05x13 - Unholy Vows

[bunniefuu]

-[speaking german]

NARRATOR: Two decades after Adolf Hitler terrorized Europe,

a high-ranking religious figure in the United States,

Archbishop Valerian Trifa was embroiled in controversy.

Romanian immigrants identified Archbishop Trifa as a man

with a secret past, responsible for the murders

of hundreds of Jews during the w*r.

Trifa denied it.

To see whether Trifa played a role in these horrific w*r

crimes, the United States government

looked for scientific proof.

[theme music]

-Sir, could you confirm your name for me, please?

-My name is Viorel Trifa.

NARRATOR: In , a Romanian immigrant, Viorel Trifa,

came to the United States to start a new life.

Trifa told United States immigration officials

that he was a victim of the Nazis during the w*r.

He said that when he left his native Romania,

he was taken prisoner by the German Gestapo.

He said he was held at the Dachau concentration camp,

and was lucky to escape with his life.

After the w*r, he said he struggled to survive.

And then, like hundreds of thousands of refugees,

came to America under the Displaced Persons Act.

-The Displaced Persons Act was a statute enacted by the US

Congress and signed by the president in

that had the noble purpose of rescuing victims of persecution

in Europe who were languishing in the so-called DP camps,

and resettling them in the United States,

where life would be better.

NARRATOR: This is a copy of one of the forms Trifa filled

out for entry into this country.

In this official account of his treatment by the Germans,

he says he was a political prisoner held by the Gestapo.

In , Trifa was granted US citizenship.

Trifa had strong ties to the Romanian Orthodox Church.

And after coming to the United States,

he was ordained a priest, and quickly

rose up through the church ranks.

Trifa became Archbishop of the Diocese of Detroit,

and took the religious name Valerian.

But soon, a cloud of suspicion and controversy

surrounded Archbishop Trifa.

Some of the Romanian immigrants in his church

thought they recognized Trifa from their years in Romania.

They said that a man named Trifa had been an ardent follower

of Adolf Hitler during the w*r, and that Trifa was a leader

of the Iron Guard, a pro-n*zi group in Romania.

ELI: The Iron Guard was the largest

of the fascist movements in Romania.

It was violent.

It was anti-Semitic.

It was the equivalent of the n*zi movement in Romania.

NARRATOR: This picture shows an Iron Guard rally

during the early years of World w*r II.

The similarities to Nazism, the solute, the uniforms,

are clearly evident.

And like the Nazis, the Iron Guard was also anti-Semitic.

And like Hitler, the Iron Guard encouraged v*olence

against the Jews, and against others

they perceived as enemies.

Archbishop Trifa adamantly denied

he had ever been a member of the Iron Guard.

If the charge was true, it meant Trifa

had lied to US immigration officials.

And it also meant that a high profile religious leader

in the United States was, in fact, a n*zi w*r criminal.

Romanian immigrants living in the United States

identified a high-ranking religious figure, Archbishop

Valerian Trifa, as a n*zi w*r criminal from World w*r II.

They believed that Archbishop Valerian Trifa had once

been a member of Romania's Iron Guard,

sympathetic to Adolf Hitler, and a group who encouraged

v*olence against Romanian Jews.

-[speaking foreign language]

NARRATOR: On January , , Viorel Trifa

had broadcast a hate-filled radio address

from the Romanian capital city of Bucharest.

That radio address encouraging v*olence against Jews

culminated in the round-up thousands of Jews

in Bucharest the next day.

News accounts described the slaughter known as a pogrom.

Department of Justice Prosecutor Eli Rosenbaum

reads one of the news account.

-Perhaps the most horrifying single episode of the Pogrom

was the quote, unquote "kosher butchering" last Wednesday

night of more than Jews in the municipal slaughterhouse.

The Jews, who had been rounded up after several hours of Iron

Guard raids, were put into several trucks

and carried off to the slaughterhouse.

There, the Greenshirts-- he means the Iron Guards--

forced them to undress and led them to the chopping blocks,

where they cut their throats in a horrible parody

of the traditional Jewish methods

of slaughtering fowl and livestock.

NARRATOR: Romanian immigrants told US authorities

that Viorel Trifa was also the editor of the Iron Guard

newspaper, "Libertatea," which also

called for v*olence against Jews.

-Trifa's his role, as far as the Pogrom was concerned,

was one of a propagandist.

One of an advocate of antisemitic hatred.

One of an inciter whose writings created an atmosphere in which

this kind of v*olence not only became

permissible and acceptable, but encouraged.

NARRATOR: The US government now faced a dilemma.

Was there any way of finding out whether Archbishop Trifa was

a past member of the Iron Guard?

The only apparent evidence against Trifa

was the decades old memories of his fellow Romanian immigrants.

-All of these cases were and are among the most challenging ones

that anyone in law enforcement could ever imagine confronting.

All of these cases involved crimes

that took place long ago, decades earlier.

It's difficult enough to prove a mugging

that took place yesterday.

NARRATOR: But one Romanian refugee, a New York dentist

named Charles Kremer, refused to let the case die.

Kremer's relatives were among the Jews k*lled

at the hands of Romania's Iron Guard.

And he vowed to bring Archbishop Trifa to justice.

For years, he petitioned the US

government to examine the case.

In , the Department of Justice

officially opened an investigation

into whether Archbishop Trifa had played a role

in murdering Jews during World w*r II.

US prosecutors approached the West

German government for assistance.

The Germans kept meticulous records during the w*r.

And in their archives, investigators

found postcards written by a man named Trifa who

had been a member of the Iron Guard.

-The postcards were found in a record group in West Germany,

not on the communist bloc, but in West Germany,

in a record group that was called Small Collections.

It was just small miscellaneous collections

that the German archivists did not know how to file.

And so, they filed them in a record group called

Small Miscellaneous Collections.

NARRATOR: Whoever wrote the postcards was

no concentration camp survivor.

The writer was a guest of the n*zi government,

and spent the w*r years in relative comfort.

-They essentially describe what he's doing during the day,

if he's seen a movie, what the weather's like.

Very normal, mundane type of stuff

that an individual at peace, without much fear of his life,

might write to his comrades while on vacation.

NARRATOR: The cards were signed by Viorel Trifa.

If they were written by the man known in the United States

as Archbishop Valerian Trifa, the archbishop

had lied to immigration officials.

Forensic scientists looked for some way

to prove that Archbishop Valerian

Trifa had written these postcards.

For decades, rumors circulated that Archbishop Valerian Trifa,

a high-ranking religious figure in the Romanian Orthodox Church

in the United States, was once a member of Romania's Iron Guard,

a pro-n*zi group that encouraged the m*rder of hundreds of Jews

during World w*r II.

Archbishop Trifa denied he was a member.

But when US government officials found postcards allegedly

written by Trifa from Germany during the w*r,

they asked document examiner Gideon Epstein

to conduct a handwriting analysis.

GIDEON: No two people have ever been

found to have the same handwriting.

Not twins.

Not identical twins.

Handwriting is composed of motor, muscular,

and nervous movements of the body all working together.

And it becomes habitual, and unique, and individual,

almost from the point of time when people start to write.

NARRATOR: Epstein spent months comparing signatures

on the postcards with samples of Archbishop Trifa's known

signatures, like this one from an official church document.

GIDEON: The whole forensic concept

is that you're comparing something that's

disputed against something that's known.

And handwriting is basically the same thing.

We have usually a document or a writing that's disputed,

and then we have writings that are known.

And the question is, did the person who make the known

make the disputed?

NARRATOR: Epstein noticed that the writings in all cases

were done with extreme speed, or what is called fluency.

So-called fluent writers have wide variations

in how they write.

And those variations are almost always the same,

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,

and to be able to simulate that variation at the same speed,

and the rhythm, and fluency, with all

of the unconscious habits that the writer has,

it's an impossibility.

NARRATOR: After months of analysis,

Gideon Epstein reached his conclusion.

There was no doubt.

The writer of the German postcards was Valerian Trifa.

This was proof that Trifa lied to immigration authorities,

but he vowed to fight any deportation.

Prosecutors were concerned.

Their only solid evidence was the handwriting analysis

and eyewitness identifications that

were more than years old.

But looking at a blow up photo of one of the postcards,

investigators saw what they thought might be a clue.

The card had only a return address, apparently just

an update on where the writer was living.

On a large blank space, investigators

saw what they thought might be a finger print.

They petitioned the West German government

for the actual postcard and were denied.

The West Germans did not want the postcard damaged.

And in the s, the powders used to detect fingerprints

would have permanently altered the card.

The case stalled for years.

ELI: I believe that the immigration service felt

that the case was just too difficult.

They couldn't handle it.

NARRATOR: What brought the case back to life

was a new piece of forensic technology, the laser.

In the s, researchers discovered that laser beams

react with the oils that form fingerprints,

causing the prints literally to glow or luminesce.

The procedure was non-invasive.

In other words, a print, if it existed,

could be taken from the German postcard without damaging it.

In , the West Germans brought the postcard to FBI

headquarters in Washington, DC to be

examined with laser technology.

