Nazi Hunter Dedicates Career To Pursuing Justice 
 
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 More than 65 years after World War II, many Nazis are living out their lives in quiet retirements. The crimes scenes are, for the most part, cold. But Eli Rosenbaum is hot on the trail. He and his team at the Justice Department are Nazi hunters. They track down Nazis who moved to the U.S. after the war, and deport them. 
 
 Rosenbaum grew up in a Jewish home, where his family didn't talk about the Holocaust. But one night when he was a child, he tuned the TV to a dramatic reenactment of the Auschwitz trial in Germany. "Suddenly I am seeing a woman testifying about being experimented on at a Nazi concentration camp," he tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "And I recall being absolutely shocked." 
 
 Other than meeting the victims, Rosenbaum says the most memorable part of his work is questioning the suspects, an experience he calls "surreal." Siting in someone's home, or in the U.S. Attorney's office, "these people look close to harmless." Hearing them talk about the terrible things they did for the Nazi regime is unsettling, says Rosenbaum, "but one tends not to focus on the horror of it. You focus on getting the answers to the questions you're posing. But afterwards, that's usually when it hits you." 
 
 "The time pressures grow every year. Sometimes I say it's sort of like when we started we were told, 'OK, run a four minute mile.' And we did it. And then a few years later, they say, 'Okay, you've got to run that mile but you've only got about three minutes forty-five seconds.' So, each year we have to run faster. 
 
 In the early part of his career, Rosenbaum felt guilty if he took a weekend day off. "We were, after all, told from very start that time was our enemy, that these people were already senior citizens, and that we would have to work as fast as we responsibly could." The time pressure, added to the tragic nature of the cases, became too much, and he left after three years. 
 
 But before long, he was back at the Justice Department, hunting Nazis. "The cases just don't let go of you," says Rosenbaum. Each of the victims breaks his heart, and impresses him with their courage. "You meet them and you say well, I have to pursue justice for them. It has to be done." 
 
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 ||||| He and many other young men in his town, Piadyki, were forced by the Nazis to be guards, he said, noting they were kept on a troop base converted from a farm and made to work night tours patrolling roads and bridges. 
 
 ''They came and took me when I was 18,'' he said. ''We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused. I did it to save their lives, and I never even wore a Nazi uniform. They made us wear gray guards' uniforms and had us guarding bridges and rivers.'' 
 
 Mr. Palij insists he never set foot in any camp and never took part in any killings or atrocities during the war. And indeed, federal officials do not accuse him of that. Rather, they say that he, by cooperating as a Nazi guard, ''directly contributed to their eventual slaughter'' by either forcing prisoners to work or preventing them from escaping. 
 
 Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of a special investigation unit for the Justice Department, called Mr. Palij ''an essential component in the machinery of annihilation'' at the camps. 
 
 ''He took part in the persecution of Jewish inmates at Treblinka and ensured that they could not escape, and the end result was that as many as 7,000 people were individually massacred,'' Mr. Rosenbaum said. 
 
 ''He was very loyal and very capable and served until April 1945, the last weeks of the war, while other soldiers were deserting right and left,'' he said. 
 
 In 1949, Mr. Palij emigrated here at age 26 as a refugee of World War II. In 1957, he was granted United States citizenship. Mr. Palij, a retired draftsman with no children, lives in a rear rental apartment on 89th Street in Jackson Heights, a quiet Queens street lined with old brick row houses. He lives on Social Security checks. After two strokes, he is in frail health and takes care of Maria, 72, his wife of 43 years, who now has Alzheimer's disease. 
 
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 In recent months, however, he has gone from being seen by neighbors as a polite old chap who constantly tinkers with his 1980 Oldsmobile, to a man being portrayed as a Nazi death camp guard with blood on his hands. Jewish demonstrators marched outside his home, calling him a butcher. ''There were 200 Jewish kids out there,'' he said. ''I called the precinct, and the cop told me: 'Leave them alone, and they'll leave. Don't say anything, or you might get a rock through your window.' '' 
 
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 He has begun entering his home by the alley behind it. 
 
 ''We get phone calls, people yelling, 'You Nazi!' It scares the hell out of my wife,'' he said. 
 
