Consider This from NPR - He Tracked Down Nazi War Criminals. Now He's Investigating Atrocities In Ukraine

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

How serious is the U.S. about investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine? They put Eli Rosenbaum on the case. He's best known for directing the Department of Justice special investigations unit which tracked down Nazis who had gone into hiding after World War II.He lays out the challenges of conducting an investigation in the midst of an ongoing war.This episode also features reporting from NPR's Jason Beaubien and Brian Mann on Russian airstrikes that killed Ukrainian civilians.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu slash forward. It's the sort of scene that is repeating over and over in Ukraine. One minute, four-year-old Liza Dmitriev is helping her mother push a baby stroller in Vinnytsia, far from the war's front lines. The next, two Russian cruise missiles tear the neighborhood apart. Ukrainian officials say at least 24 people were killed. Liza Dmitrieyev was one of them.

Last month, it was a mall in Kremenshchuk. Ihor Mikhailov was there to escape the hot summer sun and pick up some water when a Russian missile came crashing down. His wife and 20 other people were killed. When I woke up, I realized I'd lost my arm. There were blocks of concrete that had fallen around me. I was lying under them. I realized I had to crawl out of there. There was the airstrike on an apartment building in rec center near Odessa, 21 people dead, and the attack that brought down a residential building in Shasev Yar that Ukrainian authorities say killed at least 47 civilians. In each case, Russia claims it was aiming at military targets.

Attacks on schools, hospitals, playgrounds, apartment buildings, grain silos. These are not the acts of rogue units. They fit a clear pattern across every part of Ukraine touched by Russia's forces. That's the U.S. State Department's Ozra Zeya delivering a statement on behalf of Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a conference in The Hague last week. Forty-five countries, including the U.S., agree to coordinate their investigations into Russian war crimes. The allegations go beyond airstrikes on civilians. With each day, the war crimes mount. Rape, torture, extrajudicial executions, disappearances, forced deportations. Russia has denied any criminal behavior by its forces and even given medals to some of the units that served in places like Bucha, where there is strong evidence of atrocities.

And it launched its own war crimes tribunal, claiming that Ukraine has committed crimes against humanity. The Kremlin has threatened to try all the fighters they've captured, including Americans and Brits. To oversee the U.S. investigation, Attorney General Merrick Garland has stood up a new war crimes accountability team. The United States is sending an unmistakable message. There is no place to hide. We and our partners will pursue every avenue available to make sure that those who are responsible for these atrocities are held accountable. Consider this. The Department of Justice has turned to a veteran prosecutor of Nazi war crimes

to lead its investigation into atrocities in Ukraine. We'll talk with him about the challenge ahead. From Nmarket exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Eli Rosenbaum, the man in charge of the U.S. Justice Department's investigation into atrocities in Ukraine, built a career pursuing criminals from another war. Long after World War II ended, he tracked down Nazis who'd made it to the United States, brought prosecutions against them, and got them deported. He tells a story that explains what he calls surprising and distressing parallels between these two conflicts.

I think most especially of the case involving a man named Boris Romanchenko, who was living until recently in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In World War II, Romanchenko was a prisoner of the Nazis, held at four different concentration camps. Miraculously, Mr. Romanchenko survived the torments of his Nazi captivity, and he returned home to Kharkiv. Romanchenko became an officer in the Organization for Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. In a 2015 ceremony, he recited in Russian what's known as the Oath of Buchenwald.

