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-[speaking german] NARRATOR: Two decades after
Adolf Hitler terrorized Europe, a high-ranking religious
figure in the United States,
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Archbishop Valerian Trifa
was embroiled in controversy. Romanian immigrants identified
Archbishop Trifa as a man
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with a secret past,
responsible for the murders of hundreds of Jews
during the war.
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Trifa denied it. To see whether Trifa played
a role in these horrific war crimes, the United
States government
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looked for scientific proof. [theme music] -Sir, could you confirm
your name for me, please?
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-My name is Viorel Trifa. NARRATOR: In 1950, a Romanian
immigrant, Viorel Trifa,
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came to the United States
to start a new life. Trifa told United States
immigration officials
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that he was a victim of
the Nazis during the war. He said that when he
left his native Romania,
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he was taken prisoner
by the German Gestapo. He said he was held at the
Dachau concentration camp,
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and was lucky to
escape with his life. After the war, he said
he struggled to survive.
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And then, like hundreds
of thousands of refugees, came to America under the
Displaced Persons Act.
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-The Displaced Persons Act was
a statute enacted by the US Congress and signed by
the president in 1948
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that had the noble purpose of
rescuing victims of persecution in Europe who were languishing
in the so-called DP camps,
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and resettling them
in the United States, where life would be better. NARRATOR: This is a copy of
one of the forms Trifa filled
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out for entry into this country. In this official account of
his treatment by the Germans,
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he says he was a political
prisoner held by the Gestapo. In 1957, Trifa was
granted US citizenship.
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Trifa had strong ties to the
Romanian Orthodox Church. And after coming to
the United States,
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he was ordained a
priest, and quickly rose up through
the church ranks. Trifa became Archbishop
of the Diocese of Detroit,
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and took the religious
name Valerian. But soon, a cloud of
suspicion and controversy
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surrounded Archbishop Trifa. Some of the Romanian
immigrants in his church thought they recognized Trifa
from their years in Romania.
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They said that a man named Trifa
had been an ardent follower of Adolf Hitler during the war,
and that Trifa was a leader
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of the Iron Guard, a
pro-Nazi group in Romania. ELI: The Iron Guard
was the largest
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of the fascist
movements in Romania. It was violent. It was anti-Semitic. It was the equivalent of the
Nazi movement in Romania.
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NARRATOR: This picture
shows an Iron Guard rally during the early
years of World War II.
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The similarities to Nazism,
the solute, the uniforms, are clearly evident. And like the Nazis, the Iron
Guard was also anti-Semitic.
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And like Hitler, the Iron
Guard encouraged violence against the Jews,
and against others
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they perceived as enemies. Archbishop Trifa
adamantly denied he had ever been a
member of the Iron Guard.
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If the charge was
true, it meant Trifa had lied to US
immigration officials. And it also meant that a
high profile religious leader
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in the United States was, in
fact, a Nazi war criminal. Romanian immigrants living
in the United States
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identified a high-ranking
religious figure, Archbishop Valerian Trifa, as a Nazi war
criminal from World War II.
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They believed that Archbishop
Valerian Trifa had once been a member of
Romania's Iron Guard,
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sympathetic to Adolf Hitler,
and a group who encouraged violence against Romanian Jews.
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-[speaking foreign language] NARRATOR: On January
20, 1941, Viorel Trifa had broadcast a
hate-filled radio address
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from the Romanian capital
city of Bucharest. That radio address encouraging
violence against Jews
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culminated in the
round-up thousands of Jews in Bucharest the next day. News accounts described the
slaughter known as a pogrom.
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Department of Justice
Prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum reads one of the news account. -Perhaps the most horrifying
single episode of the Pogrom
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was the quote, unquote "kosher
butchering" last Wednesday night of more than 200 Jews in
the municipal slaughterhouse.
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The Jews, who had been rounded
up after several hours of Iron Guard raids, were put
into several trucks
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and carried off to
the slaughterhouse. There, the Greenshirts--
he means the Iron Guards--
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forced them to undress and led
them to the chopping blocks, where they cut their
throats in a horrible parody
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of the traditional
Jewish methods of slaughtering
fowl and livestock. NARRATOR: Romanian immigrants
told US authorities
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that Viorel Trifa was also
the editor of the Iron Guard newspaper,
"Libertatea," which also
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called for violence
against Jews. -Trifa's his role, as far
as the Pogrom was concerned,
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was one of a propagandist. One of an advocate of
antisemitic hatred. One of an inciter whose writings
created an atmosphere in which
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this kind of violence
not only became permissible and
acceptable, but encouraged.
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NARRATOR: The US government
now faced a dilemma. Was there any way of finding
out whether Archbishop Trifa was
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a past member of the Iron Guard? The only apparent
evidence against Trifa was the decades old memories of
his fellow Romanian immigrants.
