FEATURE ELI ROSENBAUM The Man Who Wouldn't Let the Nazis Hide By Diane Kiesel A Photos by Patrice Gilbert Photography 22 WASHINGTON LAWYER * MAY/JUNE 2024 s a Harvard Law School student in the late 1970s, Eli M. Rosenbaum could have written his own ticket to a lucrative career at any white-shoe law firm. But during his second year of law school, a tiny article buried in the back of a newspaper caught his eye. It announced a new unit within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to hunt down and deport Nazi war criminals hiding in plain sight in America. " There's the summer job for me, " Rosenbaum recalls thinking at the time.