Nearly 40 of Adolf Hitler's former henchmen were found to have been receiving millions of dollars in Social Security payments underwritten by American taxpayers. Four of them are still alive and comfortably living out the last of their years in various places in Europe.
A two-year investigation conducted by the Associated Press reveals that 38 out of 66 Nazi war criminals and members of the fanatical SS units received an unspecified amount said to be somewhere in the range of millions of dollars in Social Security benefits. AP says the payments came in through a legal loophole that allowed the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) to leverage Social Security benefits as a tool to compel former Nazi soldiers to leave American soil voluntarily.
At least four beneficiaries have been found alive and receiving around $1,500 in benefits every month. One of them is Jakob Denzinger, a former guard of the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, Poland, where the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. estimates that almost a million Jews died from gunfire, starvation or gassing. Today, Denzinger lives in a spacious apartment fronting the Drava River in Osijek, Croatia, where he spends his days strolling the marina in front of his apartment and tipping generously at his favorite Italian restaurant. Thomas Denzinger, his son who lives in the U.S., says his father deserves the old-age benefits.
"This isn't coming out of other people's pockets," the younger Denzinger says. "He paid into the system. They should take nothing out."
Denzinger's son also notes that his father pays 30 percent in taxes.
"He's made a new life for himself over there," Denzinger adds. "But he's angry. He claims he was drafted into the army and did as he was told. You do as you are told or they line you up against a wall and shoot you. You don't have any choice."
95-year-old Martin Hartmann, a former SS guard who served in the Sachsenhausen death camp in Germany, is also believed to be receiving Social Security payments. His former neighbor, Nathan Gasch, who himself was a Sachsenhausen survivor, told AP before he died last year that he was unnerved to have found a picture of Hartmann donning his Nazi uniform hanging on the wall of his house in Arizona. Wasyl Lytwyn, 93, is said to be living in Ukraine after agreeing to leave the U.S. in exchange for Social Security in 1995. Lytwyn was part of the Nazi unit that killed up to 13,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. The last of the four known beneficiaries is Peter Mueller, 90, who was an SS guard in the Natzweiler concentration camp in France before moving to Illinois and leaving for Worms, Germany, where he is said to live in a nursing home.
In 1999, Congress attempted to pass new legislation that would have prohibited Nazi war criminals from receiving benefits. This was after the State Department drafted a memo detailing how the OSI worked to expel Hitler's former men from the country. The memo states that the OSI would "refrain from seeking in any way to limit the subject's receipt of U.S. Social Security benefits," all while delaying action to move criminals to be deported.
Not many countries are willing to accept Nazi war criminals for deportation, so the OSI devised the strategy to encourage criminals to leave voluntarily and reduce the need for a lengthy deportation process that could take up to 10 years. But the State Department still criticizes the OSI up to know about its "cynical public ploy."
"It was not upfront, it was not transparent, it was not a legitimate process," says James Hergen, former legal adviser of the State Department. "This was not the way America should behave. We should not be dumping our refuse, for lack of a better word, on friendly states."
But the OSI thinks the State Department is simply concerned with diplomatic niceties instead of truly wanting to get rid of Hitler's former men.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, says the loophole allowing former Nazi soldiers to receive benefits should be closed, and that Europe has "no will" prosecuting Nazi suspects.
"Someone receiving an American pension could live very well in Europe or wherever they settled," Hier says. "We, in effect, were rewarding them. It didn't make any sense."
