H eadlines
Criminals Continued from Page 1
United States.

For years, much of the infor-
mation known today about the
existence of Nazi war crimi-
nals in the U.S. was unknown
outside of the offices of the
now-defunct Immigration
and Naturalization Services.

It wasn’t until a campaign
by Elizabeth Holtzman, a
Brooklyn-born Harvard Law
graduate who was only the third
Jewish woman to serve in the
House of Representatives, that
public scrutiny was brought to
bear on the phenomenon.

On June 16, Holtzman
will deliver the 2021 Sol
Feinstone Memorial Lecture
on the Meaning of Freedom, an
annual address held at Gratz
College. Holtzman’s speech,
titled “Nazi War Criminals in
America: The Historic Forty-
plus Year Effort to Bring Them
to Justice,” will cover the legal
and moral questions that vexed
her and those who joined her
initially lonely effort to identify
and deport Nazi war criminals.

The event is free and will be
presented online.

Holtzman, counsel and
co-chair of the government
relations group at Herrick,
Feinstein LLP, worked in the
administration of John V.

Lindsay, a former congressman
and New York City mayor,
before she ran for Congress
in 1972. Holtzman upset
50-year incumbent Emanuel
Celler to become, at 31, the
youngest woman ever elected
to Congress. That record held
until 2014.

L ater i n her c a reer,
Holtzman, a Democrat, would
spend eight years as district
attorney of Kings County, the
first woman to be elected DA
in New York City. She was the
first and only woman to be
elected comptroller of New
York City, ran for Senate on
several occasions and served
on the Homeland Security
Advisory Council.

A 2020 article in Tablet
recounted the beginning of
Holtzman’s political career:
“She used her new office to
ask ‘unpopular questions’ of
those in power, probing the
legality of military action
in Cambodia ordered by
President Richard Nixon and
criticizing his deflective use of
executive privilege. Sitting on
the Judiciary Committee, she
played a significant, public role
in Nixon’s impeachment.”
In 1973, a man approached
Holtzman with a tip. The INS,
he said, kept a list of Nazi war
criminals living in the country,
a list that they were content to
keep and do little else with. To
this day, Holtzman said, she
doesn’t know why she was the
one who the man approached
with that explosive piece of
information. “I mean, I was one of 535
members of the House and
Senate,” Holtzman said.

Incensed, but unsure of what
to do with what she’d been
told, Holtzman didn’t move on
the information until later that
year when two articles in The
New York Times corroborated
the man’s story, according to
Tablet. The following April,
during a congressional hearing
involving INS commissioner
Leonard F. Chapman Jr.,
Holtzman asked him flat-out:
Was there a list of Nazi war
criminals in the U.S.? He
answered yes.

“I said, ‘OK. I want to see
the files,’” Holtzman recalled.

“I didn’t take their word for
an end. That was just the
beginning.” T h e f o l l o w i n g M a y,
Holtzman held a press confer-
ence excoriating the laxity of
the INS, and called for a task
force to be created with the
purpose of expelling Nazi war
criminals in the U.S., with the
goal of seeing them stand trial
Elizabeth Holtzman
for war crimes. At first, it was
a lonely fight; people simply
could not believe that the
government had allowed such
a thing to happen, Holtzman
said. But as her fight grew
in prominence, many were
willing to lend Holtzman their
swords in order to slay the
“bureaucratic dragons” that
had slowed her down.

It wasn’t until 1978, five years
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after the initial disclosure of the
list, that Holtzman was able to
form a Special Litigation Unit.

The Holtzman Amendment
to the Immigration and
Nationality Act, passed that
year, “provided additional
grounds for deportation and
exclusion for individuals who
collaborated with the Nazi
government,” according to
lawyer Talia Zikel Lissner.

Her work was far from
over, as Holtzman knew. The
legal process of identifying,
trying and deporting Nazi war
criminals was a decades-long
project. It would eventually
outlast her career as an elected
official; just last year, a former
concentration camp guard
named Friedrich Karl Berger
was deported from Tennessee,
an action made possible by the
Holtzman Amendment.

“I’m not someone who
gives up,” Holtzman said. “I
didn’t know what was going to
happen. All I know is that I had
to keep fighting and pushing
and prodding and cajoling and
persuading.” l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM