Office Of Special Investigation

(OSI)

   The Office of Special Investigations was founded in 1979 as a unit within the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice as a direct legacy of Simon Wiesenthal. The OSI has focused on the prosecution of Nazi war criminals who lived in the United States. Many war criminals, mostly from Eastern Europe who participated in the murder of Jews and Gypsies, entered the United States after World War II, often by lying on affidavits about their Nazi past. Since its founding, the OSI has investigated more than 1,500 persons, and more than 100 have been prosecuted for violating U.S. immigration and naturalization laws in obtaining their American citizenship. Those convicted of participating in Nazi war crimes were subsequently denaturalized and deported to their native countries. Many, such as Adam Friedrich, lived in the United States for decades and led obscure lives. Friedrich, for example, had lived in the United States since 1955 and had been a citizen since 1962 before the OSI found out that he had been a member of the Waffen-Schutzstaffel (SS), assigned as a prison guard at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. He was denaturalized in 2004 but died in 2006 before he could be deported. The most recent case of war crimes prosecuted by the OSI was that of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-American who was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and recently deported to Germany by the Office of Special Investigations for concealing his involvement in war crimes at the Sobibor death camp in order to immigrate to the United States. On 13 July 2009, Demjanjuk was formally charged in Germany with 27,900 counts of acting as an accessory to murder, one for each person who died at Sobibor during the time he is accused of serving as a guard at the Nazi death camp. Demjanjuk’s trial commenced in Berlin in December 2009.