Nazi Collaborator’s Deportation Ends Long-Running Investigation

It was barely 7 a.m., but Eli Rosenbaum, never much of a morning person, sat alertly in his rental car, watching the yellow house on Sumner Street, waiting to confront the man inside.

Rosenbaum kept his eyes fastened on the house for three hours that summer day. No one emerged. Then he and his investigator walked across the tree-shaded street and up to the door to announce themselves.

They had come to Norwood, Mass., from the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit in Washington. They wanted to ask Aleksandras Lileikis about his wartime activities in his native Lithuania.

And so it began.

For more than two hours on June 27, 1983, the 28-year-old Rosenbaum, just two years out of Harvard Law School, questioned Lileikis, who seemed younger than 76 with his ramrod posture and imperious air bordering on disdain. He himself had studied law in Lithuania.

Yes, Lileikis said, he had been chief of the security police in Nazi-occupied Vilnius. Yes, he sometimes had ordered prison inmates transferred to the Germans--but, he said, it was at their command.

Yes, he had heard rumors about Jews being massacred, but nothing was reported to him. “‘How could I know?” he said. “I was in the office.”

And no, he did not recall the Special Detachment, a Lithuanian killing unit that lined up thousands of Jews in pits, mowing them down in a frenzy of bullets until the last screams were silenced.

Then came what Rosenbaum hoped would be the clincher.

He handed Lileikis a copy of Order No. 255, dated Aug. 22, 1941. It asked the chief of the Vilnius hard labor prison to turn over 52 Jews to the commander of the Special Detachment. In other words, it was a death warrant.

At the bottom was the typed name “Lileikis.”

“May be real, may be not,” Lileikis told Rosenbaum, scanning the order from behind square spectacles. “I’m not saying it’s not real.”

Maybe, he said, subordinates sent it out without his knowledge. Maybe, he said, it was a KGB forgery concocted after the Soviets swept into Vilnius. The document had, after all, come into American hands from the Russians.

“Rather like a professor addressing one of his less-talented students . . . he very calmly explained to me, ‘You’ll notice it doesn’t have my signature,’ ” Rosenbaum recalls. “ ‘Show me something with my signature.’ ”

Rosenbaum couldn’t.

“I remember thinking he was feeling, ‘Ha! This kid who’s green, he’s going to come and question me, someone who has questioned hundreds of people . . . and he thinks he’s going to trick me into admitting something? Try again.’ ”

Rosenbaum would try again--though he never again saw Aleksandras Lileikis.

The chase would take years of dogged pursuit across thousands of miles. It would take an intrepid former race car driver into the dim yellowing archives of East Europe, with their meticulous records of chilling horrors.

And it would not end until the Communist empire, with its secrets buried since the final days of the Third Reich, began to collapse--and truths hidden for decades began to surface.

The OSI--specifically charged with seeking out evildoers from an era fast disappearing in the world’s rearview mirror--was created solely to dig out the truth about men like Lileikis.

In this case, it had an aging suspect and no witnesses, a common predicament for an agency in its own twilight: Soon, the last perpetrators of Nazi genocide and last Holocaust survivors will be dead.

When Rosenbaum drove away from Lileikis’ house that day, he felt nothing more could be done.

Soon after, he left the OSI. He eventually became general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, where he unearthed evidence indicating that former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim had participated in Nazi-era roundups of Jews and others.

But in 1988, he rejoined the OSI, supervising the team that would pursue Lileikis; the main investigator, Mike MacQueen, arrived the same year.

MacQueen was at the University of Michigan when he spotted an OSI ad seeking historians. A former mechanic who once raced small cars, he also was a skilled polyglot: He spoke German and Polish, plus some Russian and Ukrainian. (He later taught himself Lithuanian.) He had studied at the University of Warsaw and was teaching central European history. It was a perfect fit.

It also was good timing.

