Manhattan University Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center

Ziering began his pursuit of war criminals by assisting the Immigration and Naturalization Service in locating witnesses who could identify Nazi war criminals, but the work escalated when it became apparent that the government was dragging its feet in many cases. The case of Latvian Nazi chief of police Boulislav Maikovskis, who had ordered the mass shooting of over 200 villagers, assisted in the murder of 20,000 Latvian Jews, and had personally assaulted and killed Jews in the Riga ghetto itself, was both the most famous and the most consequential for Ziering’s activism in this area. Ziering and Society president Lore Oppenheimer organized a demonstration in front of Maikovskis’ home in Mineola, NY to draw attention to the inaction of government officials. Since neither of them had organized a protest before, they looked to the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for logisitical support. Ziering’s relationship with the ADL intensified as a result of this demonstration, as did his relationship with fellow Riga survivor Elliot Welles. Ziering arranged a meeting between Welles, whose mother had been shot by Maikovskis and who had been relentlessly pursuing evidence of Nazi war criminals at large since the early 1960s, and ADL director Abe Foxman. Welles proposed that the ADL form a task force on Nazi War Criminals. As a result of this meeting, Welles served two decades as the director of the ADL’s Task Force on War Criminals and became one of the most influential forces identifying war criminals in the United States and working for their extradition.  For most of these two decades, Ziering served at his side.