With his targets in their nineties, the end of the hunt is near — but Eli Rosenbaum is determined to keep searching until time runs out 

Could this be the last one?

Last month, Friedrich Karl Berger, a white-haired, 95-year-old resident of bucolic Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was expelled from the United States.

Berger, known to his friends and family as “Fritz,” lost his appeal of a federal immigration judge’s order that he be thrown out of the country and sent back to his native Germany. The judge determined that upon being admitted to the US in 1959, Berger had concealed his past as an armed guard watching over concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust. His hopes of spending his final days in the comfort of his rambling suburban American home were dashed.

“We proved that he took part in the death march from this sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, back to the main camp of Neuengamme,” says Eli Rosenbaum of the United States Justice Department.

Will Berger be the last German war criminal to be deported from the US?

Rosenbaum, whom British historian Guy Walters called “the world’s most successful Nazi hunter,” has heard that tune before. He recalls a 1980 Newsweek article about a Nazi on trial in Germany headlined “The Last Nazi.”

“We laughed,” recalls Rosenbaum, who at the time had just joined the Office of Special Investigations at the Justice Department. “We were very busy in our office. There were lots of other Nazis. And we would see these headlines every few years.

“But I am here to tell you that at long last, in the year 2021, with all participants of the Nazi crimes at least in their nineties, the end is near,” he tells Mishpacha. “Whether the Berger case will be the last Nazi, we don’t know. It may be. But we are still investigating, and we want all the perpetrators out there to know that it will never be safe for them in the United States.”

Rosenbaum has a long title — dare I say tedious? — to go with his glamorous-sounding job. Since the Office of Special Investigations was merged with another bureau and given the broader mandate of going after war crimes wherever they happen, he is the “director of human rights enforcement and policy” in the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section of the Criminal Division in the United States Department of Justice.

In the media, though, he is simply the “Nazi hunter.” As is usually the case with such simplifications, Rosenbaum does not like that moniker, saying it romanticizes his work, much of which is desk-bound drudgery, and minimizes the work of others in the field.

“It is not an appellation that I care for,” he says, “because it suggests that the work prosecutors and investigators do in this area — and I have done both, I am an investigator and a prosecutor — is a sport of some sort, that it is a game or a movie.

“In fact, it is very serious, professional, and often heartbreaking law enforcement work. I would not want people who do other kinds of law enforcement to think that they are not operating on the same level of professionalism and the same level of skill and ethical responsibility. They are.”