In 1990, as Communism crumbled, Lithuania declared its independence and the Lithuanian Central State Archives, a drab Soviet-style concrete building in Vilnius, finally opened its doors.

MacQueen was among the first in, with a list of names that included Lileikis, who first had surfaced as a suspect in an unrelated OSI case and in German archives.

By day, he sifted through records in a jumble of languages, taking notes on a laptop computer fitted with a Lithuanian-English dictionary. By night, he organized his findings--once in a $6-a-night room without heat or hot water--looking for connections, plotting his next step.

“I knew there had to be something in there somewhere,” he says.

It wasn’t easy. The Germans and their collaborators had burned most records as the Red Army advanced. There was no Lileikis file, and just fragments of documents from the Saugumas, the security police he headed.

The remaining records took MacQueen back more than 50 years to Vilnius, then a vibrant Jewish capital with synagogues, newspapers, theater--and about 60,000 Jews.

After the Germans occupied Lithuania in 1941, the Jews of Vilnius were forced to wear four-inch Stars of David, barred from sidewalks and penned into two squalid, barbed-wire ghettos rife with typhus and scarlet fever.

The killing soon started. Usually, Jews were taken six miles into the lush green pines and white birch woods of Paneriai. Stripped of their clothes and valuables, they were lined up in sandy pits.

Some died cradling their babies.

Though not as streamlined as the gas chambers, this was an efficient killing process. During the last half of 1941, 33,000 Jews were murdered; in one week alone, the Germans carted off more than eight tons of clothing.

What was at issue is what role Lileikis played, what blame he deserved, if any.

Lileikis was unlike most OSI suspects--peasants who did the low-level dirty work of the Nazis. He was a university-educated senior police official and instead of a gun, his accusers said, he wielded a fountain pen that dispatched innocents to their deaths.

The German word is “Schreibtischtaeter,” or desk perpetrator. The archetype was Adolf Eichmann.

The Saugumas plainclothes division that Lileikis commanded took orders from the Germans. It ferreted out hiding places, searched for sources of forged documents and arrested people suspected of being Jews, the OSI says.

“There was zero on the Saugumas,” MacQueen says of the archives. “I had to piece it all together.”

Arrest almost invariably led to execution by the Special Detachment, the killing squad based a floor below Lileikis’ office--a building that also housed the Gestapo, a block away from where many Jews marched heading to their deaths.

Most of the mass killing stopped by late 1941 as the remaining Jews were exploited for slave labor. By 1944, just 5,000 of Vilnius’ Jews had survived.

Lileikis, a Saugumas member since 1927, fled Lithuania when the Red Army marched into the Baltic in 1940. He applied for German citizenship, putting two signatures on his application that would haunt him decades later. He returned to Lithuania when the Germans seized control in 1941.

After the war, Lileikis initially was denied entry into the United States, but his persistence was rewarded. In 1955, he was admitted despite an Army Counter Intelligence Corps report that said he was “possibly connected with the shooting of Jews” under Nazi rule in Vilnius.

He told Army interviewers his Saugumas duties largely consisted of exploring public opinion, screening personnel and preventing sabotage.

In search of the truth, MacQueen traveled to Lithuania 14 times, as well as Germany and Poland, poring over state archives and KGB and Communist Party records.

He discovered nuggets of history in unlikely places. In housing records, he found reports of Saugumas officers applying for apartments where Jews once lived; in health department records, a lengthy list of execution sites.

But MacQueen had nothing incriminating Lileikis. Then, in 1993, he shifted focus.

“When I turned the problem upside down and started approaching it from the victims, everything fell into place very rapidly,” he says.

From a canvas-bound catalog of 2,900 prisoner files typed in Russian, he ordered more than 600 with identifiable Jewish names. Some had identification cards with solemn black-and-white photos--a father of seven in his pinstriped suit, a plain-looking bespectacled woman--each one condemned to die.

He also found manila cards with names and birthdates, many with the typed German words “befehlsgemaess behandelt”--”treated according to orders”--a euphemism for execution. Some had a red or blue slash--an indication, says the OSI, that the deed was done.

