 at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, an odd mixture of locals, tourists, press, and glossy-looking politicians converged downtown on Washington Street. Waist-high metal barricades blocked the street like a sieve, making sure only the credentialed few could roam as they wished through the high-security checkpoint.

As the day’s main events tapered down, rumors spread that the presidential motorcade would soon be driving out of town via Washington Street. Adults straddled the barricades, taking photos of every black SUV that passed by. Their children spent the time squeezing between the fence bars, bored.

Stephen Colbert was not restricted by the barricade. Among the honorary few with pre-approved press passes or recognizable names, he moved freely around town. In the hot, late-afternoon sun on this first Saturday of March, Colbert breezed past boxy men in uniform wearing coiled earpieces. He nonchalantly spoke into his cell phone and stopped to occasionally pose for pictures with his fans.

Colbert doesn’t live in Selma. Neither does the Reverend Al Sharpton, who was crisply dressed that afternoon and was escorted by an entourage that seemed attached to his presence like orbiting moons. When he walked down Washington, he strode toward his car with purpose. Unlike Colbert, he dodged fans and press alike.

Across town, a longtime Selma resident (who didn't want his name published) steered clear of the crowds, the street fairs, and the posturing — including

 a spirited sermon by Sharpton at the Brown Chapel AME Church on Sunday

, where the reverend challenged the hagiographic praise of the generation of black Americans who came of age during the civil rights movement. “There were many people in the … generation who were not in the movement,” Sharpton said. “Just ‘cause you are old don’t mean we owe you no gratitude today.”

“I don’t want to hear that bullshit,” the longtime local told me as we walked around Selma's Seventh Ward, with an undercurrent of regret at how little the celebrations that weekend had to do with the actual people of the town, and how much the focus instead was on Selma as a staging ground. “There’s a lot of people in the shadows during the sixties that don’t want the limelight or the public. They did things from their heart to achieve voting rights.”

He requested that I not publish his name for fear of repercussions — not that he believes anyone will hurt him for voicing his opinion. A black man with many friends in his neighborhood, he wants to keep his reputation in tact.

His feelings of resentment are easy to understand. “You see what I see?” He nodded slowly toward a row of abandoned houses, their roofs caving in, some windows boarded up, some open, brandishing shards of unkempt glass.

Abandoned houses. Roofs caving in. Joblessness twice the state average. Welcome to Selma in 2015.

, Colbert and Sharpton joined tens of thousands of visitors for the commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the violent confrontation on March 7, 1965, when peaceful civil rights marchers, planning a trek from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery in support of voting rights, crossed Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and were met with baton-wielding Alabama state troopers — their ranks bolstered after an open call from County Sheriff Jim Clark, who, preparing for a melee, promised to deputize all the county’s white men over age 21. After armoring themselves with gas masks, the troopers shot tear gas canisters into the crowd and charged forward, some on horseback, nightsticks drawn, and rained blows upon the civil rights activists, injuring nearly 70 and aborting the march. Two weeks later, after the horrors of Bloody Sunday shocked many across the nation into action, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., successfully led a 54 mile march from Selma to Montgomery.

These demonstrations — and the public attention they drew — led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which forbade Jim Crow-era literacy tests and poll taxes. At the 50th anniversary commemorations, Attorney General Eric Holder and Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (among others) drew attention to 

the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County, 

, which struck down the preclearance requirement in the Voting Rights Act. Preclearance required certain jurisdictions — nine states, and dozens of counties and cities throughout the country — with histories of institutional discrimination and disenfranchisement to get preclearance from the federal government before changing their voting laws.

Though the public memory of Selma’s importance arguably never diminished, it roared back into the collective consciousness earlier this year with the release of the popular film “Selma,” a dramatized history of the events of 1965. Controversies haunted the film, from the ire of some historians and Lyndon Johnson partisans who felt that the film unfairly maligned LBJ, to — more notably — the film’s failure to gain nominations in most of the major Oscar categories. While the movie was a finalist for four Golden Globes, and though it received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture (and won Best Original Song), “Selma” missed out on nominations in other major categories where awards prognosticators had considered it a major contender, including nods for Best Actor (David Oyelowo for his portrayal of King) and Best Director (filmmaker Ava DuVurnay would’ve been the first black woman in Academy history to receive a nomination for directing). In light of the renewed, broader media conversation about race in American life, 

many in the media framed the slights as signs of persistent, yet implicit, veiled racism

Some even referred to this year’s Oscars as the “whitest” yet

The anniversary seemed both to squelch and inflame sentiments about continued racial inequality, as if the movie, the civil rights movement, and anger over the police killings of Ferguson’s Michael Brown, New York’s Eric Garner, and 12-year-old Clevelander Tamir Rice — to name just a few — were all hoisted onto the shoulders of Selma, additional crosses for the city to bare.

Thoroughly reported on by national media upon their return to the town are Selma’s decrepit swaths of low-income neighborhoods, its unemployment rates (double the Alabama average), and the enduring segregation of its schools and churches. 

