Former Justice Department Investigator Calls for Inquiry into His Findings That U.S. Had Harbored Na

The former Justice Department investigator who recently revealed on national television that the government has harbored hundreds of Nazi collaborators urged a crowd of 250 here to ask their Congressmen to open an inquiry into his findings.

Speaking to members of Brith Sholom and the Coordinating Committee on Vital Jewish issues, John Loftus said, “It’s time that the American people have the truth put before them.”

While working for the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, Loftus uncovered a covert operation, conducted by the State Department’s Office of Policy Coordination, in which hundreds of Byelorussian Nazi collaborators had been recruited for counterintelligence work in the Soviet Union after World War II.

Many at the Byelorussian were later smuggled into the United States and given clearance to obtain U.S. citizenship. Loftus believes that there are currently more than 300 Byelorussian Nazi collaborators living in this country, a figure he considers “a very conservative estimate.”

THE TIP OF THE LCEBERG

And that may be only the tip of the iceberg. “I personally believe that the problem is not limited to Byelorussians, that there are other ethnic groups recruited in a similar fashion,” said Loftus. He is also concerned that such operations continue to this day. “I was given permission by the CIA to say this much: that the leader of a modern group of war criminals was recently given sanctuary in the U.S.,” he said.

Loftus believes that war criminals living in the United States today should be prosecuted and stripped of their citizenship. “It’s absurd to think that somehow the horrors of the Holocaust could ever be atoned for by punishing one or two Nazis,” he told reporters in a press conference prior to his talk. But he added, “We have to set an example for all time, that men who kill children shall never go free.”

According to Loftus, there are currently 27 cases against ex-Nazis pending in federal court as a result of the Justice Department’s investigations. But he cautioned that such litigation is “enormously complex,” and would not necessarily produce convictions.

That process first involves suing in federal court to strip a Nazi collaborator of his American citizenship, a process Loftus described as tantamount to conducting a murder trial 30 years after the crime. The problem is that many at the witnesses are either dead or living in the Soviet Union. And the Soviets have furnished eyewitness testimony for the atrocities in every country except Byelorussia, Loftus noted.

Once war criminals have been exposed and stripped of their citizenship, deportation proceedings can begin. But the process rarely gets that far. Loftus had worked over a year on a case against Stanislou Stankevitch, a Nazi collaborator who directed the brutal massacre of 6,500 Jews in a Byelorussian town in October, 1941, and had later been smuggled into the United States by military intelligence.

“We had prepared a case against Stankevitch containing his confessions, his admissions of Nazi background, and were ready to prosecute,” then discovered “that Stanislau Stankevitch had just died,” Loftus told CBS-TV’s Mike Wallace on the May 16 edition of “60 Minutes.”

It was that setback, and a desire to return to his law practice, that prompted Loftus to leave the office of Special Investigations last summer. But his interest in the project continues: he will be discussing the investigation with members of Congress this week.