The hunt for the world's war criminals

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As the US justice department renews efforts to deport suspected Nazi-era war criminals, Brian Barron believes that, more than 60 years after World War II ended, the international hunt for suspects has slackened.<hr>Scattered across America are 20 old men who remain the target of the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations, the OSI.

For three decades it has been the driving force exposing and expelling naturalised Americans who in their youth sold their souls to Hitler's apparatus of mass murder.

Under the US constitution, the only remedy against suspected Nazi war criminals here is to charge them with immigration offences.

In all, about 100 people have been dealt with already. No one knows how many remain undetected.

Sadly part of the stock in trade of being a foreign correspondent is coming across war crimes

But, as one OSI prosecutor remarked: "We are in a race against the Grim Reaper and he sometimes wins because the tactic of all defence lawyers is to delay proceedings so their clients can die in freedom still in the USA."

So that figure of 20 cases still pending probably marks the final limits of America's long hunt for Nazi-era fugitives.

No more immunity

Now the OSI is devoting some of its resources to pursuing war criminals of the modern era, joining other nations in trying to bring to trial notorious dictators, to signal that no one is immune.

Charles Taylor faces 11 charges of crimes against humanity

The trial of Charles Taylor, Liberia's former strong man, is the latest example.

Atrocities in the Balkans and Rwanda have also brought former leaders into the dock.

This breakthrough against the excesses of the once high and mighty stems from a ruling by Britain's Law Lords nine years ago that Chile's former dictator, General Pinochet, could be extradited for alleged crimes including torture.

Escaping justice

Sadly part of the stock in trade of being a foreign correspondent is coming across war crimes.

Few lead to investigation, let alone punishment.

In Africa, on the muddy banks of the Chad River during the civil war in 1980, we saw dozens of skeletons, with trussed wrists and legs manacled just above their decaying army boots.

The backdrop was desolation: the destroyed former French colonial capital, N'Djamena, with no intact buildings, every wall pockmarked by shrapnel and bullet holes.

Unknown victims, anonymous murderers.

Rights groups say 500,000 people were killed during Amin's rule

Further east in Uganda, during the last weeks of Idi Amin's dictatorship, there were many war crimes as his drunken forces retreated.

Scores of Christians were thrown to the crocodiles in the Nile.

In the field marshal's dungeons, below the secret police headquarters, we found bludgeoned corpses of prisoners still chained to the walls.

Idi Amin himself ended up in comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia as a guest of the king, favoured for trying to spread Islam and open mosques in a largely Christian nation.

The force majeure of Saudi wealth and influence trumped any talk of international justice.

Nazi excesses

Of course, those sorts of incidents pale into insignificance alongside Nazis implementing murder on an industrial scale.

But it was the Nuremberg trial after the German surrender that empowered the post-war Nazi hunt.

Sixty years on, that hunt is winding down. Those on the wanted list are geriatrics.

Four years ago in Italy, I covered the trial of 10 former German SS soldiers for a reprisal massacre.

After repeated ambushes by Italian partisans, the SS shot nearly 600 men, women and children in and around a village church, including the priest at the altar.

The defence argued they were following orders, which was true.

A few months ago, the old SS troopers - now in their 80s - were sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia. Token punishment.

Could it be time to forgive but never forget?

'School for mass murder'

The 20 still under investigation in the US have been here most of their lives.

One, now 92, and a New England patriarch, was a youthful soldier press-ganged into the Soviet Army when it annexed Lithuania, then captured by the German army.

About 100,000 Jewish people died in the Warsaw Ghetto He was flogged with a steel whip and his friend was murdered beside him, as the SS asked him to sign up.

Ask yourself, what would you do to stay alive?

He ended up as an NCO in an SS training base, what the justice department's OSI calls "a school for mass murder".

He was stationed there when a thousand Jews were slaughtered at the base, and his name is on an SS roster of soldiers sent to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto.

There are no witnesses to testify he personally killed anyone and, by any description, this man was a victim himself.

The OSI thinks it will deport him back to Lithuania this year. At 92, that would be a kind of delayed death sentence.

He and his lawyer are hoping to stave off deportation long enough for the Grim Reaper to claim his own within the US.

Researching the subject, you look at the photos and film the SS took as they shot and burned to death 13,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto, sending another 50,000 to the Treblinka extermination camp.

Faced with such images, compassion for anyone connected to the SS drains away instantly.

But justice is haphazard.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 25 January, 2008 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the <a class="inlineText" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm">programme schedules </a> for World Service transmission times.