Selma itself has, for better or for worse, become a symbol of the oft-repeated need for a “national conversation about race,” in lieu of major progress toward fixing the issues actually facing the town — or country, for that matter. The issues themselves, heavy and charged, may have overpowered the everyday concerns of regular people who may consider themselves foot soldiers in the fight for justice and equality, but live against the daily backdrop of joblessness, poverty, and crime.

It’s a local example of what may be a true, pervasive problem we face today as a nation. Everyone's pointing a finger, but they're all pointing them in different directions, and the cost of this lack of cohesion can be felt, regardless of its cause.

National leaders descended on Selma for anniversary speeches. “I don’t want to hear that bullshit,” a longtime local said as we walked around the Seventh Ward. There’s a tangible sense of regret at how little the anniversary celebrations in Selma had to do with the people who actually live there.

Explore a forgotten civil rights hero at Narratively: “The Brave and Tragic Tale of Reverend Turner”

 showed a heroic-looking President Obama in front of an American flag (a photo taken during his speech one day earlier). Below the image, a headline reads “History Honored.” Selma's newspaper dates back to 1827 and still prints six days a week, an honorable output, especially for such a small press. Locally, however, some people didn’t hold the paper in high regard. Several residents rolled their eyes when the newspaper was mentioned, saying that it does little to address Selma’s actual concerns, and instead resorts to knee-jerk civic boosterism where serious reporting is needed.

 where legendary civil rights leader Amelia Boynton Robinson, now 103 years old, once lived, Selma Deputy Sheriff James Martin, 48, tried to verbally untangle the area’s struggles. “People have pretty much forgotten their past,” he said, drawing attention to the boarded-up museum’s chipping yellow paint, its faded welcome sign. The small Seventh Ward house is falling apart. “A lot of people don’t know that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., himself slept on the floor of that particular house during the movement.” In earlier times, other visitors included John Lewis, Robert Kennedy, Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, Andrew Young, Dick Gregory, Joan Baez, and Duke Ellington.

Deputy Sheriff Martin said the museum’s neighborhood has at least 16 structures that should be razed. He finds this neglect abhorrent, given what the area has done for the civil rights movement.

He pointed out that close to where he stood, near the Boynton Museum, is the Tabernacle Baptist Church, where large civil rights march organizing meetings took place in the sixties. A few blocks to the north is Selma University, which, founded in the Reconstruction Era, is one of the nation’s oldest historically black college and universities.

“The reason that this area is concentrated with such history is because this has always been the ‘black’ part of town, so of course they couldn’t go anywhere else,” Martin said. “The poverty is pretty much like any town in the United States, but the thing that made Selma so unique is because of the contribution that she has made to the nation as a whole.”

The poverty is pretty much like any town in the United States, but the thing that makes Selma unique is the contribution it has made to the nation as a whole.

, Johnnie McWilliams, 80, was seated on his porch as the sun set on Martin Luther King Street. Behind him, written on the house’s siding in large black letters was “God is more handsome than the sons of men.”

“My daughter wrote that,” McWilliams said slowly, his voice trailing off as if slipping into memories. As he looked into the distance, I asked him about life in Selma. He spoke of slavery. “Sometimes, you dream about that, you know? What you think comes through your mind all the time. When you look at how you live.”

The scripture on his house lent itself to talk of the churches. “When the blacks, when they go to the white church, they turn around and you see them look at you like they don’t want you around,” McWilliams said.

The Selma Community Church is the only fully integrated house of worship in town, said congregant Kylie Jones. Jones, 25, is a white law student who moved to Selma from Colorado when she was 18. Early on the Sunday morning after the president’s speech, members of the congregation marched to protest 

a memorial to Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in a nearby cemetery. It was erected in 2000, and in March 2012, someone stole the bronze bust of Forrest from atop a marble pedestal

. The marker has a Confederate flag engraved on it, and praises the general-turned-grand wizard as the “Defender of Selma.”

“They’ve roped off the memorial,” Jones told me that Sunday afternoon. “We found out this morning that they have blocked us from getting inside.”

Tensions unevenly felt, Selma resident Francine Smith walked coolly through town with her daughter, her son-in-law, and her grandson on Saturday after the president spoke. Smith, who works in a doctor’s office, is black, and her son-in-law is white. Her daughter and son-in-law met when they were in the military, and were both stationed on the same ship.

“I think when you say ‘Selma,’ they say, ‘Oh my God. Selma,’” said Smith, who believes that the town is far from being the divided battlefield people remember. She stayed firm as I pressed her on Selma’s residual racism.

“It’s not like that, it’s not like that,” Smith said, shaking her head. “In order for Selma to progress, then that stigma that’s being thrown on us has to be lifted so we can move on.”

 is an Editor-at-Large for Narratively, as well as a regular contributor to the publication. Her work has appeared in such outlets as 

 and Al Jazeera America, among others. You can follow Rebecca on Twitter at 

This piece was produced in partnership between The Wilson Quarterly and 

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In Selma, there's a tangible sense of regret at how little the 50th anniversary celebrations had to do with the people who actually live there.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Selma

It has been five years since Efraim Zuroff’s book was first published in 2009. Ostensibly a memoir of the now 66-year-old Brooklynite’s work as a self-proclaimed Nazi Hunter, “Operation Last Chance” is but one of many personal accounts of the Holocaust and World War II that line a set of musty-smelling shelves inside the Strand bookstore in Manhattan, where I picked up an $8 copy at Zuroff’s repeated (yet playful) urging.

