[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 51 (Tuesday, April 13, 2010)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E515-E516]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
AMERICAN GATHERING OF JEWISH HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS AND THEIR DESCENDANTS
______
HON. CAROLYN B. MALONEY
of new york
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Mrs. MALONEY. Madam Speaker, I rise today to share a resolution
conveyed to Attorney General Eric Holder, from the American Gathering
of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants in recognition of
the outstanding work of the Office of Special Investigations at the
United States Department of Justice.
Resolution of the Governing Board of the American Gathering of Jewish
Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants
Whereas the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust
Survivors and Their Descendants is the umbrella organization
of Holocaust survivor groups and Landsmannschaften in North
America, representing some 80,000 Holocaust survivors and
their family members;
Whereas the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) was
created in the Criminal Division of the United States
Department of Justice in 1979 in the wake of the shocking
public exposure by the then-Representative Elizabeth Holtzman
and others of decades of U.S. government inaction in the face
of the documented presence in the United States of numerous
perpetrators of Nazi crimes;
Whereas, most unconscionably of all, some of those Nazi war
criminals were brought to this country by U.S. government
agencies that were aware of the Nazi crimes that they had
committed;
Whereas OSI recently marked the 30th anniversary of its
establishment by Attorney General order;
Whereas, under the courageous and tenacious leadership of
Eli Rosenbaum and his predecessors, OSI has been, for the
past three decades, by far the most dedicated and successful
government agency in the world in tracking down,
investigating, prosecuting, and obtaining law enforcement
justice in cases of fugitive Nazi war criminals and has
accordingly won bipartisan praise from the Congress, awards
from Jewish organizations, and plaudits from the media;
Whereas OSI has won more court cases against Nazi criminals
than have authorities in all of the other governments of the
world combined during the period of OSI's thirty-year
existence;
Whereas OSI has prevailed in its crucial mission despite
(1) daunting investigative obstacles rarely if ever
encountered by other American prosecutors, (2) determined
efforts made over many years by former White House
Communications Director and later presidential candidate
Patrick Buchanan, then-Attorney General Edwin Meese, former
Rep. James Traficant, organizations of Nazi supporters, and
others to undermine, disable and even close that office, (3)
threats of violence directed at OSI personnel by Nazi
criminals' supporters, (4) the immoral and ongoing refusal of
European governments to accept the return of Nazi criminals
against whom OSI has won deportation orders in U.S. courts,
and (5) receiving funding that is but a tiny fraction of the
moneys allocated by the U.S. government to support
international efforts to prosecute a smaller number of
perpetrators of atrocity crimes in Rwanda and the former
Yugoslavia;
Whereas OSI launched the only law enforcement effort in
postwar world history to identify suspected Axis perpetrators
systematically in order both to identify them for
investigation and to prevent their entry as immigrants or
visitors, with the result that nearly 200 such persons have
been stopped and turned away at U.S. airports--a world-
leading program from which our government might learn much as
it struggles to identify terrorist and bar them from entering
this country;
Whereas the fruits of OSI's extensive efforts to assist
other nations in pursuing justice in the Nazi cases may be
seen around the world, including in the ongoing Munich trial
of former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk;
Whereas OSI has done more than has any other component of
the federal government to restore the honor of the United
States government in the Nazi cases and to secure a measure
of law enforcement justice on behalf of the Holocaust's
victims;
Whereas OSI's efforts have also succeeded in obtaining a
great measure of historical and remunerative justice on
behalf of Holocaust victims and survivors, especially in (1)
conducting investigations and prosecutions involving
genocidal crimes committed in the former Soviet Union that
were previously little know in the West and whose
perpetrators had not previously been identified; (2) proving
and publicly disclosing the fact that Gestapo archcriminal
Klaus Barbie, Nazi V-2 program slave master Arthur
Rudolph, Eichmann cohort Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, and
other Nazi war criminals were employed by U.S.
