[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

[[Page E516]]

     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.

                          ____________________