“Problems with the pictures” allegedly set Hāzners freeat pages 139-140
We arrive at the INS's defeat and the false meme that "problems with the photographs" were to blame for the loss, not that allegations failed scrutiny regardless of issues with presentation of photographic evidence.
The task force did try several older cases with devastating results. Of the five cases the SLU actively tried—Zutty’s project control office had originated all cases—two were lost outright. The first lost case concerned Vilis Hazners, a Latvian who had immigrated through the Refugee Relief Act in 1956 but never had become a citizen. At his deportation hearing, the INS accused him of having been a member of a Latvian self-defense unit and later also a Schutzmannschaft unit and that he had lied about these activities on his immigration paperwork. Witnesses identified him as an individual who ordered the murder of Jews in the Riga ghetto. However, the trial was eventually lost due to problems with the pictures identifying Hazners. Martin Mendelsohn replaced the first INS lawyer participating in the trial, William Strasser, after having been reprimanded by the court for rearranging a photo spread he had introduced as evidence. Moreover, the INS could not reproduce the original photos which INS investigators had shown to Israeli Holocaust survivors. Instead Martin Mendelsohn used what he claimed to be accurate reproductions. The judge, therefore, did not allow the witness, Maria Radiwker, an Israeli investigator, to make the link between Hazners and the available photographic material.a In addition, INS translators made a mistake when identifying Hazners as a member of the local police on a World War II document. Instead a court translator pointed out that the document actually described Hazners as a member of a Selbstschutz unit.b Finally, Hazners’ defense attorney could show that the accused was not present at most of the locations the crimes were committed.c The judge in the end decided that not enough evidence linked Hazners to the crimes and dismissed the case in 1979. The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) upheld the court’s decision in 1981, “holding that the record did not contain clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence of Hazners deportability.”d
a Syracuse Post Standard, March 8, 1978, 5. b Syracuse Herald-Journal, March 9, 1978, 16. c Ezergailis, Nazi/Soviet Disinformation, 182. d Saidel, Outraged Conscience, 17.
Sources
Syracuse Post StandardMarch 8, 1978
"War Crimes Trial Ouster Try Hits Snag", by Joseph Mianowany.
ALBANY (UPI) — The government, with a new attorney at the helm, Tuesday resumed deportation proceedings against an accused Nazi collaborator, but again ran into problems with photographic evidence it had hoped to use.
The U S Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)'s case against Vilis Hazners of Whitehall, Washington County, hit a number of stumbling blocks similar to ones encountered when the proceedings began in earnest last October.
The 73-year-old Hazners is accused of beating Jews and selecting them for execution in Riga, Latvia, during World War II and of concealing that activity when he immigrated to the United States in 1956.
Martin Mendelsohn represented the INS Tuesday, replacing William Strasser, who had handled most earlier sessions.
Strasser was reprimanded last year for rearranging a series of pictures he had introduced in evidence against Hazners.
The government's first witness Tuesday was Maria Radiwker, 72, an Israeli investigator responsible for much of the early investigation into the whereabouts of accused Nazi collaborators.
As Strasser had tried with several Israeli witnesses last year, Mendelsohn attempted to have Mrs Radiwker identify WW II-era photographs and link them to pictures of Hazners.
Mendelsohn said the series of photos were "accurate reproductions" of ones Mrs Radiwker had shown the Israeli witnesses.
1However, INS Judge Anthony De Gaeto would not let the witness compare the pictures, saying she was not a photographic expert and the government did not prove the original pictures were destroyed or unavailable.
Later, when Mendelsohn tried to submit a photo identified as one of Hazners and taken from a book on war criminals, defense attorney Ivars Berzins reacted strongly.
2"I'm speechless," he said "I'd better sit down so I can contain myself."
Schiessl makes the leap in his narrative that non-introduction of evidence caused the government to lose the Hāzners case. His source makes no such contention.
Moreover, the judicial review of the Hāzners case considered the photo spread as having been entered into evidence and concluded that its non-introduction at trial had not contributed to the government's failure to prove their case.
Nevertheless, Schiessl's is the prevalent narrative, returning to the genesis of his thesis: 10,000 escaped Nazis and their collaborators in the U.S., per Alan A. Ryan, Jr.:
Vilis Hazners, of Whitehall, New York, also charged with being a Latvian executioner, went to trial over a two-year period from 1977 to 1979. INS attorneys could not find the photographs that had been shown to the witnesses prior to trial and were forced to substitute what they contended were "reproductions" to a skeptical judge. A document crucial to INS's case was never put in the record. The judge found the evidence that was introduced to be insufficient, and Hazners went free.1
Ryan was intimately acquainted with the opinion rendered in the Hāzners judicial review and denial of motion to appeal yet perniciously insists Hāzners "went free" — a euphemism for "escaped justice" — because the INS could not find original photographs, and, apparently, never put into the record the supposed single document that could have won the case. As no such "document" has ever been revealed, we suspect the OSI ultimately discovered it was Soviet disinformation and quietly buried it, along with Hāzners's exculpatory German war records.