 In July, a federal judge stripped Mr. Palij of his citizenship for falsely claiming in his immigration papers in 1949 that he worked on his father's farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis. Mr. Palij insists that he did this to enter the United States ''to save my life.'' 
 
 ''I spent five years in a refugee camp in Germany, and I had nowhere else to go but America,'' he said. 
 
 ''These Jewish groups want to hunt down all the living Nazis, and I don't blame them,'' he said, ''but they know I never worked in a camp. They have proof of that.'' 
 
 Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which helps bring former Nazi war criminals to justice, dismissed Mr. Palij's denials. 
 
 ''Every time they find a guard like this, he says he was forced into service,'' he said. ''To work at those camps, you had to be eager to be there. They only took people they knew were loyal and brutal and not sympathetic to pleas of the inmates. 
 
 ''The most vicious guards at these camps, they all have this line that they were just the short-order cook or something, when they were actually trained to do nefarious and horrible things.'' 
 
 Justice Department officials say that since 1979, their investigations have resulted in 73 former Nazis' being stripped of United States citizenship, with 59 of them deported. 
 
 But Mr. Palij said Wednesday, ''Let them come and get me.'' 
 
 ''I'm not running. What will they do? Shoot me? Put me in the electric chair? Where are they going to deport me to? What country is going to take an 80-year-old man in poor health?'' ||||| Washington (CNN) The U.S. government thinks Jakiw Palij was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp, but the 92-year-old is quietly living out his last years not in prison -- confined by old age to a second-story apartment in a modest red-brick duplex in one of the most diverse sections of New York City. 
 
 Jackson Heights, Queens is an evolving, largely immigrant neighborhood a short 20 minute subway ride to midtown Manhattan. 
 
 Palij's life there represents the closing of an era: the only remaining active case from the Nazi era pursued by the Justice Department's Office of Human Rights and Special Prosecutions. 
 
 Despite more than a decade of deportation attempts by the Justice Department, Palij, who worked at the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland, likely will die here. 
 
 A federal judge ordered Palij deported in 2004, but none of three European countries to which he could be sent will take him. 
 
 In court filings, he has denied wrongdoing, claiming that he and other young men in his Polish hometown were coerced into working for the Nazi occupiers. 
 
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 Eli Rosenbaum has dedicated a career to pursuing men like Palij. 
 
 Rosenbaum was an intern when he joined what was then the Office of Special Investigations in 1979, shortly after it was created. 
 
 Now director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy, Rosenbaum has become the Justice Department's best-known Nazi Hunter, helping the department pursue 137 cases, of which 107 were successful in stripping citizenship or deporting accused Nazis. 
 
 Among them: John Demjanjuk , who was convicted in Germany of being an accessory to more than 28,000 murders for his work as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, after the Justice Department human rights unit pursued his deportation. 
 
 Michael Kolhnhofer was so incensed at the deportation efforts of the Justice Department that when reporters showed up at his home in Kansas City in 1996 to ask questions he started shooting out his front door. The former Nazi guard at the Buchenwald death camp died after a shootout with police. 
 
 For Rosenbaum, a career as Nazi hunter was accidental. 
 
 After his internship stint he envisioned a legal career, perhaps in finance. 
 
 Growing up, his family in Long Island, N.Y., didn't talk about the Holocaust. The term "Holocaust" wasn't even common parlance until a 1970s NBC broadcast of a teleplay based on the Nuremberg Trials. 
 
 Rosenbaum recalls a snowy drive in New York decades ago with his father, who began telling him of his wartime military service. His father described arriving at Dachau, Germany a day after it was liberated. Then he stopped speaking. Rosenbaum looked over at this father. He was holding back tears. 
 
 "That was a time when you just didn't see your dad cry," Rosenbaum recalls. 
 
 The human rights office got its start after congressional and public pressure prompted the Justice Department to try to track down former Nazis who had moved to the U.S. -- some of them with the help of U.S. spy and law enforcement agencies that recruited former Nazis with technical knowledge. In recent years, the office has also investigated cases related to atrocities in Bosnia and Guatemala. There remain a handful of ongoing World War II probes and Rosenbaum also oversees cases involving more recent war atrocities. 
 