And there in long-forgotten prison files, marred with scorch marks of a hasty but ineffective disposal effort at war’s end, Mike MacQueen found his evidence: orders for the arrest, detention and transfer to the execution squad of hundreds of Jewish prisoners, some bearing the scrawled signature of Aleksandras Lileikis, some issued with his name.

No story touched MacQueen more than Gitta Kaplan and her 6-year-old daughter, Fruma, hidden by two non-Jews but eventually discovered.

Their tragedy could be traced on paper: a file showing Lileikis ordered mother and daughter imprisoned, then turned over to the Germans. And, finally, their execution cards.

“I had the death cards of Gitta and Fruma on my bulletin board for a long time,” MacQueen says. “The 6-year-old was my motivation to find justice.”

By spring 1994, MacQueen was confident that he could definitively link Lileikis to more than 300 executions--and that was based on just a fragment of remaining records. The OSI was convinced that he shared responsibility for thousands more murders by ensuring Jews were confined to the ghettos, holding pens for the doomed.

It was time to act.

Rosenbaum prepared papers seeking to strip Lileikis of his U.S. citizenship, a first step toward deporting him on grounds that he had concealed his role in Nazi persecution to get into the country.

Though still fit enough to drive his own car, Lileikis was now 87, the oldest man to face OSI charges. With cases taking five to eight years to litigate, he might well stall deportation until his death.

Before the complaint was filed, Rosenbaum flew to Boston with a standard offer: There would be no charges if Lileikis surrendered his citizenship and left the country.

A deal seemed imminent, but then he sent word through his lawyer: No.

On Sept. 21, 1994--11 years after he stood on Lileikis’ doorstep--Rosenbaum announced the charges at a Washington news conference.

With a dramatic flourish, he invoked the name of a little girl who had died half a century earlier.

“The story of what happened to little Fruma Kaplan and countless other Jews who vanished from the face of the Earth there is told in documents--specifically in orders signed and issued by Aleksandras Lileikis,” he said. “It is not too late to pursue some measure of justice on their behalf.”

Afterward, reporters flocked to Lileikis’ house.

“I’m not murderer,” he told the Boston Globe in his broken English.

If MacQueen had found pieces of a puzzle, it was up to two prosecutors to assemble them. That task fell to OSI attorney Bill Kenety, whose resume included the prosecution of a Mexican drug lord tied to the infamous torture-murder of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, and David Mackey, head of the U.S. attorney’s civil division in Boston.

In answering the complaint, Lileikis, who became a U.S. citizen in 1976, took the 5th Amendment against self-incrimination to many charges, denied others and said he entered the country with the government’s “full knowledge of his wartime occupation and activities.”

In 1995, the OSI asked the court to denaturalize Lileikis without a trial, arguing that the facts of the case could not be disputed.

Lileikis countered that investigators had not “a scintilla of evidence” that he was involved in arrests and executions and Saugumas’ role in Jewish persecution “was a purely ministerial and custodial function.”

His lawyers said that the papers MacQueen dug up called for moving prisoners and that there was no indication that Lileikis signed anything voluntarily. Besides, they argued, the documents were hidden “and subject to alteration to suit Soviet purposes.”

To resolve authenticity questions, the director of the Lithuanian State Archives hand-delivered the records to the United States for expert examination.

A handwriting analyst studied Lileikis’ signature from several documents, including the 1941 records, using the application he made that same year for German citizenship as a basis of comparison.

The analyst’s conclusion: The same man was responsible for all the signatures.

A Secret Service expert studied 20 documents under infrared and ultraviolet light and found the ink, pencil markings and chemicals in the paper consistent with 1941. And a second agency expert concluded the typed statements linked to Lileikis resembled Ransmeyer Rodrian styles--a company established in Germany in 1899.