ELI: It was classified technology that enabled them,

they believed, to detect fingerprints that could not

be detected using traditional means.

So sensitive was this technology-- that is to say,

so secret was it-- that when a German official brought

the postcard, the original, with a Justice Department escort

to the FBI, the German official was allowed to go up

to the door of the room in which the machine sat and no further.

He was barred from even seeing it.

NARRATOR: But there were a number of problems.

Investigators were not even sure the postcard contained a print.

And so much time had passed since the postcard was written,

there were questions about whether the finger oils that

might be present would be visible,

even with laser technology.

[chanting]

NARRATOR: In , the US government's investigation

of Valerian Trifa, the Romanian Archbishop of Detroit,

was coming to a head.

Prosecutors suspected that Trifa had lied about his involvement

in the m*rder of hundreds of Jews during World w*r II.

Trifa said they had the wrong man.

That Trifa was a common name in Romania, and that it was

another man named Trifa who had been

the member of the pro-n*zi Iron Guard movement.

The case came down to one postcard signed by Viorel Trifa

in Germany during World w*r II.

Forensic scientists suspected that it

may contain a fingerprint.

If a print was found, and it matched Archbishop Valerian

Trifa, there would be solid proof

that he had lied about his past.

Analyst Ron Capaco put the card under a diffused laser beam.

The laser light reacts with human finger oils

to reveal prints.

But in this case, the card was more than years old,

and there were questions about whether anything

would be found.

Capaco, examining the card through orange filtered goggles

that eliminate all sources of light other than the laser,

was surprised at what he saw.

A clear print glowing on a blank area of the postcard.

Despite the age of the postcard, it

had absorbed enough finger oil to form a clear print.

The question was whether the fingerprint on the postcard

was the fingerprint of Archbishop Trifa.

Capaco photographed the print on the postcard.

In this photo, the print, a left thumb print,

can be clearly identified.

Investigators now went to the document

Trifa entered the US with in .

At that time, he was fingerprinted.

The thumbprint of that document was compared

with the thumbprint taken from the postcard.

It was a perfect match.

The prints on both documents were

the left thumb print of Valerian Trifa.

-The ultimate proof is a latent fingerprint.

There's no known way to fabricate a latent fingerprint

in a way that is undetectable.

So when we got word from the, uh, the Bureau

that their technology had succeeded in, uh,

finding Trifa's print on this old document, something that

had never happened in any of our cases before nor since,

we were, of course, ecstatic.

We were ecstatic.

NARRATOR: This -year-old print is the oldest latent print ever

detected by any law enforcement agency in the world.

Investigators speculate that when Trifa wrote the card using

the fountain pens of the day, his finger oils mixed

with a small amount of INK, sealing the oils

into the porous paper of the card.

The ink faded over time, but the thumbprint remained intact.

The print was almost invisible to the naked eye,

but clearly visible under the new technology of the laser.

GIDEON: Well, the postcard was a very

important piece of evidence.

Because not only were we are able to identify

his handwriting, that he denied making,

but also the thumb print was identified as his.

And there is no better form of personal identification

than to have both the fingerprint

and the handwriting of an individual identified

on the same piece of evidence.

NARRATOR: There was no way he could have known it,

that the postcard he so casually sent in

would seal his fate some years later.

PETER: They went for the fingerprint

to see if they could get it.

Um, prosecutors always want to have

the most truth available on hand.

NARRATOR: When informed of the palm print match,

Archbishop Trifa surrendered his citizenship.

For Romanian refugees, like Dr. Charles Kremer,

who would lost relatives at the hands of Trifa's Iron Guard,

the year wait for justice was a long one.

-I would have been much more satisfied if the trial went on

continuously, and exposed this m*rder*r with all the crimes

that he committed, and let the people at large know

that a man that's changed the g*n for the cross

does not belong in the United States.

NARRATOR: For two years, no other country

was willing to accept Trifa.

In , Portugal agreed to take him in.

After a youth spent as a fascist leader,

and adulthood spent as a religious figure hoping

to escape his past, Valerian Trifa

ended his days as an exile, dying in Portugal in .

-[speaking german]

NARRATOR: Though decades had passed since Hitler

and his henchmen terrorized Europe,

the traces they left behind provided lasting evidence

bearing witness to their crimes.

-We don't have the m*rder w*apon.

We don't have a body.

What we have is paper.

It's paper that survives to bring these people to justice.

Some with fingerprints, some without,

really speaks volumes about crimes

that were committed by Trifa and by others.

And it's those documents that survive.

Even though the victims didn't survive,

the documents to survive to make these prosecutions possible.

[theme music]