A matter of justice: tracking down Nazis in the United States gets a major boost.

WASHINGTON D.C. -- more than 50 years after the end of World War II (1939-45), Nazis are once again in the news:

* The new U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, learned for the first time last month that her grandparents were jewish and had perished in the Holocaust -- the wholesale murder of Jews by the Nazis.

* Banking officials in Switzerland revealed that they had held on to money and gold stolen from concentration camp victims by the Nazis. Now the descendants of those victims want the money back.

Adolf Hitler

Nazi is the short name for the National Socialist German Workers Party, a political organization led by Adolf Hitler from 1921 until 1945. The Nazis believed in the racial superiority of the Nordic race, people of Northern European descent, over other races. The Nazis were also strongly anti-Semitic, and saw jews as the enemies of civilization. Hitler's stated goal was to conquer Europe and impose a "new order" based on force and racial pride.

Hitler was elected leader of Germany in 1933, and he quickly moved to make Germany into a dictatorship ruled by the Nazi party. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II.

In the early years of the war, Hitler's armies won battle after battle and rolled across Europe from the Atlantic Ocean to the gates of Moscow. Throughout that empire, Jews and other Nazi "enemies" were rounded up. Some were shot on the spot. Millions of others were sent to concentration camps and killed. Many were gassed to death, their bodies destroyed in specially built ovens. An estimated 10.2 to 12 million people were murdered by the Nazis in that way. About half of them -- 6 million -- were Jews.

By the end of 1941, the United States had joined the Allies, a group of nations at war with Nazi Germany. It took years of tough fighting and millions of dead and wounded before the Allies defeated Hitler's Germany. The Nazis surrendered on May 7, 1945.

War Crimes

Immediately after the war, the Allies tried top Nazi officials for war crimes, including the Holocaust (see Sidelights). Many minor officials were also tried and sentenced. But a number escaped Germany and fled to other parts of the world, including the United States.

The U.S. government has tried to locate and deport many of those people. But until recently, the evidence linking them to Nazi crimes has been missing.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, led to the release of many Nazi documents captured by the Soviets and kept secret until now.

A special branch of the U.S. Department of justice, the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), is using these documents to locate former Nazis living in the United States. Currently, the OSI is pursuing some 300 separate investigations.

"We don't have the murder weapons, the fingerprints," says Eli Rosenbaum, the head of the OSI. "We depend on documents ... [and] the Nazis documented almost everything."

In the last two months, the OSI

* began deportation proceedings against Johann Breyer, 71, of Philadelphia, an admitted guard at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany and the Auschwitz death camp in Poland;

* won a deportation order against Frenec Koreh, 87, a member of the Lithuanian security police, which assisted the Nazis in herding jews into ghettos and arranging their executions;

* charged that Michael Kolnhofer, 79, a retired Kansas City construction worker, was a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. Kolnhofer fired shots at police and reporters gathered outside his house and was badly wounded by return fire. He suffered brain damage and is now unlikely to stand trial.

In addition, the OSI has compiled a list of 60,000 people who are suspected of committing war crimes under the Nazis. U.S. immigration officials have used the list to bar people from entering the United States.

Why prosecute very old men who will soon die anyway? "Time in no way diminishes ... what was done," says OSI's Rosenbaum. "Survivors stir cry over lost parents, lost siblings and children. To do nothing would be to reward [Nazis] who eluded detection."

"It's important to send a message to the would-be perpetrators of war crimes in the future if they dare to act ... there's a real chance that the civilized world will pursue them -- if necessary for the rest of their lives."