WASHINGTON -- Hours before his death in Wednesday's crash of Pan Am Flight 103, Justice Department Nazi hunter Michael Bernstein persuaded the Austrian government to reverse itself and accept deportation of a former Auschwitz concentration camp guard, his boss said Friday.
'He was carrying the papers on the plane,' said Neil Sher, director of the department's Office of Special Investigations that searches out and prosecutes former Nazi war criminals.
Bernstein 'was very proud of the fact, and pleased, that they had agreed to take back' Josef Eckert, a 74-year-old California man who admitted in September he belonged to a German Secret Service guard unit, Sher told reporters at the Justice Department. Although Eckert was at Auschwitz when millions of men, women and children -- mostly Jews -- were murdered, the Austrian government had balked for months at accepting his deportation.
Sher, who himself took a Pan Am flight back to the United States from Frankfurt, West Germany, on Thursday, mourned the loss of the 36-year-old Bernstein, who was one of his assistant deputies. He called Bernstein a 'remarkable man' who exuded competence, warmth and dedication.
'There is a Yiddish word -- a 'mensch' -- it means a real person,'' Sher said. 'He was a mensch.'
Sher expressed anger that the State Department alerted embassy employees around the world of an anonymous bomb threat regarding Pan Am flights from Frankfurt, but failed to tell other government employees.
'How could you not be angry hearing the reports coming out now - when you see who and what was told and what was not told,' he said. 'I'm very upset. I fly all over the world all the time.'
Sher, who was in Budapest, Hungary, on official business when he learned of his colleague's death, said, 'I flew home ironically on a Pan Am jet through Frankfurt yesterday. ... If I had known this threat was out there, I wouldn't have (scheduled a flight) back on Pan Am. I would have flown Lufthansa.'
Since joining the Justice Department unit in 1985, Bernstein had developed deportation cases against a half dozen former Nazi guards who concealed their wartime activities upon entering the United States in the 1950s, Sher said.
'He won them all; he put together such a strong case,' Sher said. 'And Eckert was the last.'
But he said in 1987, Austria argued it no longer was required to honor a three-decade-old agreement in which it and Germany pledged to accept deported war criminals found in the United States. The Austrians felt the agreement had expired, Sher said.
Bernstein's success in Vienna, he said, marked 'a very important resolution of this important case. ... Mike did a marvelous job.'
Several Jewish groups submitted memorials to The New York Times Friday to honor Bernstein, who is survived by his wife, Stephanie, his mother, Janet, and their children, Sarah, 8, and Joseph, 4.
Sher said that Bernstein gave up a lucrative position at the prominent Washington law firm of Covington and Burling to join the Justice Department unit in 1985.
Noting that Bernstein was Jewish, Sher said, 'Mike had read an article in the newspapers about OSI (Office of Special Investigations). He called me and sent a resume. He said he was very interested in working for us. ... Mike was doing this out of dedication to the effort.'
'He was exceedingly thorough. He was meticulous. He understood things,' Sher said. 'He would leave no stone unturned. He was compassionate, too. He was one of the best lawyers that ever came through OSI.'
Sher said he that when he saw a brief mention of the plane crash on the news in Budapest Wednesday night, 'I got a terrible sinking feeling in my gut.'
The next morning, he said, his deputy phoned him to break the news. 'As soon as it rang, I knew what it was ... I was so shaken.'
