie Jacobsen. Spies, Lies, and Citizenship answers questions like those articulated earlier and exposes scandalous new information about Nazi fugitives—such as Josef Mengele, Andrija Artuković, Arthur Rudolph, Kurt Waldheim, and Klaus Barbie—sheltered and protected in the United States or relentlessly pursued by criminal investigators.
In each of these cases, the OSI had to decide whether or not to rely on eyewitnesses, either through affidavits or in direct courtroom testimony. Eyewitness testimony can frequently be unreliable. In some cases the witnesses deliberately mislead investigators because they have a specific agenda. In the case of Tscherim Soobzokov, rivals in the Circassia community had an axe to grind and did their best to spark investigation of their Russian neighbor. In other cases, such as in the case of John Demjanjuk, the witnesses made honest mistakes. The placement of his picture next to that of another Treblinka guard in a photo array influenced eyewitness identification of Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. Although the evidence proved that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, the government vigorously pursued other charges against the Ukrainian and succeeded in stripping him of his citizenship and deporting him. Finally, in the case of Frank Walus, while eyewitness testimony initially bolstered the government case against him, subsequent investigation undercut the validity of that testimony. As a result, the case against him was dismissed. Unlike Demjanjuk and Soobzokov, Walus did not face further government inquiry or litigation. The Walus, Demjanjuk, and Soobzokov cases seem to establish a pattern of behavior by the government agencies in question—INS, USAO, DOJ, and OSI—and their pursuit of high-profile cases whether there was substantiating evidence or not. It is possible, however, that, as the OSI settled down to business and the dust settled, there was less government overreach or investigatory mistakes.