Allan A. Ryan Jr. (July 3, 1945 – January 26, 2023) was an American attorney, author and a law professor at Harvard University, where he taught from 1985 until his death. He is best known for his work as a Justice Department lawyer who in the early 1980s identified and prosecuted dozens of Nazi collaborators living in the United States, earning him a reputation as America's foremost Nazi hunter.
Biography Ryan was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 3, 1945, the oldest of eight children of Allan Ryan, an accountant, and Anne (Conway) Ryan, a homemaker.
Ryan graduated from Dartmouth College and magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota Law School. He served as a law clerk to Justice Byron White of the Supreme Court of the United States and as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. In the U.S. Justice Department, he was Assistant to the Solicitor General and from 1980 to 1983 Director of the Office of Special Investigations, Criminal Division, responsible for the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States. From 1985 until his death, he was an attorney at Harvard University, first in the Office of General Counsel and from 2001 as Director of Intellectual Property, Harvard Business School Publishing.Allan Ryan
Ryan was the author of Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: A Report to the Attorney General (Government Printing Office, 1983), Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), Yamashita's Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur's Justice and Command Accountability (University Press of Kansas, 2012), and The 9/11 Terror Cases: Constitutional Challenges in the War Against Al Qaeda (University Press of Kansas, 2015). He was historical advisor to the PBS documentary Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals (2011) and co-producer of PBS documentary Dead Reckoning (2018).
Ryan taught the law of war at Boston College Law School from 1990, and he was on the faculty of the Harvard University Division of Continuing Education, where he taught the courses War Crimes, Genocide and Justice; The Constitution and the Media; and Intellectual Property.
Ryan was a member of the Naval War College Foundation, the U.S. Naval Institute, and the Society for Military History, and served on the National Commission of the Anti-Defamation League. He formerly served on the Board of Directors of its New England Region of the League, where he was chair of its Civil Rights Committee. From 2016 until his death, he served as chairman of the Board of Veterans Legal Services, which provides legal assistance to economically disadvantaged veterans in Massachusetts.
Ryan died from a heart attack at his home in Norwell, Massachusetts, on January 26, 2023, at the age of 77.
Director of the OSI The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) was created in 1979 to identify and expel from the United States those who assisted Nazis in persecuting "any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion." This involved the challenging tasks for decades-old crimes of gathering, verifying, and presenting in court eyewitness and documentary evidence that was incomplete and scattered around the world. Much of this evidence was then in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain.Feigin p.1 OSI received The Elie Wiesel Award, the highest award of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The award was established in 2011 and recognizes "internationally prominent individuals whose actions embody the Museum's vision of a world where people confront hate, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity."
Early cases As an assistant to the US solicitor general, Ryan had been arguing cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. By chance, he was assigned a case already lost by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to strip Feodor Fedorenko of his US citizenship and deport him. Fedorenko was alleged to have been a guard at various places, including a Jewish ghetto and Treblinka extermination camp where a total of 800,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis.Feigin p.48 Ryan considered himself a prosecutor rather than a Nazi-hunter, but he came to believe the case was important and recommended that it be pursued. He won the case in the court of appeals, and the Supreme Court later upheld the appeals court's ruling. That case, Fedorenko v. United States, became OSI's seminal caseFeigin p.18 & 59 that set important legal precedent and led to Ryan's being asked to serve as the second Director of OSI, following the brief tenure of Walter Rockler.Feigin p. 419 Federenko was later convicted of treason in the Soviet Union, sentenced to death, and executed.
