Former AIPAC director and Nazi hunter Neal Sher dies at 74

• Author: RON KAMPEAS/JTA
• Published date: 08 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Sher, who led the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations for 11 years and was for a period the director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, died Sunday in Manhattan, his widow, Bonnie Kagan, said in an email to friends.

Darkly handsome, dapper and intense, Sher cut a dashing figure throughout the 1980s. At press conferences, he would unveil the discovery of monsters disguised as working men living contented lives in American suburbia.

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But behind the drama, there was hard work, in a formula crafted by Sher during his years at the OSI, first as a litigator when he joined in 1979, the year it was established, and then as its director from 1983-1994.

He transformed the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting system from one that had relied on tips, which were not always reliable, to one which systematically checked Nazi-era German records against US immigration records. Under his system, the office has, since 1979, removed 69 former Nazis, in most cases revoking their citizenship for lying about their Nazi past when immigrating to the United States. A number of them killed themselves as the feds were closing in, some spectacularly.

In one explosive episode, Sher, citing evidence that former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim had not disclosed his past as a Nazi officer, got the US government to ban his entry to the United States.

Sher's doggedness led to the discovery not just of Nazi cogs, but of major figures, among them Archbishop Valerian Trifa, who had instigated a pogrom against Bucharest's Jews, and Arthur Rudolph, the NASA scientist deported to Germany after Sher showed that he had directed a German wartime factory where he worked Jews to death.

"For these people to live freely in the United States is contrary to everything this country stands for," he told CBS in 1983.

There were occasional flubs: The OSI's efforts led to the extradition in 1986 of Nazi camp guard John Demjanjuk to Israel; the OSI identified Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, the mass murderer at Sobibor, and it was for those crimes Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in an Israeli court. An Israeli appeals court in 1993 established that Demjanjuk was not Ivan, and returned him to the United States, where a US court chastised the OSI for withholding exculpatory information.

The OSI continued to pursue the case, noting the...