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-All of these cases were and are
among the most challenging ones that anyone in law enforcement
could ever imagine confronting.
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All of these cases
involved crimes that took place long
ago, decades earlier. It's difficult enough
to prove a mugging
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that took place yesterday. NARRATOR: But one Romanian
refugee, a New York dentist
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named Charles Kremer,
refused to let the case die. Kremer's relatives were
among the Jews killed
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at the hands of
Romania's Iron Guard. And he vowed to bring
Archbishop Trifa to justice.
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For 20 years, he
petitioned the US government to examine the case. In 1973, the
Department of Justice
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officially opened
an investigation into whether Archbishop
Trifa had played a role
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in murdering Jews
during World War II. US prosecutors
approached the West German government
for assistance.
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The Germans kept meticulous
records during the war. And in their archives,
investigators
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found 22 postcards written
by a man named Trifa who had been a member
of the Iron Guard.
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-The postcards were found in a
record group in West Germany, not on the communist
bloc, but in West Germany,
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in a record group that was
called Small Collections. It was just small
miscellaneous collections
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that the German archivists
did not know how to file. And so, they filed them
in a record group called
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Small Miscellaneous Collections. NARRATOR: Whoever
wrote the postcards was no concentration camp survivor.
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The writer was a guest
of the Nazi government, and spent the war years
in relative comfort.
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-They essentially describe
what he's doing during the day, if he's seen a movie,
what the weather's like.
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Very normal, mundane
type of stuff that an individual at peace,
without much fear of his life,
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might write to his
comrades while on vacation. NARRATOR: The cards were
signed by Viorel Trifa.
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If they were written by the
man known in the United States as Archbishop Valerian
Trifa, the archbishop
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had lied to
immigration officials. Forensic scientists
looked for some way to prove that
Archbishop Valerian
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Trifa had written
these postcards. For decades, rumors circulated
that Archbishop Valerian Trifa,
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a high-ranking religious figure
in the Romanian Orthodox Church in the United States, was once a
member of Romania's Iron Guard,
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a pro-Nazi group that encouraged
the murder of hundreds of Jews during World War II.
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Archbishop Trifa
denied he was a member. But when US government officials
found 22 postcards allegedly
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written by Trifa from
Germany during the war, they asked document
examiner Gideon Epstein
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to conduct a
handwriting analysis. GIDEON: No two
people have ever been found to have the
same handwriting.
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Not twins. Not identical twins. Handwriting is composed
of motor, muscular, and nervous movements of the
body all working together.
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And it becomes habitual,
and unique, and individual, almost from the point of time
when people start to write.
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NARRATOR: Epstein spent
months comparing signatures on the postcards with samples
of Archbishop Trifa's known
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signatures, like this one from
an official church document. GIDEON: The whole
forensic concept
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is that you're comparing
something that's disputed against
something that's known.
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And handwriting is
basically the same thing. We have usually a document
or a writing that's disputed,
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and then we have
writings that are known. And the question is, did the
person who make the known
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make the disputed? NARRATOR: Epstein noticed
that the writings in all cases were done with extreme speed,
or what is called fluency.
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So-called fluent writers
have wide variations in how they write. And those variations are
almost always the same,
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no matter how often
they're repeated. GIDEON: But to try
to simulate or copy the style of a writer that
has a great deal of variation,
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and to be able to simulate that
variation at the same speed, and the rhythm, and
fluency, with all
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of the unconscious habits
that the writer has, it's an impossibility. NARRATOR: After
months of analysis,
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Gideon Epstein reached
his conclusion. There was no doubt. The writer of the German
postcards was Valerian Trifa.
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This was proof that Trifa lied
to immigration authorities, but he vowed to fight
any deportation.
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Prosecutors were concerned. Their only solid evidence
was the handwriting analysis
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and eyewitness
identifications that were more than 30 years old. But looking at a blow up
photo of one of the postcards,
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investigators saw what they
thought might be a clue. The card had only a return
address, apparently just
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an update on where
the writer was living. On a large blank
space, investigators saw what they thought
might be a finger print.
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They petitioned the
West German government for the actual postcard
and were denied.
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The West Germans did not
want the postcard damaged. And in the 1970s, the powders
used to detect fingerprints
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would have permanently
altered the card. The case stalled for years. ELI: I believe that the
immigration service felt
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that the case was
just too difficult. They couldn't handle it. NARRATOR: What brought
the case back to life
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was a new piece of forensic
technology, the laser. In the 1970s, researchers
discovered that laser beams
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react with the oils
that form fingerprints, causing the prints literally
to glow or luminesce.
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The procedure was non-invasive. In other words, a
print, if it existed, could be taken from the German
postcard without damaging it.
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In 1982, the West Germans
brought the postcard to FBI headquarters in
Washington, DC to be
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examined with laser technology. ELI: It was classified
technology that enabled them,
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they believed, to detect
fingerprints that could not be detected using
traditional means.