“This is going to sound self-serving,” Zuroff had told me on a muffled line from Israel. His voice was raised to compensate: “You should really read my book!”

Zuroff works as the Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office and worldwide coordinator of its Nazi war crimes research division. He’s a proud successor to Simon Wiesenthal — the Center’s namesake and the original Nazi Hunter — and has dedicated his life to carrying Wiesenthal’s torch: finding Nazi criminals in hiding, exposing them, and bringing them to justice.

It was shocking to Zuroff, then, when just three years after he published his definitive history of Nazi hunting, a 2011 court case in Germany changed the very nature of the practice. As a result, almost 70 years after the end of World War Two, a mad rush to reap the benefits of this change is occurring on a global scale before the dwindling population of sentient offenders tapers to extinction.

IT ALL STARTED WITH A MAN NAMED JOHN DEMJANJUK

, a retired Ohio autoworker. Demjanjuk was deported from the United States in 2009 and convicted in 2011 by a German court on 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for his role at the Sobibor death camp in Occupied Poland in 1943. Ninety-one years old at the time of the trial, Demjanjuk wasn’t prosecuted for a direct act of murder; he was prosecuted for accessory to murder simply for standing guard at the camp.

A new precedent was set. Prior to the Demjanjuk conviction, a charge of murder or accessory to murder could not be justified unless the courts could prove that a person committed a specific crime. “They changed the legal strategy,” says Zuroff of the case. “If you served in the death camps, you are automatically guilty.”

Ultimately, despite his conviction, Demjanjuk did not serve any of his sentence, as he died in March 2012 before his final appeal was heard by the courts (

as such, under German law, he is technically still presumed innocent

Such anticlimactic outcomes are the norm in Zuroff’s line of work. “I’m one-third detective, one-third historian, and one-third political lobbyist,” he says.

Finding the offenders is not always the hard part, and Zuroff’s frustration with legal recourse is heavily detailed in his book. Tales abound of known Nazi commanders who have evaded prison time, slipped through the cracks of justice, maneuvered their way through legal loopholes, crossed borders, feigned illnesses, and of course, denied, denied, denied.

“You have to understand,” is how Zuroff begins many of his sentences, before brandishing, humbly, his near encyclopedic knowledge of the intricacies involved in finding, catching, and successfully capturing, as he puts it, “anyone who in the service of Nazi Germany or its allies was actively involved in the persecution and/or murder of innocent civilians.”

This is Zuroff’s working definition of a Nazi war criminal, and to date, he claims he has found close to 3,000 Nazi criminals who emigrated to the West, although he says “quite a few were dead when I found them.”

Success is hard to measure given that countries can’t and don’t prosecute Nazis the same way across the board. In the United States, Nazi war criminals can only be prosecuted on immigration and naturalization violations, because their crimes were not committed on U.S. soil; murder and accessory to murder charges come if the alleged criminal is extradited back to Germany, and vary based on whether the suspect worked at a concentration camp or at one of the six death camps.

“This is crazy. I spent my entire professional life hunting Nazis, and I started 35 years after the war was over,” says Zuroff, who claims he has had a hand in getting legal action taken against close to three dozen Nazi war criminals. He does not consider this nearly enough, given the likelihood that an estimated 98 percent of the people who committed these crimes are already dead. “I lost a lot,” continues Zuroff. “I’m jealous of people like Wiesenthal.”

IN 1964, WORKING ON A TIP FROM WIESENTHAL

, knocked on the Queens front door of Hermine Ryan (née Braunsteiner). Ryan’s husband said he was unaware of his wife’s past as a Nazi camp guard at the Maidanek death camp in Poland. She, however, did not put up a front, 

: “My God, I knew this would happen.”

The headline of Lelyveld’s article, which was published on July 14 of that year, played with the contradiction of lifestyles and became a larger metaphor for the trickery entailed in survival after the atrocities committed during the war: “Former Nazi Camp Guard Is Now a Housewife in Queens.”

Ryan had only become an American citizen in 1963, having concealed a criminal past from the American government. She had actually served prison time in Austria after being convicted of assassination, infanticide, and manslaughter in Ravensbruck in 1941 and 1942.

Ryan became the first United States citizen to be extradited for war crimes. After being sentenced to life in prison in Germany, 

she died without media mention in 1999 at the age of 79

An estimated 10,000 Nazis entered the United States as immigrants after the war. Some sources dispute this number as mere speculation, but what is indisputable is that Nazi war criminals entered the country as part of the post-war migration — either as displaced persons or post-war refugees, many having traveled circuitous routes to live in attempted anonymity.

“People have said to me that they came in and recognized on the boat … someone who had been a guard in a camp,” says Mark Weitzman, the Director of Government Affairs of the Wiesenthal Center, referring to Holocaust survivors who have come to him with tips. “They were too scared to report them” at the time, Weitzman adds.

