Justice Dept. Probing U.S. Nazi Hunters

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s internal watchdog unit has begun an intensive review of allegations that evidence was withheld or mishandled by department investigators who conducted separate high-profile investigations of a suspected Nazi concentration camp guard and of a Nazi collaborator, The Times learned Thursday.

If the charges are substantiated, they would suggest that problems cited in the celebrated pursuit of John Demjanjuk, accused of being concentration camp guard “Ivan the Terrible,” could be more than isolated mistakes. Instead, they would indicate a pattern of errors or deliberate distortion by the department’s Office of Special Investigations.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating the unit’s handling of the investigations of Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker who has been convicted of war crimes in Israel, and Andrija Artukovic, a Seal Beach, Calif., resident, who died in 1988 of natural causes in a Yugoslav prison. He was extradited there for alleged war crimes committed while he was minister of interior in a Nazi puppet government in wartime Croatia.

The special investigations unit has the single mission of pursuing former concentration camp guards and other Nazi war criminals who gained entry into the United States after World War II by lying about their backgrounds.

Investigations by the office, with its 42 attorneys, historians, investigators and support staff, have led to 42 naturalized Americans losing their citizenship and to 30 deportations in the 13 years since the unit’s creation. Its methods have never been questioned by U.S. attorneys general.

A department source said that Atty. Gen. William P. Barr is concerned that the Nazi hunters may have used “cowboy” tactics in pursuing suspects. Suspicions range from using questionable evidence of wartime wrongdoing in some federal citizenship proceedings to ignoring conflicting evidence that tended to weaken cases.

Evidence of wartime abuses against Jews, Gypsies and other victims of Nazi persecution is weighed by judges in determining whether the defendants misrepresented their backgrounds and thus should be stripped of citizenship and forced to leave the country.

Extensive international attention recently has focused on Demjanjuk, whose death sentence for war crimes is expected to be set aside by Israel’s Supreme Court because of evidence that another man may have been Ivan the Terrible. The man known as Ivan operated the gas chamber at the Treblinka death camp and tortured Jews.

However, an earlier internal review of the Artukovic case had been considered closed by department officials outside the office of professional responsibility.

In recent weeks, however, internal investigators have ratcheted up their Artukovic investigation, focusing on allegations that an OSI historian overlooked information in a Croation state archive pointing to conflicts in key evidence about Artukovic’s actions as a Cabinet minister.

The Justice Department is expected to make a public statement soon on the Demjanjuk case, probably today. In an unusual action last Friday, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, citing its study of the Demjanjuk case record and numerous press reports, said his extradition to Israel may have been based on “erroneous information.”

A three-judge panel of the court, which had refused to block Demjanjuk’s extradition, ordered the Justice Department to turn over by July 15 any evidence it has that tends to show Demjanjuk is not Ivan the Terrible and to detail when U.S. agents first learned of each such item of evidence.

The court followed the order by releasing two letters written to the Justice Department last Jan. 7 and May 4 by its clerk, Leonard Green. The letters asked for a copy of the department’s “investigation of allegations of a conspiracy between the Department and Israeli authorities to suppress the exculpatory evidence.” The appeals court issued its order after receiving no formal response to its inquiries that had been sent to Robert S. Mueller III, assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division.

Justice Department sources said a review of the Demjanjuk case by attorneys in the criminal division had been completed before the court’s order but that the review was considered preliminary and had been referred to the internal investigators for more extensive examination.

The preliminary report is understood to have established that there were two statements by Soviet witnesses referring to a man with the last name Marchenko, a camp guard who may have been Ivan the Terrible. One of the statements used the first name of Ivan and the other used Nikolai. The internal review will determine whether those statements were accidentally or deliberately overlooked.

The step-up of the Artukovic investigation is based largely on information uncovered by a Florida historian employed by Artukovic’s son, Radoslav A. Artukovic, a Los Angeles stockbroker who has never given up defending his father.