Office of Special Investigations

After the Second World War, as the Cold War was gearing up, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed to secure the spoils of war in occupied Germany. For instance, with “Operation Paperclip,” the U.S. transferred many German rocket scientists to the U.S., first as privileged prisoners, but later as voluntary immigrants willing to assist the U.S. in the ensuing space race. Parallel to this, the U.S. government also let German individuals of the Third Reich’s military and security sector immigrate under false IDs in order to assist with the transfer of “secret weapons” technology and with the cleansing of U.S. society from pro-Soviet spies and collaborators (later known as McCarthyism).

On a broader scale, many Soviet citizens who had fought in pro-German units or who otherwise had collaborated with the Germans, fled West at war’s end. Many of them later immigrated to the U.S., with the immigration services welcoming them as staunch anti-communists, turning a blind eye to some of these immigrants’ questionable past. Among them were many Ukrainians, since many if not most non-Jewish Ukrainians had collaborated with the Germans, which they saw as liberators from Stalinist terror and Russian domination.

Some of these Ukrainians in exile formed Ukrainian nationalist associations and lobby groups in the U.S. . The Soviet Union reacted to this by forming Soviet-loyal groups, feeding them with material undermining the reputation and credibility of the Ukrainian independence movement. Central in these efforts were accusations of collaborations with Germans during World War Two. In that context, the most effective Soviet propaganda weapon consisted of assertions that certain Ukrainian immigrants had been involved in war crimes. Specifically, this concerned members of auxiliary forces who were (mis)used by the Germans for guarding and running concentration, labor and alleged extermination camps. Furthermore, some of them are said to have assisted during mass executions of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen and other German units. This kind of accusation secured for the Soviets the support of Jewish pressure groups in the U.S., such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. While treasonous pro-Soviet groups could never turn Congress into a tool for the Soviet Union’s imperialistic policies in Ukraine, Jewish pressure groups could – and did.

While Germany caved in to Jewish and international pressure already in 1958 by creating a special investigative office in charge of collecting incriminating material against suspected National-Socialist war criminals (see the entry on the Zentrale Stelle), the U.S. Congress, not being susceptible to international pressure, caved in only after Jewish pressure had mounted drastically in the 1970s. This was partly due to an increased Soviet campaign against nationalist Ukrainian immigrants. Another contributing factor was that the memories of the Apollo Moon-Landing Program were fading. As a result, the hero status of Wernher von Braun, who had died in 1977, and of his team of German scientists and engineers was declining. This exposed them increasingly to accusations of having contributed to the inhuman wartime treatment of slave laborers in the Third Reich’s factories of its “V weapons,” meaning rockets. Finally, the Holocaust itself moved onto societal center stage with the airing of the TV mini-series Holocaust in 1978.

All this taken together led to the formation of a special branch within the FBI, the so-called Office of Special Investigations (OSI). It was formed on 4 September 1979 to enforce Public Law 95-549 passed by Congress on 30 October 1978. Its purpose was to identify individuals residing in the U.S. who might have committed war crimes while serving the Axis powers during World War Two. The OSI then had to collect incriminating evidence against them in order to enable the U.S. Immigration Services to either deport them to their country of origin, if they had no U.S. citizenship, or to revoke their citizenship and deport them afterwards.

The OSI was staffed mainly with fanatical Jewish lawyers. Leading among them was staunch Zionist Neal Sher, who headed the OSI from 1983 until 1994, after which he headed the Jewish lobby group AIPAC until 1996. He then headed a commission aiming at making Holocaust-era insurance claims (because it’s all about the money), from which he resigned in 2002, after it had been discovered that he had misappropriated some of the commission’s funds. For this, he was disbarred as a lawyer in 2003.

One of the first and most prominent targets of the OSI was German-born rocket engineer Arthur Rudolph. He had developed the Third Reich’s ballistic V-2 rockets, managed the U.S.’s ballistic Pershing Rocket program, and was project director of the Saturn-V rocket program that brought Americans to the moon. With the late Wernher von Braun no longer able to protect the members of his German rocket team, Rudolph agreed in 1983 to leave the U.S. and renounce his U.S. citizenship rather than face a long and expensive litigation. (See Tarter 1992/2000 for more details.)

The case which had the largest impact, though, was that of Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, who was accused of having aided in hundreds of thousands of gassing murders at the Treblinka Camp. He was eventually deported to Israel, where a huge show trial was staged against him. This trial backfired on the orthodoxy, and led to the collapse of the orthodox Treblinka narrative, which has since been upheld only by censorship and government bayonets, meaning penal laws outlawing dissent. Demjanjuk was acquitted, got his U.S. citizenship back, but the OSI went after him again and managed to have his citizenship revoked once more. Demjanjuk was once more deported, but this time to the perfectionist Germans, who made sure to leave no loophole open for Demjanjuk. They sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment simply for allegedly having been present at the Sobibór Camp. This claim, denied by Demjanjuk, was based on a false ID card forged by the Soviet Union. (See the entry on John Demjanjuk for details.)

Other prominent cases of OSI persecutions include those of Feodor Federenko, Veralian Trifa and Andrije Artuković. The low-profile case of Martin Bartesch is perhaps the most interesting, because the OSI lost this case due to the skilled assistance Bartesch received from a competent lawyer. In this lawyer’s article on how he won this case for Bartesch, he details how, in Bartesch’s case,

• the OSI granted access to the pertinent files only after having been sued;
• they issued press releases claiming that Bartesch was a mass murderer of tens of thousands, although they had no evidence to support this claim;
• only when sued, did the OSI start searching for incriminating evidence;
• this search only uncovered exonerating evidence;
• this exonerating evidence was not disclosed to the defendant;
• distorted or incorrect translations were used in an attempt to frame the defendant;
• the OSI refused to retract the false charges against Bartesch when proven untrue;
• the OSI collected the names of citizens who wrote letters or protest to their elected officials,
• and the OSI considered taking administrative action against them, which is nothing short of government terrorism.

The temporary existence of the Office of Special Investigations shows the power of the orthodox Holocaust narrative. The fact that the OSI felt compelled to prosecute cases such as Martin Bartesch’s shows that they had no real criminals to pursue. (For more details, see Allen 2000.)

The OSI was disbanded in 2010, and its staff integrated into another branch of the FBI.