Washington Lawyer - May/June 2024 - 23

FEATURE
Rosenbaum tore out the article, tracked down that unit's phone number,
and talked his way into a summer internship at the newly formed Office
of Special Investigations (OSI). That phone call launched his career as this
country's preeminent avenger of Nazi crimes and other serious human
rights violations - or, as Rosenbaum's boss once described it, " a summer
internship gone awry. "
" I was in awe of the lawyers; they were brilliant, dedicated to their mission
with no playbook. The strategies [for prosecuting the cases] were
being devised while I was there, " Rosenbaum says.
He was hooked, spending 37 years at DOJ as counselor for war crimes accountability
before retiring in January 2024 with the department's highest
honor for employee performance, the Attorney General's David Margolis
Award for Exceptional Service.
At a DOJ ceremony in his honor, U.S. Attorney
General Merrick B. Garland lauded Rosenbaum's
work: " By pursuing justice on behalf of victims
who can no longer do so themselves, you have
reaffirmed their humanity and protected their
place in our collective memory. " At the same
ceremony, former Congresswoman Elizabeth
Holtzman, who wrote the legislation that created
OSI, said she had " never known anybody more
passionate about the subject of justice and
human rights, more committed, more devoted,
and more bulldog-like " than Rosenbaum. " He
doesn't give up, " Holtzman said.
HUNTING DOWN FUGITIVES
(Valerian Trifa, archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America
whose anti-Semitic rants in Bucharest during the war led to the massacre
of Jews) to his last in 2020 (Friedrich Karl Berger, a 95-year-old Nazi concentration
camp guard living in Tennessee), Rosenbaum was relentless in
his cause to track down, prosecute, denaturalize, and expel fugitive Nazi
war criminals.
The nickname " Nazi hunter "
encapsulates Rosenbaum's
decades of dogged
determination to bring
to justice Nazis hiding
A year earlier Rosenbaum, 68, was supposed to
" give up, " at least in the sense of full-time government employment, but
a phone call from Garland in June 2022 threw a wrench into that plan.
" I need you to saddle up for one more ride for your country, " Garland
told Rosenbaum. The Justice Department was establishing a War Crimes
Accountability Team (WarCAT) to pursue Russians perpetuating atrocities
against Ukrainians since invading that country in February 2022.
One and a half years later, DOJ filed war crimes charges against four Russia-affiliated
military personnel for the torture, inhuman treatment, and
unlawful confinement of a U.S. national in Ukraine. Last September,
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded Rosenbaum the Order
of Merit for his efforts leading WarCAT.
" To lead that effort was a privilege, " Rosenbaum says today. " Trying to deter
ongoing crime was a new experience for me. " He hopes that by holding
the Russians accountable for war crimes now while witnesses are
available and memories still fresh, they will get the message that " there is
no place to hide. "
For Garland, Rosenbaum was the right person for the job. " What better
way to stick it to the Russians than to appoint the department's legendary
Nazi hunter as the leader of the team? " Garland said at Rosenbaum's
retirement ceremony.
Although it's not a name that Rosenbaum particularly likes - he thinks
it sounds overly heroic - " Nazi hunter " encapsulates his decades of
dogged determination to bring to justice Nazis hiding in the United
States after World War II. From his first case in 1979 while still an intern
in the United States after
World War II.
DRIVEN BY JUSTICE
While Rosenbaum spent most of his career at DOJ, he made a few detours.
After working as a trial lawyer at DOJ from 1980 to 1984, he left
public service for the firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York
City. " The work of investigating and prosecuting Nazi cases had proved
too frustrating and depressing, " Rosenbaum wrote in his 1993 book Betrayal:
The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation
and Cover-Up. He lasted at the firm all of
one year.
" I was accustomed to working on cases I deeply
cared about, " he explains today, saying he
couldn't muster enthusiasm for his corporate
clients. He left to become general counsel to the
World Jewish Congress (WJC) until 1988, when
he returned to OSI.
In 1986, during his brief stint at WJC, Rosenbaum
led the investigation that exposed former United
Nations secretary-general Kurt Waldheim of Austria
as a war criminal. " Waldheim was known to
have been in the Wehrmacht [the armed forces of
the Third Reich], but in 1986 came the possibility
that he was a real Nazi, " Rosenbaum recalls.
At first, Rosenbaum was skeptical: " Why hadn't the press picked it up before? "
Waldheim lied repeatedly about his wartime record, painting himself
as a low-level German army officer who was injured at the Russian
front in 1941 and sat out the rest of the war as a law student in Vienna.
A year of tireless, tedious, and painstaking digging by Rosenbaum and
his OSI colleagues, with help from historians, proved otherwise. Waldheim,
in fact, was back in action after his injury and attached to an operation
that resulted in the imprisonment or slaughter of thousands of
Yugoslav partisans, for which he was awarded a medal by the Nazis.
On April 27, 1987, the Reagan administration barred Waldheim, who by
then had been elected president of Austria, from entering the United
States. " History has at last caught up with Kurt Waldheim, " Rosenbaum
said in a New York Times interview at the time.
In 1995 Rosenbaum became OSI director, a title he retained until 2010
when OSI merged with another Criminal Division section, to become the
new Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section. Rosenbaum was
named director of human rights enforcement strategy and policy.
DOING THE RIGHT THING
Because of OSI's work, the United States is recognized as the world leader
in holding Nazi war criminals accountable. Between 1979 and 2010,
OSI litigated cases against 137 Nazi perpetrators (plus Berger, whose case
was handled after the 2010 merger). It secured court victories against 109
participants of Nazi-sponsored crimes of persecution, 70 of whom were
either removed from or had left the United States. The office also sucMAY/JUNE
2024 * WASHINGTON LAWYER 23
Washington Lawyer - May/June 2024

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