Hāzners's attorney was dumbfouded because "a photo identified as one of Hazners and taken from a book on war criminals" could only have come from KGB propaganda. The INS placed into evidence via the personal belongings of a witness an entire collection of anti-Latvian KGB-produced propaganda.
 | Those who still insist Hāzners escaped justice cite the photo spread issue and allege the INS "botched" the case. Had Schiessl researched beyond contemporaneous news reports and the Nazis-among-us genre, he would have discovered that not allowing the photo spread into evidence had no impact on Hāzners's vindication. Instead, Schiessl negligently propagates the lie that "problems with pictures" allowed Hāzners to escape justice. |
Syracuse Herald-JournalMarch 9, 1978
We could not locate a clipping of this article. However, the error in translation is confirmed in trial records.
| There were far greater faults with the INS's case against Hāzners than mistranslation of what unit he belonged to. This did, however, highlight the INS's "guilt by association" strategy. |
Ezergailispage 182
Since [Daugavas Vanagi — Who are They?] gave no specifics, the American prosecutors had to invent the details based on the peak moments of the atrocities in Latvia: they threw everything but the "kitchen sink" at him, as if Hazners single-handedly had murdered the Jews of Latvia. By resorting to an indiscriminate smorgasbord of accusations, the prosecutors demonstrated their ignorance about the Nazi occupation of Latvia and thus lost the case. They latched onto Ducmanis's [the author] contention that there was no difference between occupied Latvia and Nazi Germany. They invented a Latvian government led by Oskars Dankers, as if such a thing existed on 1 July 1941. In reality, at that time Dankers was still in Germany, and the genesis of the so-called Latvian Self-Administration of the Land was a slow process that took from August 1941 to May 1942. The American prosecutors, as Ducmanis himself did not do, accused Hazners of molesting and killing Jews at the Riga Police Headquarters (Prefektura), the burning of the Synagogue at Gogola iela, the clearing of both the Riga and Daugavpils (Dvinsk in the language of the prosecutors) ghettos. Hazners' defense attorney Ivars Berzins was able to show that Hazners was not present at any of these locations and that at the times indicated Hazners was elsewhere. To confound the prosecutors' case, Berzins showed that the witnesses against Hazners had been prepared and coached by Maria Radiwker, an attorney in Israel. Hazners was acquitted and exonerated.
| Ezergailis correctly asserts U.S. authorities lost the case against Hāzners because the coached eyewitnesses had clearly misidentified Hāzners. |
Saidelpage 17
The Office of Special Investigations (051), which superseded SLU, appealed this decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) on March 5, 1980, and an oral argument before the BIA was held on September 4, 1980. On July 15, 1981, the BIA dismissed OSI’s appeal and motion to reopen, holding that the record did not contain clear, convincing and unequivocal evidence of Hazners’ deportability. Since that date, official OSI digests of cases in litigation have stated, “Various possible courses of action are now under consideration by OSI.” But there has been no action.
Sitting in the Albany courtroom in October and November, 1977, Rabbi Silton learned in detail from the witnesses about the inhuman harshness of life in the Riga Ghetto. He also learned that, with few exceptions, members of the Jewish community were not in the courtroom to offer their moral support to the witnesses.
The rabbi learned another lesson sitting in that courtroom, a lesson that a handful of others had known for some time: the issue of Nazi war criminals living in America was neither new nor easily rectified.
| Saidel, who attended the trial, relates dismissal of the case. But, it is also obvious from its reading that she is dissatisfied that the OSI has not taken more steps since to address a failure of the justice system to find Hāzners guilty of Holocaust collaboration. |
Lastly, regarding Hāzners
In two remaining passages mentioning Hāzners, Schiessl briefly notes that U.S. authorities lost 20 cases ("13.3%"), including his, and that he passed away in the U.S. in 1989.
Schiessl cites the German-language translation of the KGB's Daugavas Vanagi — Who are They? (Daugavas Vanagi: Wer Sind Sie?) regarding Hāzners and lists it in "Secondary Sources".
| 1 | Ryan, A.A. Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984, ISBN: 9780151758234. LINK, p.60. |