Honolulu Star-Bulletin from Honolulu, Hawaii • 174

NAZIS CONTINUED en bookcase stretching almost to the ceiling. It is filled with books about Nazi spies, Nazi generals, Nazi victories and defeats, Nazi atrocities. He spends many days reading and researching these books. He writes through the night, working on a book concerning the trial of Mrs. Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, a Queens housewife accused of being a guard at the Ravensbruk and Majdanek concentration camps.

DeVito was the INS investigator assigned to the case. After a great deal of persistent effort, he succeeded in accomplishing what no agent of the INS has done since Mrs. Ryan was convicted and deported. The Ryan case was the beginning of DeVito's official mission, but his interest and motivation for the pursuit of war criminals began during World War Il. By sheer chance, Tony DeVito entered Dachau concentration camp only hours after it was liberated by the Seventh Army.

He had been jeeping through the area, an Army Criminal Investigation Department agent interrogating witnesses in a rape case, when he stopped at an encampment near Augsburg for some hot chow. The lunchtime talk was not about the war, or rape. Curious and unbelieving, DeVito drove the short distance to Dachau to see for himself. What he saw that afternoon, he remembers, was a frantic and hideous jumble of images and noise. But beyond the jumble, two images remain clear, fierce and indelible in his mind: A steel door adjacent to the crematorium was open just a crack, so he pushed it.

And inside, reaching to the roof, were bodies stacked like logs, skulls piled on top of skulls, feet piled upon feet. Outside, a circle of men in gray awningstriped pants and shirts were kicking up the brown dust with rocks and sticks; inside the circle, on his hands and knees, crawled a solitary man in the same striped outfit trying unsuccessfully to dodge the rocks and blows--a collaborator now the victim, vengeance now the weapon. These two sights would stay with DeVito forever; and often during the Ryan trial, when he was too tired or too frustrated to continue, he would think back to that afternoon in Dachau and find himself energized. Marriage DeVito nursed a passionate hatred of Germans until, several weeks after Dachau, he visited a tailor in the hospital town of Erlangen. There he met the L46L tailor's beautiful daughter, and they 'EL were married after a six-month courtFEBRUARY ship.

weds The When sailed couple to the moved war America. in ended, with the DeVito's parents in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York City. He went to college at about the INS in a way that he, the outsider, would not have thought possible before. He wrote a memo to his superiors "indicating my strong feelings concerning the existence and operation of Odessa organization which protects here in the U.S., even to the point of possible infiltration into our government." List of names It was during the Ryan case that DeVito received a list of other alleged Nazi war criminals living in this country. He passed the list to his superiors, but nothing was done.

There was no coordinated effort to build cases against them. Instead, says DeVito, "the INS wanted to ignore the whole issue." When DeVito tried to devote his professional time to Nazi cases, his superiors increased his caseload of normal subversive assignments. "I was given 20 cases to process right away. Each case had a call-up date. It had to be completed by a certain date or else they would be on my back, wanting to know why.

That's the way they hoped to keep me going. Finish one, get one. Only a few of my cases didn't have call-up dates. They didn't care when those were finished. You know which ones those were? The Nazi cases." Having lost hope of any vigorous Immigration Service commitment to the Nazi cases, Tony DeVito resigned.

Now he works on his book, hoping the American people will join his cries of protest once the story is told. Lately, he has received some satisfaction. Since resigning from the Immigration Service, DeVito has pursued his investigations at his Westbury, N.Y., home, where he feels his files will be safe. Above: in kitchen with German-born the New School under the G.I. Bill.

At night he worked in a post office to support his wife and newborn son. The opportunity he was seeking appeared one afternoon in 1952 on a TV broadcast of the Kefauver committee investigating organized crime. Here was a job--a cause -that DeVito swiftly understood: good triumphantly ferreting out evil. The same week he took and passed a government service test for the Treasury Bureau and was appointed to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. DeVito is quick to mention that he had been appointed "not as a dumb-cluck border patrolman, but as a federal investigator.

No big cases But the significant investigations DeVito was hoping for eluded him for most of his professional career. He was disappointed with the INS and describes his role as that of an outsider. During these years, DeVito found escape from the tedium of his work in his family. In 1956 he took a mortgage on a tract house in suburban Long Island. Working on weekends, he added another story to make room for raising three children.

The big case he had been anticipating did not come his way till 1972, when the government decided to move against Mrs. Ryan and Tony DeVito was appointed chief investigator. Yet DeVito's enthusiasm for building a case against the woman accused of brutality in a concentration camp was quickly overshadowed by little mysteries involving the INS. wife Frieda and younger daughter Debbie. First came the missing files.

After interviewing witnesses to Mrs. Ryan's role at Majdanek concentration camp, DeVito placed his records in a padlocked filing cabinet in the chief trial attorney's office on the 14th floor of INS headquarters in New York City. The next morning, the files were gone. Then there was the Immigration Service's treatment of witnesses brought in from Europe. Two female witnesses, one from France, the other from Poland, were asked to testify against Mrs.

Ryan. They were told they would receive $37 a day from the government for expenses, barely the cost of a New York City hotel room. Still, they came to America. And then, even this money was withheld. DeVito was forced to pass a hat around the 14th floor of the Immigration Building.

The passing of the hat became a ritual during the trial -an infuriating reminder that DeVito was not fighting just Mrs. Ryan, but the general policy of the INS. But what disturbed DeVito the most was a call his wife received. Speaking in German in a calm, almost soothing voice, the caller wanted to know why Mrs. DeVito was allowing her husband to pursue Nazis.

Hadn't she been born a German? Didn't she know her husband's work could be dangerous? It was not the words or the implications, however, which so upset DeVito. He was annoyed because, he reasoned, only someone in the INS would know his wife was German and have access to his unlisted telephone number. It was many incidents like these which finally forced DeVito to think Action from Congress Congress has decided to raise its voice. Rep. Joshua Eilberg of Philadelphia, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, has ordered a Government Accounting Office investigation of the INS and its role in the cover-up of Nazi cases.

Eilberg says his committee "will continue to press for action from the Immigration Service until all the Nazi cases are closed. We are also very concerned as to why nothing has been done in this area in the past, and we will continue to investigate this matter." Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman of New York, another subcommittee member, is even more insistent: "I urge Congressional hearings into the cover-up." It is expected that these hearings will begin in early spring. Only when these Nazi war criminals are finally forced to answer for their actions will Tony DeVito consider his mission finally over. Howard Blum is the author of "Wanted! The Search for Nazis in America" New York Times Book His investigative work related to this book has a significant part in prompting Congressional hearings into the INS.

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