news item; a quote Millions in Social Security for expelled Nazis; “”OSIJEK, Croatia (AP) -- Former Auschwitz guard Jakob Denzinger lived the American dream. His plastics company in the Rust Belt town of Akron, Ohio, thrived. By the late 1980s, he had acquired the trappings of success: a Cadillac DeVille and a Lincoln Town Car, a lakefront home, investments in oil and real estate. Then the Nazi hunters showed up. In 1989, as the U.S. government prepared to strip him of his citizenship, Denzinger packed a pair of suitcases and fled to Germany. He later settled in this pleasant town on the Drava River, where he lives comfortably, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. He collects a Social Security payment of about $1,500 each month, nearly twice the take-home pay of an average Croatian worker. OSIJEK, Croatia (AP) -- Former Auschwitz guard Jakob Denzinger lived the American dream. His plastics company in the Rust Belt town of Akron, Ohio, thrived. By the late 1980s, he had acquired the trappings of success: a Cadillac DeVille and a Lincoln Town Car, a lakefront home, investments in oil and real estate. Then the Nazi hunters showed up. In 1989, as the U.S. government prepared to strip him of his citizenship, Denzinger packed a pair of suitcases and fled to Germany. He later settled in this pleasant town on the Drava River, where he lives comfortably, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. He collects a Social Security payment of about $1,500 each month, nearly twice the take-home pay of an average Croatian worker. Denzinger, 90, is among dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards who collected millions of dollars in Social Security payments after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation found. In response to APs findings, a White House spokesman said Monday that Nazi suspects should not be getting the benefits. But the spokesman, Eric Schultz, did not say whether or how the White House might end the payments. The payments flowed through a legal loophole that has given the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal government records. Denzinger, 90, is among dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards who collected millions of dollars in Social Security payments after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation found. In response to APs findings, a White House spokesman said Monday that Nazi suspects should not be getting the benefits. But the spokesman, Eric Schultz, did not say whether or how the White House might end the payments. The payments flowed through a legal loophole that has given the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal government records. Denzinger, 90, is among dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards who collected millions of dollars in Social Security payments after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation found. In response to APs findings, a White House spokesman said Monday that Nazi suspects should not be getting the benefits. But the spokesman, Eric Schultz, did not say whether or how the White House might end the payments. The payments flowed through a legal loophole that has given the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal government records. Like Denzinger, many lied about their Nazi pasts to get into the U.S. following World War II, and eventually became American citizens. Among those who benefited: - Armed SS troops who guarded the Nazi network of camps where millions of Jews perished. - An SS guard who took part in the brutal liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland that killed as many as 13,000 Jews. - A Nazi collaborator who engineered the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews in Poland. - A German rocket scientist accused of using slave labor to build the V-2 rocket that pummeled London. He later won NASAs highest honor for helping to put a man on the moon. The APs findings are the result of more than two years of interviews, research and analysis of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources. Like Denzinger, many lied about their Nazi pasts to get into the U.S. following World War II, and eventually became American citizens. Among those who benefited: - Armed SS troops who guarded the Nazi network of camps where millions of Jews perished. - An SS guard who took part in the brutal liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland that killed as many as 13,000 Jews. - A Nazi collaborator who engineered the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews in Poland. - A German rocket scientist accused of using slave labor to build the V-2 rocket that pummeled London. He later won NASAs highest honor for helping to put a man on the moon. The APs findings are the result of more than two years of interviews, research and analysis of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources. The Justice Department has denied using Social Security payments as a tool for removing Nazi suspects. But records show the U.S. State Department and the Social Security Administration voiced grave concerns over the methods used by the Justice Departments Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations. State officials derogatorily called the practice Nazi dumping and claimed the OSI was bargaining with suspects so they would leave voluntarily. Since 1979, the AP analysis found, at least 38 of 66 suspects removed from the United States kept their Social Security benefits. Legislation that would have closed the Social Security loophole failed 15 years ago, partly due to opposition from the OSI. Since then, according to the APs analysis, at least 10 Nazi suspects kept their benefits after leaving. The Social Security Administration confirmed payments to seven who are deceased. One living suspect was confirmed through an AP interview. Two others met the conditions to keep their benefit Of the 66 suspects, at least four are alive, living in Europe on U.S. Social Security. In newly uncovered Social Security Administration records, the AP found that by March 1999, 28 suspected Nazi criminals had collected $1.5 million in Social Security payments after their removal from the U.S. Since then, the AP estimates the amount paid out has reached into the millions. That estimate is based on the number of suspects who qualified and the three decades that have passed since the first former Nazis, Arthur Rudolph and John Avdzej, signed agreements that required them to leave the country but ensured their benefits would continue. Long-living beneficiaries can collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments. A single male who earned an average wage of $44,800 a year and turned 65 in 1990, the year after Denzinger did, would receive nearly $15,000 annually in Social Security benefits, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit public policy group in Washington. Thats $375,000 over 25 years. The amounts are adjusted for inflation. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., demanded Monday that the inspectors general at the Justice Department and Social Security Administration launch an immediate investigation of the payments. Maloney is a high-ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. In letters to the inspectors general at both agencies, Maloney called the payments a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars. The Justice Department said it was reviewing Maloneys letter. The Social Security Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Social Security Administration refused the APs request for the total number of Nazi suspects who received benefits and the dollar amounts of those payments. Spokesman William BJ Jarrett said the agency does not track data specific to Nazi cases. A further barrier, Jarrett said, is that there is no exception in U.S. privacy law that allows us to disclose information because the individual is a Nazi war criminal or an accused Nazi war criminal. The agency also declined to make the acting commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, or another senior agency official available for an interview. AP last week appealed the agencys denial of the information through the Freedom of Information Act. The appeal cited several concerns about the Social Security Administrations handling of the request submitted in April. Without first informing AP, the agency altered the scope of the request in a manner serving both to undercut APs inquiry while simultaneously sparing the SSA from having to disclose potentially embarrassing information, the Oct. 16 appeal said. The Justice Department declined the APs request for an official to speak on the record. Spokesman Peter Carr said in an emailed statement that Social Security payments never were used as an incentive or as a threat to persuade Nazi suspects to depart voluntarily. The matter of Social Security benefits eligibility was raised by defense counsel, not by the department, and the department neither used retirement benefits as an inducement to leave the country and renounce citizenship nor threatened that failure to depart and renounce would jeopardize continued receipt of benefits, Carr said. The department opposed the legislation in 1999, Carr acknowledged, because it would have undermined the OSIs mandate to remove Nazi criminals as expeditiously as possible to countries that would prosecute them. Speed was a key factor. Survivors of the Holocaust who made the United States their home after the war had been forced to share it with their former Nazi tormenters. That had to change, and fast, the OSIs proponents said. If suspects were to stand trial, they needed to be found and ousted while they were alive. The OSI and its backers didnt want death to cheat justice. Yet only 10 suspects were ever prosecuted after being expelled, according to the departments figures. Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said that while he could understand having to make the tough choice between no justice and a measure of justice by allowing suspects to retain their benefits to get them out of the country, the OSI should have known there was no political will to prosecute them after their removal. If these arrangements were made based on the supposition that these people would ultimately be prosecuted on criminal charges in their countries of origin, that was purely wishful thinking, Zuroff said Monday. Ultimately the numbers prove very clearly that almost none of these people were ever charged, let alone punished. At his home in Osijek, Denzinger would not discuss his situation. I dont want to say anything, he told the AP in German as he rested on his walker in the hallway of his apartment. But Denzingers son, who lives in the U.S., confirmed his father receives Social Security payments and said he deserved them. This isnt coming out of other peoples pockets, Thomas Denzinger said. He paid into the system. Plus his father is paying 30 percent in taxes. They should be taking out nothing, he said. Another former Nazi camp guard, longtime Montana resident Martin Hartmann, now lives in Berlin and also is collecting Social Security, according to a person with knowledge of Hartmanns finances. That person spoke only on condition of anonymity because the person did not want to be associated with Hartmanns Nazi history. Hartmann, 95, left the U.S. in 2007, just before a federal judge issued an order to revoke his citizenship. The loophole also means new suspects, including former SS unit commander Michael Karkoc, whom the AP located last year in Minnesota, could retain benefits even if removed to another country. German prosecutors opened an investigation after the AP uncovered documentation showing Karkoc, 95, ordered his unit to raze a Polish village during the war. Dozens of women and children were killed in the attack. The American public did not become fully aware until the mid-1970s that thousands of Nazi persecutors had immigrated to the U.S. after World War II, with estimates ranging as high as 10,000. People were shocked to learn their former enemies could be living next door. Paul Shapiro, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museums Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, said