Top Nazi hunter hails from Westbury

Growing up in Westbury in the 1960s and '70s, Eli Rosenbaum heard little about the Holocaust, despite his being Jewish.

He was a regular at synagogue and attended Hebrew school, but the horrors of Adolf Hitler's atrocities were rarely mentioned.

So when he discovered more about one of history's most ruthless and systematic genocides, he was deeply disturbed. He was even more shocked when he learned that after the Holocaust, hundreds of Nazi war criminals came to the United States to live, including some on Long Island.

His dismay led him to his life's work: becoming arguably the world's leading Nazi hunter.

Tuesday, Rosenbaum, 55, now living in Washington, D.C., came to the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County in Glen Cove to talk about his work as what the center called the world's longest-serving prosecutor and investigator of Nazi criminals and other perpetrators of massive human rights violations.

During 25 years at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he heads the office in charge of hunting Nazi leaders and others who committed atrocities and are now living in the United States, he has at times felt frustrated by the job's limits -- about the worst punishment he can mete out is deportation. "The vast majority of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and other massive" human rights abuses "have gone free," he said.

Rosenbaum said there are six open cases where he suspects former Nazis are living in the United States, including a man living in Queens. Rosenbaum, a Harvard Law graduate, said that after World War II, countries quickly lost interest in finding and prosecuting Nazi war criminals because the Cold War took precedence.

In the U.S., the Justice Department could do little to charge them criminally because of a lack of jurisdiction, he said.

But public hearings led by Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman of Brooklyn in 1977-78 shocked the nation with revelations about fugitive Nazi criminals who had escaped to the United States. She helped push through legislation permitting their deportation.

Rosenbaum joined the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations in 1980 to pursue that cause. The work was gratifying, he said, but horrifying.

"I couldn't cope with it. It was too much, so I left" to a private practice, he said. But the dullness of that job despite the better pay led him back four years later. In the 1980s, the office helped deport Boleslavs Maikovskis, an accused Nazi war criminal who lived in Mineola for 30 years. It also removed Karl Linnas, an accused former concentration camp guard commander who lived in Greenlawn.

Rosenbaum said his work has expanded to include hunting down perpetrators of massive human rights violations in other countries including Liberia, Rwanda and Guatemala who now live in the United States.

What helps keep him going, he said, is the survivors who come forward and testify, like one from Guatemala who witnessed the massacre of almost his entire village when he was 4.

"It takes a lot of courage," Rosenbaum said.