 In the Nazi cases, a handful of attorneys, historians and researchers looked into as many as 70,000 names of possible Nazis. Their obstacles were many: they had to rely on a scant supply of documents, some held by authorities in the Soviet Union and countries behind the Iron Curtain. The suspects worked hard to hide their identities. Some snuck into the U.S. as refugees, and all denied any role in atrocities. Witnesses were few, particularly in cases like Trawniki, where Nazis wiped out entire populations. 
 
 "Our World War II cases are the ultimate cold cases. All of the crimes took place many decades ago on the other side of a vast ocean," Rosenbaum says. "It's very much a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack." 
 
 Now, there's also the race against time. People who would have been adults in the Nazi era are quickly dying off. 
 
 But Rosenbaum is resolute that pursuing every last Nazi is the least owed to the victims of the Holocaust. In the case of Palij, he says: "What Mr. Palij did prevented other people from reaching old age. He served at the Trawniki SS training and base camp -- really a school for mass murder -- and he trained on live Jews at the adjacent Trawniki Jewish Labor Camp. And, in the end, everyone who was held there was massacred." 
 
 The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has helped support the work of Rosenbaum by providing access to documents it had collected on war crimes. 
 
 Peter Black, senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, worked with Rosenbaum at the Justice Department. 
 
 "For Eli, this became a mission," Black says. 
 
 That the human rights unit stuck by the work is remarkable because of the many frustrations that arose, Black says. At the height of the Cold War, U.S. courts didn't trust evidence that came from the Soviet Union. U.S. intelligence agencies also warned that some allegations that originated from the Soviets was intended to hurt exile communities from the Baltic countries and Ukraine, which were under Soviet control. 
 
 "You can't just decide that because someone gets away with [atrocities] for 40 years, that they are innocent," Black says. "You have to do what you can to achieve justice for the victims, as a statement about our response to these crimes." 
 
 Rosenbaum and other lawyers and researchers spent years poring over documents looking to connect suspected Nazis to specific crimes. 
 
 The atrocities of the Trawniki camp, where Palij worked, aren't well known in part because the killing was thorough, historians say. One document researchers uncovered helped illustrate the extent of the killing. A soldier broke the butt of his rifle, which meant he was required to file a report so the German SS would issue him a new one. The report mentioned an operation that killed 4,000 people at Trawniki, mostly Jews. 
 
 The irony for lawyers and researchers working on the cases was that after stitching together evidence that someone was involved in atrocities, the most U.S. law would allow them to do is to deport former Nazis. Trying them for the actual crimes against humanity is something that was left for authorities in other countries.
– During some three decades with Justice Department, Eli Rosenbaum has earned a well-deserved reputation as a Nazi hunter. He has worked on 137 cases involving suspected Nazis, and in all but 30 of them, the accused lost citizenship or was deported. Now, CNN reports, just a single active case remains. But when it comes to Jakiw Palij, who lives in Queens, NY, deportation isn’t likely. In fact, a federal judge ordered the 92-year-old deported in 2004, but the European countries he could be sent to won't take him. Palij, CNN notes, will likely die here. "What Mr. Palij did prevented other people from reaching old age," says Rosenbaum, who now also oversees more recent war-related crimes as the DOJ's director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy. Palij is accused of being a guard at the Trawniki death camp in German-occupied Poland—"in the end," Rosenbaum says, "everyone who was held there was massacred." Palij, who, per the New York Times, came to the US in 1949 as a refugee using falsified immigration papers, has denied any wrongdoing. In 2003, he told the Times that the Nazis coerced him into service patrolling bridges and roads at night. "We knew they would kill me and my family if I refused," he says. "I did it to save their lives, and I never even wore a Nazi uniform." The founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center downplayed that line of argument: "To work at those camps, you had to be eager to be there. They only took people they knew were loyal and brutal and not sympathetic to pleas of the inmates." In a 2013 interview with NPR, Rosenbaum described questioning the suspects about their alleged Nazi pasts as "surreal ... these people look close to harmless." (Joseph Goebbels' "love nest" is proving to be a tough sell for Berlin.)