Tips still come in to the Wiesenthal Center, but old age and the march of history has slowed the tips down to just a trickle — a handful or so a year, says Weitzman. Taking a case from suspicion through to conviction requires many elements to line up.

“What you need is not just evidence; you need a person who is physically and mentally capable of understanding the charges and standing trial,” explained Weitzman. “We are not looking to prosecute people who are suffering from Alzheimer’s.”

Public and political support on an international level for the work that Zuroff does has been mixed, for reasons both vague and, like Weitzman addressed, seemingly practical.

“What’s the likelihood of a 90-year-old Nazi war criminal committing murder again?” posed Zuroff. “The countries figured it out. All they have to do is wait it out — ignore the pains in the ass like me.”

in modern society isn’t helped by the online compendium of misinformation associated with the Holocaust. “It’s actually gotten harder,” Zuroff says of his work.

In the Internet’s darker corners, the Nazis have an almost cult-like following, with a counterculture based around denial, lore, and mythology. To some, Hitler never died. To others, the Holocaust never happened. For others still, secret “proof” fuels hateful propaganda that conflates the real search for Nazis with fantastical connective threads.

Parsing through the detritus created by a rich compendium of factual accounts and fictional representations of World War II has fallen in the United States to an arm of the government that has been operating since 1979 with relative success: the Office of Special Investigations (OSI).

According to Eli Rosenbaum, the Director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy (HRSP) for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, formerly the OSI until 2010, his agency is in sole charge of taking “legal action against persons who participated in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution.” He added that the OSI had been given an “A” rating by the Simon Wiesenthal Center every year until 2011 since the inception of its “Investigation and Prosecution Report Card” in 2001. The past three years were not included on the list, though it is unclear why.

Stacked against 44 other countries, including Syria, which has scored F’s consistently; Germany, with B’s, C’s and one “A”; and Argentina–C’s, D’s, and E’s–the OSI claims that during a 20-year period they have successfully prosecuted more World War II cases than have all of the other countries of the world combined.

In an email, Rosenbaum said that the OSI has brought cases to date against 137 persons and has been successful in cases against 107 of these individuals.

It’s because of the OSI that Efraim Zuroff has been able to largely leave the United States alone and instead be a “nudnik” — a label he gave himself that means a nuisance or a pest in Yiddish — to countries that have shown less success or ambition at rooting out the Nazis in their own backyards. It’s not that these countries are sympathetic to Nazis, says Zuroff, they just lack “political will.”

PETER CARR OF THE U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT’S 

Office of Public Affairs helped me to lock down just how successful the U.S. Government has been in its hunt for Nazis in America. After being denied an interview with the Director of the HRSP, Rosenbaum, I was instead sent via email the Department’s “USA Bulletin,” a comprehensive report on the OSI dated January 2006.

But it’s 2014 and a lot has happened since the Demjanjuk case in 2011, which changed the legal precedent for prosecution of Nazis in Germany. Prior to this case, proving and convicting Nazi war criminals for specific acts was next to impossible.

“Death camps don’t provide a lot of eye witnesses,” says David Rising, the Associated Press’s chief correspondent in Berlin, when I called him on the phone. Rising, who has been covering German government and politics for more than ten years, said that “aside from the highest ranking [Nazis], they never convicted anybody.”

Berlin being the de facto central location for Nazi investigations, Rising supposed, when pressed, that he was an expert on the topic. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that his degree is in history, the Second World War, and Holocaust studies.

“They’ve launched all these new investigations,” Rising says of the Demjanjuk case. “It sort of breathed new life into the investigation of death camp guards.”

Just one day before I interviewed Rising, he’d written a story on Oskar Groening

, a 93-year-old former Auschwitz guard who was charged by German prosecutors this past September with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder for serving as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp.

Groening was one of thirty Auschwitz guards against whom the German special prosecutor’s office sought to pursue charges of accessory to murder, according to an earlier Rising report at the beginning of September.

After the 2011 ruling, Federal prosecutors in Germany conducted a new survey of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and concluded that no one could have been there for more than a day or two without learning that people were being gassed to death and their bodies incinerated at the site, Rising noted in his article.

He reported that about 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz camp alone between 1940 and 1945. In May of this year, investigations into the Majdanek death camp turned up around 20 former guards who could face charges, leaving four of the six total death camps remaining for review: Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

And, as if written by an unknown force to create a plot twist, major news broke this month of newly uncovered gas chambers that were buried for years at the Sobibor Death Camp.

“Whenever you write these stories, you get a lot of people who say, ‘Can’t you just leave these 94-year old guys alone?’” said Rising. “But you also get comments that say, ‘Thank you, thank you.’”

It is perhaps an odd coincidence — or perhaps not — that an ongoing investigation into Michael Karkoc, a 95-year old retired Minnesota carpenter who was found to have been a former Nazi commander who ordered the massacre of dozens of civilians in Chlaniow, Poland in 1944, was born of an AP investigation. Karkoc’s family denied the allegations to the press.