It's very short. It's to build a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal. But Romanchenko, who survived one war in Europe, lost his life in another. When a Russian missile struck his apartment building in Kharkiv and he was killed at the age of 96. This is madness and it has to stop. Rosenbaum was near retirement when the attorney general asked him to lead the new war crimes accountability team. He immediately said yes. His team's scope will be limited. The U.S. only has jurisdiction in cases involving victims or perpetrators who are U.S. nationals. That's a small fraction of the many alleged war crimes in Ukraine so far. When I talked to Rosenbaum, he told me these investigations will be challenging,

but war crimes prosecutors are used to that. We're ready. The work that we've done over many years has prepared us well for this urgent mission. What we probably won't have very much of is the kind of evidence that we had in the Nazi cases, which was primarily captured Nazi documents, mostly because not much is reduced to paper writing anymore. On the other hand, there are electronic communications and the various governments have advanced capabilities to intercept and analyze such communications. And there are state-of-the-art investigative techniques

that could not be deployed in the Nazi cases like DNA analysis and geofencing and the like. So we will have good cases, I'm convinced of that. Just to give us a specific idea of how this works, you take a place like Bucha, where Ukrainians returned after the Russian retreat to find what appeared to be horrific crimes committed against civilians. What would your team do in that context to try to gather evidence for a war crimes prosecution? Well, if we were investigating that scenario, and I should note that under current law for war crimes, U.S. jurisdiction is limited.

So it's going to be a limited number of cases that we investigate for our own potential prosecutorial use. But of course, you'd want to speak with witnesses. You'd want to see what communications might have been intercepted. You would want to establish the order of battle for that time and place, what units on the Russian side were present, whom they reported to. And of course, there would be forensic analysis of the remains and crime scene reconstruction potentially. When you were gathering evidence to prosecute Nazis, you were looking at crimes that had been committed decades ago. These are crimes that have been

committed in a place that is still an active war zone. How much more difficult is it to gather evidence and prosecute these cases while the war is still being fought? The fact that the war is still underway obviously brings new challenges to the work, but it doesn't prevent us from doing capable investigations. So in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the offenses are ongoing and the crime scenes in some instances are going to be difficult to reach or even for some time impossible. Also in the World War II cases, the Nazi government of Germany was succeeded by a responsible German government that acknowledged Germany's responsibility for wartime crimes, including the genocide of European Jews. That post-war

government provided our agency with invaluable investigative assistance over the last four years, including by facilitating access to documents and witnesses. Will the Russian government provide assistance to investigations anytime soon? I would submit that the question virtually answers itself. If the perpetrators in these cases are often Russian troops who have returned to Russia, what is the chance of anyone actually being held accountable of victims getting any real justice? I'm optimistic that justice will be obtained. It doesn't always happen right away. There are many, many instances of perpetrators of atrocity crimes, even the leading figures in a government like Milosevic being brought to the bar of justice. It takes time. Same with Charles Taylor and others. But

I am optimistic that what Attorney General Garland said when we were together with DOJ colleagues and State Department colleagues in Ukraine last month is to be reality in these cases. And he said, quote, there is no hiding place for war criminals. What are the special challenges to prosecuting war crimes as opposed to a typical criminal trial? Well, you know, commonly the war crimes are committed in a manner intended to physically eliminate those people who, had they survived, would normally have been inclined to cooperate with a government investigation. Witnesses on the victim side are hard to find. Some people simply cannot bear to reopen those psychological wounds while their physical wounds are mending. If ever, we've had that experience in the World War II cases, not every Holocaust survivor is prepared to talk about their victimization publicly. That leaves you sometimes with cohort witnesses, comrades, so to speak, of the perpetrators as your best witnesses.

And they, of course, are reluctant in the extreme to testify, lest they incriminate themselves. As somebody who spent much of your career prosecuting Nazi war crimes, what is your reaction when you hear Vladimir Putin say this invasion of Ukraine is an effort to denazify that country? When I hear that, for me, it's like fingernails on the chalkboard times a thousand. It's cruel. It's false. This is not a Nazi government by any stretch of the imagination. I think after almost 40 years of investigating and prosecuting Nazi perpetrators, I know a Nazi when I see one. This is yet another outrage from the Kremlin. Eli Rosenbaum, the Counselor for War Crimes Accountability at the U.S. Department of Justice.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro. This message comes from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro. work in the arts and humanities and prepares students to become global citizens by teaching more languages than any other university in the country. Indiana University. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu.