Probe sought in U.S. payments to Nazis

OSIJEK, Croatia — Former Auschwitz guard Jakob Denzinger lived the American dream.

His plastics company in the Rust Belt town of Akron, Ohio, thrived. By the late 1980s, he had acquired the trappings of success: a Cadillac DeVille and a Lincoln Town Car, a lakefront home, investments in oil and real estate.

Then the Nazi hunters showed up.

In 1989, as the U.S. government prepared to strip him of his citizenship, Denzinger packed a pair of suitcases and fled to Germany. He later settled in this pleasant town on the Drava River, where he lives comfortably, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. He collects a Social Security payment of about $1,500 each month, nearly twice the take-home pay of an average Croatian worker.

Denzinger, 90, is among dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards who collected millions of dollars in Social Security payments after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation found.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., demanded Monday that the inspectors general at the Justice Department and Social Security Administration launch an “immediate investigation” of the payments. Maloney is a high-ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

In letters to the inspectors general at both agencies, Maloney called the payments a “gross misuse of taxpayer dollars.” The Justice Department said it was reviewing Maloney’s letter. The Social Security Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The payments flowed through a legal loophole that has given the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave.

If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal government records.

Like Denzinger, many lied about their Nazi pasts to get into the U.S. following World War II and eventually became American citizens.