“The Karkoc case is different,” Rising told me. “For him they could bring murder charges. He’s even rarer as things go.”

Rising, who has been following the case closely, told me that German prosecutors have opened an official investigation into Karkoc, but that no charges have been announced.

The Department of Justice told the Associated Press in November of last year that they were aware of the allegations against Karkoc, but “generally do not confirm or deny whether an individual is under investigation.”

Referencing the above-mentioned article, Carr, the Justice Department public affairs official, wrote in an email that “We have no additional comment relative to Mr. Karkoc at this time.” Carr added that there was no further update on another controversial issue, specifically involving a leaked version of an OSI report dated December of 2008.

and published in full in November of 2010. With the word “Draft” stamped horizontally across each page’s center in capital letters, the report was released but heavily redacted by the OSI in response to a Freedom of Information Act request for the report by the National Security Archives.

Major findings in the report show “new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades,” according to the 

 article. Most importantly, according to the 

, the report concludes that “American intelligence officials created a ‘safe haven’ in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II.”

The article also reported that the Justice Department said the OSI report was the product of six years of work, was never formally completed and did not represent its official findings. The Justice Department told the 

 that the report had “numerous factual errors and omissions.”

I requested the original comment from the OSI but have not yet received it.

 when surveyed closely, is really quite small. Names like Simon Wiesenthal, Efraim Zuroff, Eli Rosenbaum, and David Rising surely come up, and repeatedly.

Prod deeper, and you’ll find a somewhat unexpected name: Craig Gottlieb, who has earned a minor celebrity status for his work as a firearms and weapons expert on the popular antiques appraisal TV show “Pawn Stars.”

“I think I’ve filmed over 40 episodes,” Gottlieb told me over the phone from San Diego.

Gottlieb’s moniker as the “history hunter”

 comes from his work as a dealer in military antiques. Gottlieb tells me that in the collector world, his is one of the world’s top five collections, measured by volume (he has a warehouse in Solano Beach, California). He speaks with fervent passion, but, as he cautioned when we began our telephone interview, only if he’s interested in the conversation.

Luckily for me, he was. I’d called to ask about Nazis in the United States, having drummed up more information than I could process. Gottlieb, whose passion is World War II, has been under fire for a controversy of his own: his purchase of (and desire to sell) Hitler’s uniform. The Holocaust, as Gottlieb described it, is “captivating. It’s like a train wreck you can’t help to look at.”

Out of the official loop of experts and Nazi Hunters, Gottlieb was frank and spoke candidly and with fan-like zeal about a curious character he met recently: a German World War II soldier whose name Gottlieb is keeping private until he reveals it himself in a documentary he has already started making on the subject.

“My friend was born in Dresden. He leaves Germany at seven or eight,” said Gottlieb, excitedly. “They move to Chicago in the twenties. He speaks with a Chicago accent.” Gottlieb relates that in 1938 or 1939, his friend’s family sent the teenager back to Germany because they thought he’d receive a better education.

“He sails to Hamburg,” said Gottlieb. “Shortly thereafter, Hitler invades and because he was born in Germany, he’s considered a German national. They won’t let him leave.” The now 90-year-old man lives in California.

A buck private during the war, Gottlieb’s subject returned to America afterward and has been living here quietly since. At get-togethers, most people know he’s a veteran; when he tells them he fought for the Germans, says Gottlieb, most people don’t have a problem with it.

“His insignia had the swastika,” said Gottlieb. “He wasn’t a Nazi. He was just fighting for the Germans.”

I’d reached out to Gottlieb hoping he’d have access to further information concerning Karkoc, the 95-year-old Minnesotan who was found to have been a former Nazi commander. In contacting a major collector of historic Nazi paraphernalia, I had hoped to tap into a shadow world of secret Nazi rumors, connected to those whose names would only be whispered in unofficial, non-governmental circles.

Reality is a bit different. “I don’t have much information about Nazis living in the U.S.,” Gottlieb admits. “I’ve got Hitler’s uniform — legitimately — and medals and hat. If you’re looking for Nazis in America, I guess that’s the closest thing you’re going to get.”

 is Narratively's Director of Operations, as well as an editor and regular contributor to the publication. Her work has appeared in such outlets as 

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Efraim_Zuroff_in_Helsinki_2012.JPG

In the eleventh hour, German prosecution laws have altered the way Holocaust-era war criminals are prosecuted. But is it too late for justice?

The Last Nazi Hunter

It’s a bright Sunday afternoon in August. At home in Long Island, Dominic Ercolano, age 89, sits in a plush beige rocking recliner.

Over wispy gray hair, he wears a blue ballcap with the words “U.S. Army Air Corps WWII Flyboy” stitched in yellow across the front.

With his hat and cane, it’s hard to imagine him in the cockpit of a fighter plane, dodging German bullets — and, in fact, he didn’t. The cane doesn’t assist him in nursing an old war wound, it’s a simple sign of old age. He has spinal stenosis, a pacemaker in his chest, and periodic difficulty breathing due to problems with his lungs. Dominic Ercolano never saw combat.

