WASHINGTON — The paper had yellowed, its edges frayed. But it clearly bore the signature of Lithuanian policeman Aleksandras Lileikis, ordering a Jewish woman and her 6-year-old daughter to be shot in a Nazi death pit in 1941.
With that, the U.S. Justice Department was able to prove an elderly Massachusetts man had decades earlier committed Nazi war crimes and to order him from the country.
The death warrant was one of about 50,000 Justice Department trial documents donated Tuesday to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The bound copies of evidence papers, hearing transcripts and court orders show how the department’s Office of Special Investigations hunted down Nazis hiding in the United States over the past three decades and deported them.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey called the documents “the largest body of English-language primary source materials relating to the prosecution of Nazi criminals publicly available anywhere in the world.”
A second set of the papers will be donated to the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Since 1979, Justice investigators, attorneys and historians have studied immigration papers and pored through archives throughout Europe and the former Soviet Union to track down Nazi officials living in the United States. The Office of Special Investigations does not have the authority to prosecute war crimes against non-Americans outside the U.S. But as of this year, it has won the right to deport 107 Nazi officials, concentration-camp guards and so-called “trigger pullers.”
Eli Rosenbaum, who heads the Justice unit, said his investigators work regularly with museum historians to interpret records and unearth pictures for trial that show the horrors of the Nazi regime.
