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. Rosenbaum grew up in a Jewish home, where his family didn't talk about the Holocaust. "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. Join Our Sunday Conversation 
 
 Should the U.S. continue to track down and deport Nazi war criminals from World War II? ''Every time they find a guard like this, he says he was forced into service,'' he said. People who would have been adults in the Nazi era are quickly dying off. In the case of Palij, he says: "What Mr. Palij did prevented other people from reaching old age. ''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. Siting in someone's home, or in the U.S. Attorney's office, "these people look close to harmless." Holocaust Memorial Museum, worked with Rosenbaum at the Justice Department. "For Eli, this became a mission," Black says. 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.
– 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.)