the influx proved to be damaging. Beyond the undermining of American values that these people represented, as a group they gained leverage over government policy in critical areas relating to national security and immigration policy, he said Monday. And even decades later as they were forced to leave the country they continued to apply that leverage at the expense of the American taxpayer. Congressional pressure led to the creation of the OSI in 1979, and it had a single purpose: Track down and expel Nazis who played a role in the persecution of civilians. But because their crimes were committed outside the U.S. and almost always against non-Americans, Nazi suspects could not be tried in U.S. courts. The only option available was to prove they lied to immigration authorities about what they did during the war, to strip them of their citizenships through a lengthy legal process and then to attempt either deportation or extradition. But almost no countries were willing to accept them through deportation, and few pressed charges that would have forced extradition. So the Justice Department devised a strategy to overcome these difficulties, including encouraging the suspects to leave voluntarily, which meant they would avoid the process of deportation and keep their retirement benefits. The OSI regularly trumpeted its successes, and boasted in 2006 that its work had led to more Nazi expulsions from the U.S. in the previous 25 years than all other countries in the world combined. We really did want people to give up and go, said a senior Justice Department official, who defended the practice as a way of avoiding deportation proceedings that could last as long as 10 years. The goal is still to remove these people as quickly as possible, and the fact that as soon as we move to the deportation stage they run the risk of losing their benefit(s) is still an encouragement to leave, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the departments thinking on the matter. The OSI encouraged several suspects to use U.S. passports for legal travel to allied countries, such as Germany or Austria. Once there, they would renounce their U.S. citizenships and still be able to collect Social Security benefits. This practice stoked outrage at the State Department and in capitals in Europe. The path for the OSIs approach opened when Congress passed legislation making participation in Nazi persecution grounds for deportation. But the Social Security Act was not changed to make such crimes also grounds for the termination of benefits. An internal memo drafted in 1984 by State Department officials discussed how deals were made behind the scenes. To get suspects to renounce citizenship, the OSI would delay legal action and refrain from seeking in any way to limit the subjects receipt of U.S. Social Security benefits, the memo said. The criticism triggered a bitter back-and-forth between the two agencies, with each accusing the other of being un-American. Decades later, the acrimony lingers. It was not upfront, it was not transparent, it was not a legitimate process, said James Hergen, a former State Department legal adviser who once described the OSIs approach as a cynical publicity ploy. `This was not the way America should behave. We should not be dumping our refuse, for lack of a better word, on friendly states. Neal Sher, who was OSIs director from 1983 to 1994, said the State Department put a higher priority on diplomatic niceties than holding former members of Adolf Hitlers war machine accountable. State always wraps itself in the flag. Unfortunately, its not the American flag, said Sher, recalling a complaint voiced by a former colleague. One of the first instances of Nazi-dumping involved Rudolph, a celebrated rocket scientist, and set off a diplomatic storm. Rudolph was brought to the U.S. after the war because of his technical brilliance. NASA awarded him a Distinguished Service Medal for achievements that included his central role in the Apollo project that put a man on the moon. Decades later he was accused of working thousands of slave laborers to death in the Nazi factory that built the V-2 rocket, and he faced the loss of his citizenship and deportation. Rudolph and Avdzej, another Nazi war crimes suspect, became the first to voluntarily leave the United States under the OSIs renunciation program. When they arrived in Germany in 1984 and forfeited their U.S. citizenships, a furious West German government filed a formal protest. Amid State Department objections, the OSI came up with a new scheme, said an internal memo, obtained by the AP, to then-Secretary of State George Shultz. The difficulty in finding cooperative countries, according to the May 1987 memo written by senior State Department officials, has led OSI to resort to bargains with Nazi persecutors which permit their voluntary departure from the U.S. Another diplomatic uproar ensued when Austrian authorities learned about a deal with Martin Bartesch, a former SS guard at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Prisoners were forced to work at Mauthausen as slave laborers. At least 95,000 died from gunfire, gassings or starvation. Unlike most guards against whom little incriminating evidence survived, captured Nazi records used by American prosecutors showed that Bartesch shot and killed a French Jew at the camp in 1943. Barteschs family denied he had done anything wrong at Mauthausen. In 1987, Bartesch landed, unannounced, at the airport in Vienna. Two days later, under the terms of the deal, his U.S. citizenship was revoked. The Romanian-born Bartesch, who had immigrated to the U.S. in 1955, was suddenly stateless - and Austrias problem. The fallout forced U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese to apologize to the Austrian interior minister and assure him Austria would not be blindsided again. Bartesch received Social Security benefits in Austria until he died in 1989. The State Department continued to protest the arrangement, but to no avail.”” News itm
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 01:18:53 +0000