Nazi Hunting - Herman Ziering
Nazi Hunting - Herman Ziering
Photos: Herman Ziering in Long Island at a demonstration against Maikovskis and Nazis living in the US without justice, 1974.
During the 1960s, Ziering began monitoring press reports and information obtained from immigration investigators suggesting that hundreds of former Nazi war criminals, including Latvian officials responsible for the mass murders in Riga, were living freely, as like ordinary citizens with impunity. He took on responsibility for helping locate and identify these war criminals, using the Society to distribute material to assist the INS in this task. When the INS failed to act, he assisted the Anti-Defamation League in forming its task force on Nazi war criminals, with fellow Riga survivor Elliot Welles as director. The work he did with Welles in the effort to deport and bring to trial Long Island resident Boleslavs Maikovskis became his most public Nazi-hunting activity, but he also traveled with Welles and Rabbi Mort Rosenthal to South America, where they investigated the veracity of reports of the death of infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and obtained information on other war criminals in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.
He assisted the Paraguayan Filartiga family in bringing a landmark case against former Paraguayan official Americo Pena-Irala to U.S. courts over the regime’s murder of 17-year-old Joelito Filartiga. With the Society and the ADL, he helped then-congressional representative Elizabeth Holtzman in her successful effort to pass legislation that established the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) dedicated to finding and denaturalizing Nazi war criminals. In later years, as court cases involving these criminals dragged on, he continued such efforts, usually acting behind the scenes, but he also led the Society’s efforts to document the events in Riga in the form of a scholarly book that would honor the memories of survivors and the lives of those who did not survive. After multiple roadblocks and confrontations with historians whose work did not meet the priorities of the Society, he found Andrej Andrick and Peter Klein, who completed the book. The ‘Final Solution’ in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation 1941-1944 was published in 2012, seven years after Herman’s death in 2005.
He 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. Welles and Ziering continued working to pressure immigration authorities and the courts to deport Maikovskis, and continued to follow the case through various twists and turns. When Maikovskis disappeared after his last request to delay extradition was denied, they investigated and discovered that he had been secretly allowed to emigrate to Munster. They both went to Munster, inundating the Munster police with documentation on his crimes and his movements and demanding to know why Germany was openly harboring a Nazi war criminal. When Maikovskis was finally arrested and placed on trial, they attended the early court sessions each day. Unfortunately, the trial dragged on until, in 1996, the judge declared Maikovskis too frail to stand trial. But Ziering and Welles two decades of work on the case had raised awareness of the presence of such war criminals at large, and they assisted in the extradition of many more, including the extradition of SS work camp commander Josef Schammberger from Argentina to Germany.