In January, Lileikis, retired from his job at a Lithuanian publishing company in Boston and accompanied by his priest and a translator, sat for two days of depositions. He answered questions about his education, his family and his opposition to communism.

But when asked about events from 1941 to 1944, he cited the 5th Amendment--more than 250 times.

“He was still mentally strong, and intellectually jousted with me,” Kenety recalls. “He showed no apology, no sorrow at all. Many of these people will say, ‘Yes, it’s a shame that so many Jews died.’ . . He just said ‘5th Amendment.’ ”

On May 24, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns in Boston stripped Aleksandras Lileikis of his citizenship without a trial.

In his written opinion, Stearns noted Lileikis’ silence on questions such as his knowledge of the fate of Jews he transferred was a “compelling inference” the charges were true.

Stearns declared that sending a 6-year-old to a hard-labor prison “would satisfy even the most liberal construction of the term persecution.” And he rejected Lileikis’ claim that he was merely a “disembodied signer of orders.”

“Lileikis is attempting to stand the classic Nuremberg defense on its head,” Stearns said, “by arguing that ‘I was only issuing orders.’ ”

An appeal was expected. But in June, a week after his 89th birthday, Lileikis, clutching a Lithuanian passport, boarded a plane with a one-way ticket to Vilnius, leaving the country he called home for 41 years.

His U.S. passport had already been surrendered.

Lileikis left behind his second wife, who told reporters he’d gone to see relatives and she expected he’d return. When pressed about wartime allegations against her husband, she told the Boston Herald, “He wouldn’t kill a fly.”

The OSI learned of Lileikis’ departure from a news report, then read a Lithuanian newspaper story in which he defiantly said he would not have left if he had felt guilty.

“I am not trying to say that all the charges are ungrounded,” he was quoted as saying. “What I say is that they have been inflated to the maximum. They have made a mountain out of a molehill.”

In a July interview with the Lithuanian newspaper Respublika, Lileikis said he didn’t hate Jews, yet made it clear he knew their fate as they were marched into the ghetto. “They still didn’t know they were going to be destroyed,” he said.

He insisted he took his job to survive. “I stepped into a morass and got stuck in it,” he said.

“Thus it could be that I committed mistakes. Mistakes and let us say, the ‘crimes’ of which I have been accused. . . . [But] I did no evil.”

Lithuania’s wartime activities still stir debate. At the time, many Lithuanians detested their Soviet rulers and welcomed the Germans. Already prone to anti-Semitism and resentful of alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviets, they sometimes acted as the Nazis’ henchmen.

Authorities have since expressed regret. In 1994, Lithuanian Prime Minister Adolfas Slezevicius, in a televised national address, urged his countrymen to acknowledge their country’s “painful past” and ask the Jewish people’s forgiveness. He promised to prosecute those responsible.

U.S. prosecutors say they’ve achieved their goal. “It’s up to Lithuania to do with him what they will,” Mackey says.

But evidently, Lileikis will not face charges there.

Lithuanian authorities have interrogated him four times, but published reports note that he is being questioned as a witness, not a suspect.

After the last session in late October, a Lithuanian prosecutor praised Lileikis, saying he was ill but had endured four hours of questioning and “withstood [it] heroically.”

Fifty years ago, the Third Reich ended on a hangman’s scaffold in a prison in Nuremberg, Germany.

Still, the hunt for Nazi-era criminals goes on.

Eli Rosenbaum knows, however, that probably within the next decade, his office will close its doors.

“There is a biological solution to these cases, and that day will come,” he says. “I lament it in advance.”

The file on Aleksandras Lileikis is closed, but Rosenbaum, now director of the OSI, wonders about the aftermath.

“Yes,” he says, carefully choosing his words, “the fact that he is a free man is something I think about often.”

“It’s impossible to really do justice in these cases,” he adds. “What punishment is there that is truly sufficient in light of the enormity of the crimes? There isn’t one. There is no earthly justice that suffices. We do what we can.”