My father was a Nazi hunter. Then he died in the bombing of Lockerbie.

One day at the start of the summer of 1986 in a federal building in Newark, my father, Michael Bernstein, sat through a conference table of an elderly man named Stefan Leili. Then, a young prosecutor at the Ministry of Justice, my father spent the day before and a half deposit Leili, who emigrated to the United States from Germany three decades earlier. While asking for an entry visa, said the United States government, Leili hid its service in the Totenkopfverbände – the sadly famous units of the death of the SS, which led the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. In 1981, the Supreme Court judged that such omission was a sufficient reason for denaturing and expulsion. If my father could prove that Leili lied, the United States could strip him of his citizenship and get him out of the country.

In an earlier interview, Leili has repeatedly denied keeping prisoners in Mauthausen, one of the working camp groups in Austria, notorious for a stone career where slave workers spent 11 hours transporting granite slabs on a steep rocky staircase. But my father and a colleague felt that this time, the weight of hundreds of detailed requests could finally make Leili loop. Leili had started to concede, bit by hindering the song, that he was more involved than it said. My father was waiting for such a moment because he had a piece of evidence that he was holding. Now he decided that it was finally time to use it.

Leili was sitting next to his university granddaughter and a German interpreter. Earlier in the deposition, the young woman said that her grandfather was a gentle man, who could not have done anything wrong. Indeed, it would have been difficult to look at this 77 -year -old man without remarkable – bald, with an outlined body – and to perceive a villain.

Admittedly, the story Leili told my father for the first time was far from nasty. Born in a small town in 1909 in Austria-Hungary, Romania, Leili was an ethnic German peasant who, like millions of other people, had been thrown from one place to the other by convulsive forces in Europe. In 1944, Leili said, the Red Army advanced to his village. He had to choose to join the Hungarian army or, like many ethnic Germans from his region, the SS. Schutzstaffel Promise better German salary and citizenship, as well as money for his family if he was killed. And in addition, if he had not accepted what the SS wanted, Leili said, he would have “been put against the wall and shot down”.

Leili told my father that he had spent a large part of his time in the SS pretending to be sick for him not to serve. He then kept some prisoners working in a Daimler ammunition factory. They were soldiers, not civilians. They had friendly relations, he told my father. They worked for short days. They were well fed, even “dodus”.