Is Jonas Stelmokas A Killer Of Jews? -- Newly Opened Archives Lead To War-Crime Charges

PHILADELPHIA - Jonas Stelmokas definitely was not hiding.

So why did it take the U.S. Justice Department 43 years to find him and accuse him of complicity in the Nazis' murder of Lithuanian Jews?

This, after all, was a man who stepped off the boat in 1949, earned a master's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951, and joined the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects a year later.

Here was a man who flew the Lithuanian flag in front of his Lansdowne home and kept a high ethnic profile: as president of the local chapter of the Lithuanian Engineers and Architects Association; as chairman of the local chapter of the Lithuanian-American Community of the U.S.A. Inc.; as chairman of the Lithuanian Cultural Center; as a member of the executive committee of Ramove, a Lithuanian veterans' association.

HE SEEMED TO SEEK SPOTLIGHT

Here, indeed, was a man who seemed to seek the spotlight: He even went back to Lithuania last year with a film crew from a Philadelphia television station.

So why are charges being brought after all this time?

Ironically, the answer lies in large part in the success of the Lithuanian cause that Stelmokas and his countrymen worked to achieve.

With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the declaration of an independent Lithuania, long-closed archives are being opened. In this new climate, war-crimes researchers and Holocaust historians alike are getting more access than ever before to Nazi-era documents in Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic states.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem says the Justice Department has had Stelmokas' name for several years, but only within the last few months was enough documentation obtained to enable authorities to act.

They acted on June 15: The Justice Department filed a complaint in federal court in Philadelphia accusing Stelmokas, 75, of hiding information and lying about his background when he applied for a U.S. visa in 1949 and when he applied for citizenship in 1954.

In its request for denaturalization - revocation of citizenship - the department charged that Stelmokas had "advocated, assisted, participated or acquiesced in the murder and other persecution of Jews and other unarmed citizens" during World War II.

The case is based on his alleged participation as a high-ranking officer in a volunteer unit that helped the Nazis murder Lithuanian Jews and other unarmed civilians in 1941 and 1942.

Stelmokas has denied the allegations against him, saying they were fabricated by the Soviet KGB.

The Justice Department says Stelmokas told U.S. immigration authorities that the only organization he belonged to before 1945 was the Lithuanian Boy Scouts.

The case comes at a time when the Justice Department's internal watchdog unit is investigating the department's handling of the case of John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland autoworker accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," operator of the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.

On June 5, a federal appeals court in Cincinnati said Demjanjuk's extradition to Israel - where he subsequently was convicted of war crimes - may have been based on "erroneous information." The court ordered the Justice Department to turn over by July 15 any evidence that Demjanjuk is not Ivan the Terrible and to detail when the United States first learned of such evidence.

Demjanjuk's case contains an irony similar to the Stelmokas case, but opposite in effect: It was the relaxed access to Ukrainian archives in the former Soviet Union that produced the information that eventually may support Demjanjuk's claim of mistaken identity and give him a chance at freedom.

Since it was formed in 1979, the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations has had a high rate of success.

Before Stelmokas, the office had sought the denaturalization or removal from the United States of 80 people - half of whom have lost their citizenship and 30 of whom have been deported or otherwise removed from the country. Other cases are still in court, and some people have died.

NO PROOF OF FORGERY

No document obtained from Soviet archives for a war-crimes case has ever been proved to have been forged, and the office has never had a judicial defeat.

Neal Sher, director of the office, said the Stelmokas case was just the first of several he expects to file this summer. In fact, newly acquired access to archives in Riga, Vilnius, Kiev and Moscow will enable the office to file more cases in 1992 than in any previous year, Sher said.

Sher said that even though many alleged Nazis and Nazi collaborators who came to the United States had since died, those archives would enable prosecutors to build cases against others.

Sher said his office was still working on investigations begun before the former Soviet archives became accessible. He said access to previously unavailable documents would strengthen continuing investigations as well as identify new cases.

Meanwhile, the accusations against Stelmokas resurrect questions about the pursuit of justice after so much time has passed: Should the fact that a man may have lived an exemplary life in the United States absolve him of guilt for what he may have done 50 years ago?

"I don't believe that time eradicates certain guilt,"said Mark Weitzman, associate director of the Wiesenthal center in New York. "We're not dealing with victimless crime. We're dealing with mass murder based on prejudice and bias and bigotry. We're dealing with the denial of the most basic human right of all - the right to breathe, to exist."