Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman (D.NY) intends to officially ask President Carter to request that West Germany eliminate its statute of limitations for Nazi war criminals, she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“This is a profound human rights issue,” Holtzman said. “It’s human rights for those who have survived and it’s human rights because it’s a moral question. You cannot permit mass murder to go unpunished, because then, in a way, you have tolerated it and condoned it. If we stand for human rights, we cannot permit condonation of mass murder.”
Holtzman explained that unless West Germany extends its statute of limitations beyond Dec. 31, 1979, there could be serious effects on efforts to bring to justice the Nazi war criminals now living in the United States. “The ironic thing is that West Germany is allowing its statute of limitations to run out next year, and after that no one can be tried any more in West Germany for the mass murder of Jews and the mass murder of millions of non-Jews,” she said.
“That creates some problems here in the United States, because here we’re in the process of carrying out all of these investigations and starting these trials. And if we deport these people to West Germany (after Dec. 31, 1979), they ‘II be able to go unpunished.”
Continuing, the lawmaker said: “We have no statute of limitations on murder in this country. We believe, and I think it is correct, that taking a human life is something that must be punished whether you catch up with the criminal 30 years later or 40 years later or 50 years later. And we’re not talking about the murder here of one person. We’re talking about the murder of six million Jews. We’re talking about the worst atrocities and tortures that were ever committed in the history of mankind. I think that it’s unconscionable of West Germany to pose a statute of limitations.”
DISBELIEF IN INS INACTION
Holtzman said that she first became aware that there were Nazi war criminals living in the United States in 1974, when people came to her and said that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had a list of such criminals and was doing nothing about it. “My first reaction was one of disbelief,” she said, “but when I asked the Immigration Service about it, they said there was such a list.”
She said when she received the status reports on the cases, there was no information on any of the reports, except that each alleged Nazi war criminal was “in good health.” No witnesses had been questioned here or abroad and no one was in charge of any kind of investigation, although there had been many allegations, some dating back to the 1940s, that there were Nazi war criminals living in the U.S., she said.
“Our government had no professionals assigned to investigate these cases on a full-time basis, and they had no lawyers,” Holtzman added. “In many cases they refused to collect evidence, or there was the most half-hearted unprofessional kind of investigation imaginable, and certainly not worthy of this country or worthy of the problem.”
She said that when she originally exposed this in the spring of 1974, “I thought that the best way of dealing with Nazi war criminals in this country was to create a special task force in the Immigration Service, so that people could develop expertise and deal only with this problem. In the summer of 1977, Immigration Service agreed to set up a task force.”
Now, she continued, “we have a situation where we have a special war crimes task force in the Immigration Service. They have five full-time attomeys and have just been authorized to hire two more. They have their own staff of investigators. They now have the primary responsibility for investigating, for prosecuting and for trying all of the cases.”
Holtzman sponsored a bill, signed into law Oct. 30, which prohibits from entry into the U.S. or makes liable for deportation any alien who entered this country after 1952 and who is known to have committed Nazi war crimes. Because of this new law and the addition of two attorneys to the INS task force, she said that she “would anticipate that within the next few months we will see deportation actions taken against persons who took part in Nazi war crimes and came here after 1952.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
