Nazis’ worst enemy

Neal Sher’s funeral service today at Riverside Memorial Chapel on the Upper West Side and his burial at a New Jersey Jewish cemetery pay tribute to a life devoted to the pursuit of justice. But Sher’s mission does not end with his passing at age 74. West Side Congressman Jerry Nadler must carry it on by exposing the terrible truth of how our own government shielded Nazi persecutors.

A Queens Village boy out of Francis Lewis High School, Sher was a labor lawyer when he joined the Department of Justice’s new Office of Special Investigations in 1979, tasked with finding and deporting any Nazi criminals who had illegally snuck into the U.S. after WWII. Soon enough, he was the agency’s director leading efforts probing the famous like former UN secretary-general and Austrian president Kurt Waldheim — whom Sher barred from America for wartime crimes.

And there was also the infamous like Dr. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz Angel of Death, whose drowning in Brazil Sher help solve. OSI did find and expel Nazis like John Demjanjuk, the quiet immigrant autoworker from Ohio who was also a death camp guard at Sobibor, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were gassed. But other monsters escaped justice, remaining here because the State Department again and again blocked Justice from deporting these arch criminals, despite them having been soaked in the blood of millions.

More than a quarter-century after stepping down from OSI, Sher was still incensed, as he wrote in these pages, that not only were successive German governments adamant in refusing to accept responsibility and take back men who had loyally served the Third Reich’s extermination machine, but the Germans were aided by our own State Department worried about ruffling the feathers of an ally.

Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, must expose State’s true record in opposing the return of Nazis to Europe. Sher can’t testify to the committee, but there are others who also know the truth. Call them on the carpet.