Three cheers for President Trump issuing an executive order Thursday directing the “full and complete release of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy” as well as Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Also needed to be published are the secret State Department files concerning how the diplomats there thwarted efforts of the Justice Department to deport Nazi perpetrators who had snuck into the U.S. after World War II. New Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in office just a week, should order the files opened.
We don’t ascribe to any of the assassination conspiracy theories about the murders in 1963 and 1968 and believe that the three gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, James Earl Ray in Memphis, Sirhan Sirhan in L.A., all acted alone, but publishing all the documents is, as Trump correctly says, “in the public interest.”
It is as well in the public interest to release how the State Department, under several administrations before Trump’s first term, did not remove Nazi death camps guards who the federal courts had ordered deported back to Europe.
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking 80 years since the Red Army liberated a strange place, Auschwitz, the Germans’ massive factory in occupied Poland designed to murder human beings and where the Nazis killed more than a million souls, almost all of them Jews.
The crimes of the Holocaust are remembered, as they must be, but the State Department, in the years before Trump, failed to deport SS men who were party to crimes against humanity and genocide.
This page has documented at least nine adjudicated Nazi perpetrators who the State Department, under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, let remain in this country: Anton Tittjung was ordered deported in 1994 and died in 2012, Bronislaw Hajda (1998; 2012), Michael Negele (2002; 2005), Jack Reimer (2002; 2005), Mykola Wasylyk (2002; 2010), Johann Leprich (2003; 2013), Theodor Szehinskyj (2003; 2014), Vladas Zajanckauskas (2007; 2013), Osyp Firishchak (2007; 2012).
It was only Trump, who in 2018, ended this shame and expelled from Queens to Germany the last remaining Nazi, Jakiw Palij, a death camp guard. Trump gets the credit and his ambassador to Germany, Ric Grenell, got it done, fast. How fast? Grenell presented his credentials in Berlin on May 8, 2018. Palij was on a plane back to Germany on Aug. 21, 2018, where he would die the next year. Grenell is now Trump’s envoy for special missions.
Many members of Congress from New York, starting with the dean of the delegation, Jerry Nadler, along with Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Greg Meeks, asked Secretary of State Tony Blinken for explanations for years without a reply. Finally, a year ago, the State Department historian provided a briefing to Nadler’s office, but the records remain sealed.
Not good enough. The congressmen, as well as their colleagues who demanded answers — Dan Goldman, Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler, Nick Langworthy, Marc Molinaro and Pat Ryan — can’t give up. We know of nine Nazis who died in their American beds. There may be more. The full record must be published and a public congressional hearing held. Lawler, who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, should push for it.
As Trump was the only president in decades to act to remove Nazis, he and his new secretary of state are the perfect ones to force the department to come clean.