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So sensitive was this
technology-- that is to say, so secret was it-- that when
a German official brought
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the postcard, the original,
with a Justice Department escort to the FBI, the German
official was allowed to go up
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to the door of the room in which
the machine sat and no further. He was barred from
even seeing it.
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NARRATOR: But there were
a number of problems. Investigators were not even sure
the postcard contained a print.
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And so much time had passed
since the postcard was written, there were questions about
whether the finger oils that
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might be present
would be visible, even with laser technology. [chanting] NARRATOR: In 1982, the US
government's investigation
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of Valerian Trifa, the
Romanian Archbishop of Detroit, was coming to a head. Prosecutors suspected that Trifa
had lied about his involvement
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in the murder of hundreds
of Jews during World War II. Trifa said they
had the wrong man.
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That Trifa was a common name
in Romania, and that it was another man named
Trifa who had been
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the member of the pro-Nazi
Iron Guard movement. The case came down to one
postcard signed by Viorel Trifa
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in Germany during World War II. Forensic scientists
suspected that it may contain a fingerprint.
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If a print was found, and it
matched Archbishop Valerian Trifa, there would
be solid proof
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that he had lied about his past. Analyst Ron Capaco put the card
under a diffused laser beam.
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The laser light reacts
with human finger oils to reveal prints. But in this case, the card
was more than 40 years old,
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and there were questions
about whether anything would be found. Capaco, examining the card
through orange filtered goggles
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that eliminate all sources of
light other than the laser, was surprised at what he saw.
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A clear print glowing on a
blank area of the postcard. Despite the age of
the postcard, it
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had absorbed enough finger
oil to form a clear print. The question was whether the
fingerprint on the postcard
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was the fingerprint
of Archbishop Trifa. Capaco photographed the
print on the postcard.
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In this photo, the print,
a left thumb print, can be clearly identified. Investigators now
went to the document
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Trifa entered the
US with in 1950. At that time, he
was fingerprinted. The thumbprint of that
document was compared
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with the thumbprint
taken from the postcard. It was a perfect match. The prints on both
documents were
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the left thumb print
of Valerian Trifa. -The ultimate proof is
a latent fingerprint.
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There's no known way to
fabricate a latent fingerprint in a way that is undetectable.
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So when we got word
from the, uh, the Bureau that their technology
had succeeded in, uh,
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finding Trifa's print on this
old document, something that had never happened in any of
our cases before nor since,
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we were, of course, ecstatic. We were ecstatic. NARRATOR: This 40-year-old print
is the oldest latent print ever
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detected by any law enforcement
agency in the world. Investigators speculate that
when Trifa wrote the card using
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the fountain pens of the
day, his finger oils mixed with a small amount of
INK, sealing the oils
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into the porous
paper of the card. The ink faded over time, but
the thumbprint remained intact.
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The print was almost
invisible to the naked eye, but clearly visible under the
new technology of the laser.
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GIDEON: Well, the
postcard was a very important piece of evidence. Because not only were
we are able to identify
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his handwriting, that
he denied making, but also the thumb print
was identified as his.
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And there is no better form
of personal identification than to have both
the fingerprint
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and the handwriting of
an individual identified on the same piece of evidence. NARRATOR: There was no way
he could have known it,
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that the postcard he so
casually sent in 1942 would seal his fate
some 40 years later.
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PETER: They went
for the fingerprint to see if they could get it. Um, prosecutors
always want to have
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the most truth
available on hand. NARRATOR: When informed
of the palm print match,
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Archbishop Trifa
surrendered his citizenship. For Romanian refugees,
like Dr. Charles Kremer,
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who would lost relatives at the
hands of Trifa's Iron Guard, the 40 year wait for
justice was a long one.
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-I would have been much more
satisfied if the trial went on continuously, and exposed this
murderer with all the crimes
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that he committed, and let
the people at large know that a man that's changed
the gun for the cross
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does not belong in
the United States. NARRATOR: For two
years, no other country was willing to accept Trifa.
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In 1984, Portugal
agreed to take him in. After a youth spent
as a fascist leader,
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and adulthood spent as a
religious figure hoping to escape his past,
Valerian Trifa
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ended his days as an exile,
dying in Portugal in 1987. -[speaking german] NARRATOR: Though decades
had passed since Hitler
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and his henchmen
terrorized Europe, the traces they left behind
provided lasting evidence
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bearing witness to their crimes. -We don't have
the murder weapon. We don't have a body.
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What we have is paper. It's paper that survives to
bring these people to justice.
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Some with fingerprints,
some without, really speaks
volumes about crimes that were committed by
Trifa and by others.
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And it's those
documents that survive. Even though the
victims didn't survive, the documents to survive to make
these prosecutions possible.
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[theme music]