“We got on a plane to go to Honolulu. We had engine trouble and turned back,” says Ercolano, who spent six months in the mainland United States preparing to be deployed to Japan. “While we were waiting for the plane to be fixed, the war ended.”

Ercolano is one of four surviving World War II veterans at his local VFW post in St. James, a hamlet in Long Island’s Suffolk County. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, for every 16 Americans who served in the war, only one is still alive; 2015 is projected to be the first year that the population of World War II veterans drops below one million. By 2025, that number will be under 100,000. By 2045, they’ll be gone completely.

After the reinstatement of the draft in 1940 (the only two previous times of mandatory conscription being World War I and the Civil War), around 10 million men were drafted into the war effort. Combined with volunteers, roughly 16 million Americans served in World War II. Some 600,000 were wounded; 400,000 more were killed.

Ercolano says that for himself and his friends — teenagers at the time the draft was reinstated — the War didn’t instill fear, but excitement. “You have to remember, through the ages, warfare — as gruesome as it was — was the only activity that a normal guy could engage in some adventure.” On his childhood block alone (4th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Park Slope, Brooklyn), Ercolano remembers six neighbors who died in the war effort.

Ercolano’s best friend at the time, Enrico Savo, was killed serving as a gunner on a B-24 plane. “He couldn’t wait to go. They got shot down over the English Channel,” recalls Ercolano.

Ercolano now considers himself lucky not to have seen combat, having married his childhood sweetheart and fathered three children. But this feeling of luck has come with much reflection and has changed drastically over the years.

Ercolano enlisted in the army in 1942 and was drafted into the Air Corps in 1943, which had been his goal from the start. He was jubilant at the prospect of adventure, but his excitement never blossomed into lived experience. By the time Japan surrendered, Ercolano had spent much of his enlisted time working as the “kitchen police” and on guard duty at a military base in Nebraska.

At first, all he felt was anger. “We missed out,” he says. “You know the movie 

referencing the 1955 film starring Henry Fonda about a World War II navy cargo ship that was far from the action.

 “That kind of describes what I went through.”

Until this interview, Ercolano admits, he had never really spoken about the war, aside from casual conversation. “Who would be interested in this? No one,” he answers. “People are interested in combat.” It’s clearly a topic that has weighed on him over the last 70 years. “I kept asking myself, ‘Why me?’ Everywhere I went, I was pushed aside — and why not Enrico?”

, has been associated with virility and masculinity,” says David M. Kennedy, Professor of History at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. “The ultimate test of manhood is armed combat. That’s an old trope that goes back to Homer.”

Kennedy is 73 years old, and was of a draftable age in the Vietnam era, but was not selected.

“There’s kind of a code amongst people my age. When you meet someone new you quickly see whether you’ve served or not,” says Kennedy of social situations where he’s watched men bond over their military service. “I don’t know the code because I wasn’t there.”

Kennedy’s father was born in 1896 and didn’t serve in either World War I or II. “He said he was too young for the first war and too old for the second war. But it turns out that wasn’t true,” says Kennedy.

It was only when his father turned 80 that Kennedy learned that his father was actually physically unqualified to serve. His selective service system designation, which classified men based on characteristics such as health and whether they enlisted or were drafted, was IV-F; reserved for those with physical defects. He’d had scoliosis.

Kennedy says his father admitted to him during conversations about why he hid the truth. “He would say things like, ‘What are you going to say when your kid asks, Daddy, where were you during the Great War?’”

, Richard Kolb, 63, grew up with World War II a constant presence in his youth. On both sides of his family, he says, every male relative served in World War II. “Your minister in church was a World War II veteran, your school teacher was a World War II veteran,” says Kolb. Pop culture was much the same: “Growing up in the 1950s, you would have been exposed to a tremendous number of World War II movies.” Kolb, now editor-in-chief of VFW Magazine, says that growing up in the wake of World War II greatly impacted his decision to enlist in the Vietnam War in 1969.

Jerry Newberry, 62, a Vietnam Veteran and the Assistant Adjutant General for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, says that within his age group, he’s met men who feel guilty for not having served in Vietnam. “I’m like, ‘You didn’t miss anything,’” he says.

Newberry can relate to the feeling of exclusion among those who haven’t served or seen combat. “I can only imagine that if your peer group and your neighbors and the majority of males in your age group were serving in the military and you weren’t, you certainly were left out.”

Newberry’s stepfather was a World War II veteran who drove a landing craft in the Pacific Ocean. “He usually kept his stories light. That was his job. He wouldn’t go into any detail about that,” Newberry says. But his stepfather’s pride was obvious to Newberry. He had a tattoo on his forearm of Betty Boop with an anchor and gave warm welcomes to those who had also served.

“I think World War II was absolutely the last time the country came together not only militarily, but civilian wise — all of our resources, all of our efforts, were behind a common goal,” he adds. For men like his stepfather, that led to a sense of a lifelong bond. “Various places, he’d meet somebody his own age and they’d start talking,” Newberry remembers. “‘You served?’ ‘Yeah.’”

Bill Detweiler, 74, the Military and Veterans Affairs Consultant to the President of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, says that the culture after the war was not one that encouraged open, emotional conversation.