Ryan led the organization during its formative years, from 1980 to 1983, navigating a difficult political landscape, establishing the importance of historical research in addition to criminal investigationFeigin p. 7, 24 and winning precedent-setting cases. OSI's approach was to identify those who met the criteria for being persecutors, determine whether they had lied about their wartime activities when applying for entry into the U.S or for U.S. citizenship and, if so, strip them of their citizenship and deport them. Initial leads came passively from existing INS cases, Jewish organizations also searching for war criminals, and individuals by chance coming across their former tormentors. Ryan's emphasis on historical research soon enabled OSI to become proactive in developing leadsFeigin p. 27 and ultimately becoming a resource for Holocaust and other World War II research well beyond OSI's mandate to prosecute.Feigin p. 7,28 The quality of Ryan's report on Klaus Barbie, in the words of OSI historian Judith Feigin, "helped establish OSI as an essential resource for persons dealing with World War II issues."Feigin p. 379
As the work began, Ryan had to contend with widespread disagreement on many important issues. Some felt the effort to expel World War II war criminals was important both to achieve justice and to set precedent for the future, while others felt that the time had passed for pursuit of these aims. Some Justice Department officials felt OSI should have a Jewish Director, while others did not want the office to be viewed as a Jewish organization and favored Ryan in part because he was not Jewish.Feigin p. 4, 9, 10 Eastern European nationality groups opposed OSI's use of evidence from the USSR, which had an interest in discrediting Baltic State, Ukrainian, and other emigre groups and might well provide false information and forged documents to achieve their aims.Feigin p. 211-12 These emigre groups also challenged the use of the lower standard of evidence involved in civil trials compared to criminal trials, even though citizenship revocation and deportation were civil issues and US law at the time did not provide for criminal penalties for crimes committed on foreign soil unless against US citizens.Feigin p. 33 The emigres also feared that OSI might seek to deport anyone who had lied on their entry applications, not just the wartime persecutors that Ryan sought to expel. In contrast, Jewish groups were pressing for more determined action by OSI than INS had demonstrated. It became clear that leading OSI was going to involve a lot of public relations work as well as research and prosecution.Feigin p. 8
From the beginning, Ryan had to deal with major controversies. In contrast to the Fedorenko case, which the INS had lost and Ryan had won on appeal, the Walus case had been lost on appeal by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago with the court ordering a retrial and Ryan, by then deputy director of OSI, counseled against pursuing the case.Feigin p. 81 The documentary evidence was weak and the eyewitnesses, forty years after the fact, were unconvincing. It was even possible that this was a case of mistaken identity. According to Judith Feigin, OSI's historian, it took courage in 1981 for Ryan to dismiss the Walus case. Frank Walus had come to the attention of INS in 1974 by a letter from Simon Wiesenthal,Feigin p. 71 a highly respected Holocaust survivor and acclaimed Nazi hunter. Several Holocaust survivors had traveled to America from Israel and emotionally confronted Walus, their former tormentor, in court. Furthermore, Ryan had not yet won the confidence of the Jewish community, whose support could be important for OSI success, and he could expect a negative reaction for his not pursuing Walus.Feigin p. 85, 88 Ultimately, however, Ryan's track record "won the respect and admiration of the Jewish community [and he] was appointed to the Executive Committee of the New England Region of the Anti-Defamation League- the first non-Jew ever to be so honored."Feigin p. 93-94
By the middle of 1984, forty cases had been filed by OSI against alleged war criminals then living in America.Ryan, Quiet Neighbors p. 353-61 Through following years, OSI successfully prosecuted over 130 other cases involving persons complicit in Nazi war crimes but later living quietly in America. Three such cases seeking expulsion reached the Supreme Court.Feigin p. v Most cases involved camp guardsFeigin p. 45 who had beaten or executed prisoners or had led them to places of execution. Juozas Kungys, for example, was prosecuted because OSI determined he had "rounded up and transported thousands of Jews to an execution site, distributed firearms and ammunition to an execution squad, forced the victims into a mass grave, shot some of them, and exhorted the execution squad to do the same.Feigin p. 127
Demjanjuk Controversy A highly controversial and widely publicized case involved Ivan (aka John) Demjanjuk, who was ultimately convicted in 2011 in Germany as an accessory in the murder of 28,000 Jews while a guard at Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland. This conviction was the culmination of determined prosecutorial efforts over thirty years in three countries. Professor Lawrence Douglas, who wrote a detailed history of the Demjanjuk case, concluded that in spite of the serious missteps along the way, the German verdict brought the case "to a worthy and just conclusion."
The controversy stemmed from OSI's initially mistaking Demjanjuk's identity and proceeding with denaturalization action against him in the belief that he was the notorious, sadistic guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" at Treblinka extermination camp. OSI had obtained conflicting evidence from documents and eyewitnesses as to Demjanjuk's description and location during the war that led one member of the prosecution team to recommend not pursuing the case. Others including Ryan were convinced at the time that Demjunjuk was "Ivan" and the case went forward.Feigin p. 153 At his denaturalization trial in 1981, Demjanjuk was judged to be the Trablinka guard "Ivan" and the U.S. citizenship he had obtained in 1958 was revoked. In separate subsequent proceedings, it was further determined that he was deportable and extraditable. At the request of the government of Israel, he was extradited to face trial there for war crimes. In 1988, after a fourteen-month trial, it was again determined that Demjanjuk was "Ivan the Terrible." He was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death.Feigin p. 150-57