Rep. Holtzman Says Ins Confirms It Did Not Probe Nazis Thoroughly

Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman (D.NY) declared yesterday that the reply from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to her charges “confirms” her analysis that the INS has “failed to conduct a thorough, result-oriented investigation” of alleged Nazi war criminals living in the United States.

“It appears,” she asserted in a letter to INS Commissioner Leonard Chapman “that whatever additional action INS has taken was not the result of a more vigorous and systematic investigation but was solely in reaction to my initial inquiries or in response to them.” She reiterated her demands for a full and competent investigation of the alleged criminals.

Ms. Holtzman had alleged that 60 reported war criminals are in the U.S. with little or no federal effort to apprehend them. INS, she said, had allowed 73 of them to take refuge in this country following World War II and of that number 13 had died. They were charged with the killings of tens of thousands of innocent persons most of them Jews.

Chapman replied that her allegations were based on a “misunderstanding” of his agency’s authority and are “without foundation.” However Chapman acknowledged that INS is investigating 37 persons “who comprise our current Nazi war criminals list.” In his reply, Chapman cited a U.S. Supreme Court decision which he said supported the view that “there is no authority to deport an alien solely because his activities are considered offensive or because he is purportedly a war criminal.”

Chapman also reported that the alleged statement attributed to a former Lithuanian prelate forbidding church support to Jews in Jeopardy “does not indicate in any way that he was involved in war crimes or war atrocities.” In the case of another on the list who was alleged to have murdered a Jewish school teacher, that person was reported in Chapman’s reply to have died in 1964 in Cicero, III. Chapman did not explain why that person who Ms. Holtzman said was wanted by the West German government hadn’t been deported prior to 1964.

Pointing out that Commissioner Chapman “confirms that INS has never contacted West Germany or (in the last 15 years) any other country for the purpose of deporting or extraditing Andrija Artukovic,” Ms. Holtzman said that Artukovic, the Croatian Minister of Interior under the Nazis, had been under a deportation order for more than 20 years.

Ms. Holtzman also noted that Chapman said no extradition treaties exist with Iron Curtain countries. “In fact.” she said, “there are treaties in force with Poland, Yugoslavia, Rumania and Hungary. Something is clearly awry with INS investigating procedures if, as the INS memorandum shows, it took six months to discover that Joseph Matukas had been dead for ten years,” she said.

Pointing out that INS claims it cannot contact the Soviet Union for information on individuals from the Baltic countries because the U.S. does not recognize the Soviet Union’s takeover of them, Ms. Holtzman posed the question to INS “How then does it explain handing over the Lithuanian seaman, Simas Kurdika, to the Soviet Union?” She said that her assertion that INS has not yet directly contacted official or documentary sources in Israel is not “challenged” and that it is “only now” that INS is making “efforts to establish liaison” with two government sources in Israel.