Remembering Neal Sher

I read of the death last week of Neal Sher with a heavy heart. He was a complicated figure. He made some huge errors of judgment. Some reflected negatively on his work as director of the innocuously named Office of Special Investigations, the department of the Justice Department in charge of rooting out ex-Nazi war criminals living under false pretenses in the United States and revoking their citizenship, then deporting them to their original homelands. Others reflected poorly on his personal integrity. But Neal Sher was a giant in terms of the quest for justice for the martyrs of the Shoah, a man who, during his eleven years running the OSI, seemed to me to be the physical embodiment of the notion that no murderer should be rewarded with a free pass for having eluded justice for years or even decades. When put that way, who would argue to the contrary? And yet there were, and are, people out there—and, I fear, lots of them—who found and still find something unseemly, perhaps even grotesque, in pursuing elderly men and women long since settled into American life and insisting they answer for their crimes of scores of years ago. For such people, the Second World War has receded so far into the past that threatening to deport someone’s doddering grandpa because he was once part of the Nazi killing machine seems petty, even ridiculous. But for those of us whose entire lives are lived in the shadow of the Shoah, nothing could be further from the case.

The individuals the OSI went after under Neal Sher’s leadership were a varied lot in some ways—a former archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Prime Minister of Austria, a scientist working for the NASA Saturn 5 rocket program, an auto plant worker—but they all had one thing in common: all lied about their past to gain entry to the United States and all managed to become United States citizens because of those lies. But to trivialize the work of the OSI by suggesting that the crime of those it went after was that they all told a single lie on some immigration form decades earlier is really to miss the point entirely. These people were not deported because they told a fib on some form; they were deported because they had no right to enter our country in the first place without disclosing the specific role they played in the massacre of European Jewry. Nor did they lie because the matter was not one of consequence. Just the contrary is true: they lied precisely because they knew that telling the truth would disqualify them from living here.

Neal Sher’s work at the OSI is inextricably bound up with the story of Ivan Demjanjuk, the auto factory worker mentioned above. He was accused of having been part of the killing machine at Treblinka and was stripped of his citizenship and deported to Israel in 1981, where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death in 1988. Later, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction, saying that there was sufficient doubt about the testimony against Demjanjuk to warrant setting the verdict aside. Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship was restored and he returned to Cleveland—only to have his citizenship stripped from him a second time after the OSI determined that he had indeed been a guard in a death camp, just that the camp was Sobibor rather than Treblinka. He was deported to Germany, where he was convicted of participating in the murder of 28,000 Jews and was sentenced to five years in prison. So the original prosecution was flawed—and Sher paid a dear price for that error of judgment in terms of his influence and reputation—but the end result, the conviction of a war criminal, was just and fair. (The penalty was ridiculous— about two hours of prison time for each of the people he helped kill—but I suppose the fact that the defendant was already in his 90s contributed to the decision to imprison him for only five years. He was released pending appeal and died the following year in a nursing time, having avoided any jailtime at all.)

We are in the final throes of the effort to bring Nazis to justice. And that’s really saying the very least. Josef Schuetz, now 100, is on trial in Brandenberg, Germany, for having “knowingly and willingly” assisted in the murder of 3,518 prisoners at Sachsenhausen between 1942 and 1945. More specifically, he is accused of abetting the execution of Soviet POWs by firing squad and the murder of thousands of other prisoners with poison gas. He looks like a very old man in his weirdly cheery Mondrian-style sweater as he hides his face from the camera in shame. (Click here to see what I mean.) Slightly younger is Irmgard Furchner, 96, who stands accused of complicity in the murder of more than 11,000 people at the concentration camp at Stutthof, near Gdansk in Poland. She fled the proceedings, but was quickly located and obliged to return to the courtroom. And she has every reason to be worried about the verdict: just last year one of her colleagues at Stutthof, Bruno Dey, was found guilty of 5,320 counts of accessory to murder. (That trial was even more Kafkaesque than the others because Dey, now 93, was only seventeen years old when he worked as a guard at Stutthof and so was tried in juvenile court.) And still in the wings is the coming prosecution, possibly, of Herbert Waller, 96, accused of being the last living perpetrator of the unspeakable horror of Babi Yar, where 33,000 Jews were murdered in the course of two days at the end of September 1941.

I have no opinion regarding the guilt or innocence of those still on trial—that is for the court to decide. But I have strong feelings about the reasonableness of these trials: instead of seeing them as part of some insane effort to persecute extremely old people for things they did a lifetime ago, I think of this as a last-ditch effort to seek some sort of justice for the dead. I agree that the numbers confound rationality: in a world in which murdering someone fully intentionally and with malice aforethought can lead to interminable incarceration or, in some states, execution, what do you do with someone found guilty of participating in the brutal murder of tens of thousands of victims? Even so, the notion of turning away from prosecution because of someone’s age seems unjustifiable. Besides, these people have already won—they’ve already lived long, full lives and now are only facing justice at the very tail-end of their days. So it’s only justice itself—as embodied in the principle that you can’t age out of your responsibility of having participated in genocide—that prosecuting them will serve. But, at least for me, that’s good enough. Neal Sher was the embodiment of the effort to seek justice for the dead of the Shoah. May he now rest in peace and may his memory be a blessing for us all.