“My father was in the military. I had three uncles at Pearl Harbor. None of them got a scratch,” says Detweiler. “They didn’t talk very much about it. None of those fellows did.”

“We have people at the museum today who still don’t really talk about it,” says Detweiler. “They’ll come in to the museum with their families. They’ll see exhibits that remind them of their service, and that’s when they start talking about it for the first time.”

, Anne, Dominic’s wife, lived in Brooklyn during the war’s early years. She recalls a dearth of men on the streets. Most people seemed to have a family member or close friend overseas. Her own brother was in the Navy. “It was very scary,” she says. “The jobs weren’t plentiful, and you couldn’t do anything.”

Anne was encouraged to enlist by a friend of hers in 1943, when she was 18 years old. “I thought it would be exciting,” she remembers. She was stationed at the Pentagon, where she kept records of the enlisted men — a job she took from a man who was being deployed overseas. “They needed the guys in the service. They had to fight.”

Anne volunteers that her husband’s lack of combat doesn’t bother her. “I never thought about it.” Her husband Dominic has thought about it — a lot — but has accepted his fate and moved on.

“I was disappointed, but unbeknownst to me, I had come back so I could marry my childhood sweetheart,” he beams, pointing to old black and white photographs of the pair on their honeymoon. Anne and Dominic have been married for 65 years. “I feel like that couldn’t have all happened by accident.”

751px-American_World_War_II_senior_military_officials,_1945.JPEG

Millions of men saw combat during World War II. Others were so far removed from the action that their guilt and regret endures to this day.

Left out of the "Greatest Generation"

 is known for: a deftly-written piece that regaled its audience with intricate details about an otherwise inaccessible character.

 published as the magazine’s cover story on a Sunday in February 2006, kicked off a series of reactions that were incongruous to its sympathetic tone. Almost immediately after hitting newsstands, the 9,000-word piece was met with a paroxysmal rage that circuitously exiled this “freshman” from the very collegiate ranks that Brown had documented.

That’s because the freshman profiled was hardly a typical student; he was former Taliban spokesperson Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, 27 years old when the article came out. As Brown reported, Hashemi had been a diplomat in the Afghan Embassy in Islamabad in 1998, then a “roving ambassador” in 2000. 

Likewise, the school was hardly a typical college; Yale has a rich and storied history of cooperation with the intelligence community (Yale-CIA ties are explored in Robin Winks’ book 

, among other works) — a fact not likely lost on visitors to New Haven. The former Taliban spokesman attended classes on a campus adorned with a statue of American Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, who was executed by the British after being captured while on an intelligence mission.

Now, eight years later, as the war winds down in Afghanistan and recent news attention has bubbled over with reports from the country’s presidential elections, figures like Hashemi reveal a more personal side to delicate U.S.-Afghanistan relations. Many questions about Hashemi’s time at (and departure from) Yale remain publicly unanswered.

There are things that Chip Brown himself still wonders.

“I was dismayed to learn that Rahmatullah’s apartment was staked out and he was chased around New Haven by a TV crew from FOX News,” Brown wrote in a recent email, when I asked him to describe his story’s impact.

 cover story showed Hashemi as a young man disenchanted with the direction of the Taliban — initially thought to be Afghanistan’s savior — and who came to the U.S. to seek an education and secure a better future for his family.

It was not the first media coverage that Hashemi received in the U.S. (though it was the first major attention paid to him in his capacity as a college student). In early 2001, pre-9/11, Hashemi embarked on an American media tour as an envoy for the Taliban, meeting with State Department officials and delivering lectures at several universities. At the time, he was tasked not just with speaking on behalf of a tendentious government, but with defending the Taliban’s very recent destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a UNESCO world heritage site with ancient religious statues predating Islam. Hashemi was subsequently rebuked by many Americans.

In one well-publicized instance, a woman heckled him while he spoke at the Atlantic Council. Hashemi’s response to the woman’s outburst — “You have imprisoned the women – it’s a horror, let me tell you,” she shouted — was filmed, and the clip was included in Michael Moore’s 2004 film 

 “I’m really sorry to your husband,” Hashemi responded to the woman. “He might have a very difficult time with you.”

 article downplays the controversial nature of Hashemi’s attendance — with controversy reserved for his days as a spokesman, not a student. In one scene, Brown describes a debate that took place at Yale in early 2001 between Hashemi and two Yale professors: “The Taliban: Pros and Cons.” The professors come across as impassioned (though sometimes misinformed); Hashemi plays the quick-witted comeback kid, rebutting their critiques with polished talking point from his media appearances: “Well, if you were my only source of information about the Taliban, I’d hate them too!”

Brown explained to me that what sparked his initial interest in Hashemi was not a desire to follow-up on the controversial character, but a simple tip that Hashemi would be attending Yale in the summer of 2005 — specifically, the non-degree program for special students. Several of Brown’s friends had met Hashemi through filmmaker Mike Hoover, a confidant of Hashemi’s, who was credited in many news reports with having helped him get into Yale that summer.

“I thought his experience getting an education in America would be an interesting and instructive story,” Brown wrote to me.

