Nazi hunter for U.S. Dept of Justice speaks at USC

On Monday, September 19, Eli Rosenbaum, Director of the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, gave a presentation sponsored by the International Human Rights Clinic and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. Rosenbaum has spent his career pursuing former Nazis and other perpetrators of human rights violations living and hiding in the United States.

Speaking before a capacity crowd at the USC Gould School of Law, Rosenbaum discussed his work investigating and prosecuting individuals for genocide, torture, war crimes, and recruitment or use of child soldiers. Among the many war criminals whom his office found and deported is John Demjanjuk, a former Nazi guard convicted this year in the Munich Regional Court of being an accessory to the murder of more than 28,000 Jews at the Sobibór extermination camp. Thomas Blatt, a survivor of the Sobibór camp who testified against Demjanjuk, was in the audience at Rosenbaum’s lecture; Blatt’s life story is preserved in the Institute’s Visual History Archive. An excerpt of his testimony is also featured in Segments for the Classroom, one of the Institute's online resources for educators.  Click here to view the excerpt on YouTube

Rosenbaum was quoted in a September 20 article by CNN about John Kalymon, a former Ukrainian Nazi who lost an appeal to avoid deportation.  Click here to read the article