Tales of a Nazi-Hunting Litigator

It has been 10 years since he left the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting division, but for University Attorney Allan A. Ryan Jr., the denaturalization and extradition trials of John Demjanjuk will not go away. Today, under federal scrutiny, Ryan has had to relive and tell the...

When University Attorney Allan A. Ryan Jr. joined the Justice Department's elite Nazi-hunting unit in January 1980, he knew he hadn't picked an easy job.

"It was a question of leaving a secure post in a prestigious office...for a highly uncertain future in a new office born in political controversy and saddled with the undistinguished record of [the Immigration and Naturalization Service]'s defeats," Ryan wrote in Quiet Neighbors, his 1984 book about Nazis living in America.

Ryan, the former president of the University of Minnesota Law Review, much preferred the more academic tasks he had in the solicitor general's office. There, Ryan could do what he loved: writing briefs and making arguments for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ryan had argued and won an appeal against Nazi death camp guard Feodor Fedorenko, but he knew little about the Nazis he would be pursuing at the newly formed Office of Special Investigations (OSI). He also was not Jewish, which was a politically sensitive point.

His victory in court, however, made him unique, and Philip B. Heymann, then the head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, wanted him. Ryan took the job.

Ryan worked at OSI from 1980 to 1983, but those years spent finding and denaturalizing Nazis living in America continue to affect his life today. What he learned in those three years made him an educator and won him a small measure of fame.

And now, as Tennesse Judge Thomas A. Wiseman wraps up an investigation into charges that OSI lawyers, including Ryan, suppressed evidence in the denaturalization trial of one Nazi war criminal, Ryan's years at Justice have caught up with him again.

A Career

After graduating from Dartmouth in 1966 and the University of Minnesota Law School in 1970, he won a prestigious clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, but then took an unusual turn, doing a stint in the Marines from 1971 to 1974.

"When I was in law school I devised a clever way to beat the draft by joining the Marines later," Ryan explained in an interview in his Holyoke Center office last week.

He then spent three years in a Washington law firm, working with, among others, Michael Tigar, who is representing Demjanjuk in the federal probe by Wiseman.

Ryan went to the solicitor general's office in 1977 because "the idea of writing briefs and then going out to represent the government of the United States in the Supreme Court of the United States seemed like an exciting thing to do," he says.

While at the solicitor general's office, Ryan argued the appeal against Fedorenko, after some hesitation.

In a memo suggesting the case not be appealed, Ryan called Fedorenko a "dead end" case. After reading the trial transcript, however, Ryan abruptly changed his mind and chose to prosecute.

The litigator ultimately found he liked the case, and wanted to prosecute more like it. In 1980, looking for a challenge, he accepted the job at OSI.

OSI employees, by Ryan's own description in Quiet Neighbors, were "an eclectic group" that included trial lawyers and recent law school grads, historians, intelligence analysts and criminal investigators.

Upon arriving at OSI, Ryan found he had an extraordinary job. In January 1980, the same month he joined the office, Ryan travelled with Walter Rockler, the man he would replace in March, to Moscow.

The trip's highlight was a meeting with a Soviet cabinet-level official. Ryan and Rockler broke the ice by lighting up cigarettes, even though Ryan, as he notes in his book, doesn't smoke cigarettes.

Ryan won from the Soviets the right to gather evidence and depose witnesses in their country, a privilege that was key to collecting evidence against alleged Nazis.

The work was intense and often emotional, as his office located Holocaust survivors and asked them to retell their experiences.

"You've got to have the detachment to talk to the survivor," Ryan says. "The prosecutor's responsibility is to assemble evidence and realize that can have an effect on the person who has been accused. That is not a role that emotion does well in."

Ryan left OSI in early 1983 to prepare a report for Attorney General William French Smith on Klaus Barbie, the onetime chief of the Nazi Gestapo in Lyon, France, widely known as "The Butcher of Lyon."

The U.S. had recruited Barbie into its intelligence service and facilitated his escape to Bolivia. As a result of Ryan's report, the U.S. issued a formal apology to France.

The attorney left the government for good later that year, spending much of the next 18 months writing Quiet Neighbors.

The book, which Demjanjuk lawyer Michael Tigar brought up while questioning Ryan in court last month, contains strong statements about the guilt of John Demjanjuk, who OSI successfully prosecuted as the infamous Nazi death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible."

Soviet records released in 1991 indicate Ivan may have been another man, and Ryan is no longer willing to say for certain that Demjanjuk was Ivan.

Now, Ryan says the book simply represents his thoughts and feelings as they stood 10 years ago. "It was a story that needed to be told," says Ryan, adding that he didn't make any money on the publication.

After he finished the book, Ryan and his wife, with two young children, decided they wanted to get away from Washington, and Ryan joined the Office of the General Counsel in March 1985.

But he never completely left his days at the Justice Department behind him.

In 1988, Ryan agreed to play the prosecutor in an HBO television program, "Kurt Waldheim: Commission of Inquiry."