Brown’s article closes optimistically, with Hashemi preparing to apply for admission to Yale as a degree-status student after completing several semesters in the non-degree program.

To some, it was a story of the redemptive power of education. To others, it was diversity run amok.

After the story ran, Hashemi’s application was denied, despite his having received a recommendation from Charles Hill, a diplomat-in-residence and distinguished fellow of international security at Yale at the time. 

“I thought he would be a good student. I thought he would benefit from being educated at Yale,” Hill told me recently over the phone. “I recommended him, so I thought he should have been admitted. I’m sorry that he was not.”

Asked to comment, a spokesman for the university replied that “Yale doesn’t discuss why any applicant isn’t accepted. Only two of the 29 students who applied to the degree-granting program for nontraditional students were accepted” that same year.

 article was published, the question posed by critics wasn’t on the matter of Hashemi’s  degree application, but rather why he was admitted to Yale’s non-degree program in the first place.

 (who had interviewed Hashemi in early 2001), some criticized Yale for what they considered to be a blind inclusion that disregarded the Taliban’s crimes. “This is taking the obsession that the U.S. universities have with promoting diversity a bit too far,” Fund wrote on the 

’s editorial page just days after the 

Fund was joined in his outrage by Yale ’96 alumnus Clinton Taylor, who corralled an unknown number of Yale alumni to join in a campaign to pull donations to the university if Hashemi was allowed to remain a student.

Referred to as the “Nail Yale” campaign, Taylor used a blog post on the conservative website T

to call for like-minded alums to mail fingernail clippings and fake plastic nails to the university in lieu of money. (The gesture was an allusion to past Taliban threats to rip out the fingernails of polish-wearing Afghan women.)

“I’m very glad I took the time to pursue the issue,” Taylor recently told me, via email. “I still think the Taliban is evil. They’re still the same bunch of homicidal thugs they always were, and I still think Yale’s choice to admit their spin doctor was a tremendous mistake.”

“I still think Yale’s choice to admit [the Taliban’s] spin doctor was a tremendous mistake,” says the ‘Nail Yale’ founder

Trey Popp, a ’97 graduate, wrote in the May/June 2006 issue of 

 that Inge Reichenbach, then-vice president of development for the Yale admissions office, told him that “in the spring of 2006, [her] office received 50-100 letters packed with plastic fingernails and human fingernail clippings,” though Popp noted that “most came from non-alumni, and many arrived from a single address.”

“Some people felt very strongly that this is not a situation that Yale should have put itself in,” Reichenbach told Popp. “Others were very supportive, emphasizing that Yale is an educational institution, and it’s here to educate people.”

As to whether Hashemi disrupted Yale’s campus prior to the 

 piece, it is unclear. Professor Peter Stillman, who taught Hashemi in his “Introduction to Political Philosophy” class, barely remembers the student. “Sayed was one of about 30 students in a five-week Yale Summer Session course, and I have no clear memories of him,” Prof. Stillman responded when asked to comment. “I could not say anything of interest — indeed, I could not say anything at all — about him.”

Some protesters were “eager to turn one Yale student into a symbol of everything they despised about the Taliban,” Brown says

In 2006, Jim Sleeper, a journalist and political science lecturer at Yale, weighed in on the controversy in the online edition of 

. Sleeper suggested that Hashemi’s presence was more complicated than publicly presented by Yale officials, and likely was not a part of any diversity initiative.

In an email exchange earlier this year, Sleeper suggested that Hashemi’s enrollment may have been in association with national intelligence efforts, though he emphasized both on the phone and in email that he could not prove such a connection. “My only interest in this story is not whether Hashemi was working for or with American officials,” Sleeper wrote to me. “My interest in this story was that the conservative noise machine put the university through a lot of unnecessary grief suggesting that this was diversity run amok.”

Sleeper added, “I have no proof that Hashemi came to Yale thanks to Yale alumni in the State Department and national intelligence agencies who hoped his avowed conversion to Western principles would be an asset in their struggle to win hearts and minds in Afghanistan.” Sleeper claims his “hypothesizing” about Hashemi’s CIA ties was corroborated “by one usually-reliable source.”

Todd Ebitz, a media spokesman for the CIA, declined to comment on whether there were any connections between Hashemi and the agency in the past or whether there have been any continuing connections.

Charles Hill, the former Yale diplomat-in-residence, remembers Hashemi as a “very pleasant, well-spoken, polite, serious man,” and said that Hashemi had requested a recommendation from him prior to applying for the degree status program. Hill told me flatly that to connect Hashemi to the CIA was, “not the way to think about things. They’d need more soundly-based evidence to speculate.”

Brown, who has kept in touch with Hashemi over emails, agrees. “Do you think if my research suggested any of this I would have omitted it? You might ask, did I go out of my way to disprove it? No. But then there are a hundred other far-fetched and patently absurd scenarios I didn’t get to the bottom of either. Most conspiracy theorists are tragically ignorant of the law of parsimony.” 

Ignorant or not, such theories were heaved at Hashemi as he took a fall after his 

Rebecca White