intelligence and military agencies after World War II and
were assisted by those agencies in escaping postwar
justice; (3) proving, for the first time, and in direct
contradiction of more than half a century of Swiss
government denials, that looted gold, some of it ripped
from the mouths of murdered Jewish victims in the Nazi
camps, was melted down by the Reichsbank and traded to the
Swiss National Bank; (4) discovering that certain artwork
stolen by the Nazis from European Jews was in the
possession of the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C.; (5) laboring indefatigably from 1999 to 2007 to
locate, declassify, and disclose to the public, despite
the opposition of some other federal agencies, fully eight
million pages of classified documents in the U.S.
government possession relating to Axis war crimes; (6)
successfully leading the U.S. government's effort, in
conjunction with Israeli and German authorities, to trace
the fate of the infamous Auschwitz selector and
experimenter Dr. Josef Mengele; and (7) undertaking a
worldwide investigation that confirmed the allegations
first made by the World Jewish Congress that former United
Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim took part in Nazi
crimes against humanity and persuading the Reagan
Administration to bar him forever from reentering the
United States;
Whereas, as a result of the expansion of OSI's mission in
2004, the unit has also won acclaim for its efforts in
pursuit of justice on behalf of the victims of atrocities in
Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere, while it continues to
investigate and prosecute Nazi criminals;
Whereas the Department of Justice has announced that OSI is
soon to be merged with Criminal Division's Domestic Security
Section in order to consolidate the Justice Department's
human rights enforcement efforts:
Now therefore be it Resolved by the Governing Board of the
American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their
Descendants, meeting in Washington, D.C., this 14th day of
February 2010, That the Governing Board:
(1) Praises and expresses deep gratitude for the matchless
dedication and unique accomplishments of the prosecutors,
historians, and other professional staff, both past and
present, of the Office of Special Investigations, and
especially its remarkable director, Eli Rosenbaum, who
devoted his storied career to bringing justice and hope to
Holocaust survivors, the families of those who perished in
the Shoah, and the families of the hundreds of thousands of
American soldiers, sailors, and airmen who gave their lives
in the historic battle to end the nightmare of Nazi
inhumanity;
(2) Expresses abiding gratitude to Eli Rosenbaum, the
longest-serving investigator and prosecutor of Nazi criminals
in postwar world history, for his courageous, tenacious, and
extraordinarily successful efforts, undertaken at great
personal sacrifice and risk, to pursue justice--and
historical truth--on behalf of those Jewish men, women and
children whose blessed memory was summoned by Israeli
Attorney General Gideon Hausner in his opening address in the
Eichmann case in Jerusalem when he declared that he did not
stand alone to present the case, because he was joined by
``six million accusers'' who ``cannot rise to their feet and
point their finger at the man in the dock and cry `J'accuse'
. . . for they are now only ashes--ashes piled high on the
hills of Aushchwitz and the fields of Treblinka and strewn in
the forests of Poland'';
(3) Thanks Eli Rosenbaum and his predecessor Neal Sher for
being among the first to
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expose and publicly refute the Holocaust calumnies of Patrick
Buchanan, long before such criticism became a mainstream
phenomenon;
(4) Considers OSI's landmark work to have been the key
post-Nuremberg American realization of the solemn commitment
to justice made to the Third Riech's surviving victims 55
years ago by former Attorney General and Supreme Court
Justice Robert H. Jackson when he first stood at the podium
before the judges of the International Military Tribunal;
(5) Deems the Justice Department's continued pursuit of
justice in the Nazi cases to be an undeniable moral
imperative notwithstanding the lateness of the date;
(6) Very strongly supports OSI's continuing efforts to
identify, investigate, and prosecute the perpetrators of Nazi
crimes and also postwar crimes against humanity;
(7) Calls on the Department of Justice to ensure that its
personnel will continue to leave no stone unturned in the
effort to pursue justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi
crimes; and
(8) Urges those nations of Europe that, despite having
provided the henchmen who massacred a third of the world's
Jews, continue to violate their moral obligation to accept
the return of Nazi criminals whom the United States seeks to
deport to observe that time is short in the Nazi cases and
therefore to desist at once from their obstructionist
conduct.
____________________