The show--a mock trial of the former Austrian president on Nazi war crimes--was widely criticized. Both Elizabeth Holtzman '62, who as a member of Congress pushed for the formation of OSI, and Neil M. Sher, then the director of the office, labeled the show dangerous and unfair to Waldheim.

"I didn't like the idea of a TV trial but...this was thoroughly researched and totally unrehearsed," says Ryan, who lost the case.

In Boston, Ryan also became a member of the board of overseers at Facing History and Ourselves, a Brookline-based group devoted to teaching children about the Holocaust.

"The best way to fight prejudice and bigotry is to teach children what terrible harm prejudice and bigotry have done," says Ryan, who participates in teacher training sessions organized by the group. "What we ought to be doing is educating children about the Holocaust."

Ryan also put his political clout to use for the organization. When Facing History was denied funding by the Department of Education in 1988, Ryan testified before a Congressional committee on behalf of the group. Facing History now receives a $70,000 annual government grant to supplement its budget of $1.7 million.

"He's just a very approachable and thoughtful person," says Mark Skvirsky, program director at Facing History. "He's a gold mine for Facing History."

Ryan also teaches a course at Boston College Law School. The class is a three-credit seminar called, "International Human Rights: Legal Responses to War Crimes, Genocide and Terrorism," and it focuses on "the ways courts could bring human rights violators to justice," Ryan says.

The attorney, who is also involved in the Holocaust Human Rights Research Project, says he maintains an intense interest in human rights violations and war crimes overseas, and he tries to work current events into his course.

"The war crimes that took place in Yugoslavia were chilling," Ryan says. "What's terribly disheartening is that the same ones seem to be happening again in the same places, the same valleys."

As a Harvard attorney, Ryan has also kept a high profile. He has handled cases that attracted local and national interest, including last year's attempt by a group of law school students to sue their school to ensure greater faculty diversity.

The litigator has won accolades from colleagues for his professional handling of Harvard cases, with one notable exception.

In 1984, Barbara Bund Jackson, now a private consultant, filed suit against Harvard and Business School Dean John H. McArthur charging the school denied her tenure because she is a woman. Ryan argued the case for Harvard when it finally ended up in court in 1988.

There were frequent problems with Harvard and Ryan's handling of the evidence. Documents that Jackson asked for in March 1986 were destroyed in April or May 1986, even though Business School officials knew they were under subpoena. School officials labeled it a mistake. Jackson and her attorney charged cover-up.

Even more embarassing for Ryan was the handling of tally sheets used by Business School professors to vote on Jackson's application for tenure. Ryan did not turn over the tally sheets when they were asked for by Jackson, according to the court's decision in the case.

In fact, the court and Jackson only learned of the existence of the ballots when Smith Professor of Corporate Finance Gordon Donaldson let slip during his testimony that the ballots were in the Office of the General Counsel.

In his decision, U.S. District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock added a separate section for "Missing Evidence." In that section, he wrote a stinging rebuke of Ryan, all but saying the Harvard attorney lied to the court.

"Not only did defendants fail to turn over the tally sheet during discovery, but defendants counsel misled the court, during a hearing held on February 17, 1988, to consider defendants motion for summary judgment, by representing that all renure 'ballots are routinely destroyed after the vote is taken," Woodlock wrote.

In an interview last week, Ryan said he had thought the tenure ballots had been destroyed until he discovered otherwise. He said he was mistaken, but denied lying.

"I was saying to the court then as I always do what I believe to be true," Ryan says. "I think it was an unfair statement for the court to make."

In December 1991, Ryan was accused of a similar kind of misconduct--suppressing evidence during his tenure at OSI that might have cleared Demjanjuk. The charge was initially leveled by Yoram Sheftel, an attorney for Demjanjuk in Israel, where the alleged Ivan the Terrible now sits on death row.

Ryan vehemently denied the charges on ABC's "Nightline" when Sheftel initially made them. The suggestion still infuriates him today.

Under direction from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio, Judge Thomas A. Wiseman began his probe of OSI's conduct in the Demjanjuk case last fall, and Ryan testified last month. Throughout, however, Ryan has maintained the issue has nothing to do with Harvard when his days at OSI again landed him in the national and campus news.

The Harvard job is, after all, different than the directorship of OSI, when Ryan could share cigarettes with cabinet-level Soviet officials. Now, Ryan spends part of his time working in cooperation with the firm of Melick and Porter in the farm leagues of law--personal injury suits brought against the University.

"The people here--my clients--seem to me among the most thoughtful, human, decent people that I have ever come across," says Ryan. "People at Harvard want to do the right thing."

But Ryan worries that his reputation among his "clients" could be hurt by Wiseman's probe. Integrity for a lawyer, Ryan says, "is everything."

Thirteen years later, Ryan does not regret his choice to go to OSI. He remains proud of the work he did, and says he can't think of anything he did wrong.

"Different aspects of the experience [at OSI] affected me in different ways," says Ryan, but then he emphasizes that he has moved on to a different part of his life. "But my work at the Justice Department and my work at Harvard are not the same thing."