It has been 10 years since he left the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting division, but for University Attorney Allan A. Ryan Jr., the denaturalization and extradition trials of John Demjanjuk will not go away. Today, under federal scrutiny, Ryan has had to relive and tell the...

When University Attorney Allan A. Ryan Jr. joined the Justice Department's elite Nazi-hunting unit in January 1980, he knew he hadn't picked an easy job.

"It was a question of leaving a secure post in a prestigious office...for a highly uncertain future in a new office born in political controversy and saddled with the undistinguished record of [the Immigration and Naturalization Service]'s defeats," Ryan wrote in Quiet Neighbors, his 1984 book about Nazis living in America.

Ryan, the former president of the University of Minnesota Law Review, much preferred the more academic tasks he had in the solicitor general's office. There, Ryan could do what he loved: writing briefs and making arguments for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ryan had argued and won an appeal against Nazi death camp guard Feodor Fedorenko, but he knew little about the Nazis he would be pursuing at the newly formed Office of Special Investigations (OSI). He also was not Jewish, which was a politically sensitive point.

His victory in court, however, made him unique, and Philip B. Heymann, then the head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, wanted him. Ryan took the job.

Ryan worked at OSI from 1980 to 1983, but those years spent finding and denaturalizing Nazis living in America continue to affect his life today. What he learned in those three years made him an educator and won him a small measure of fame.

And now, as Tennesse Judge Thomas A. Wiseman wraps up an investigation into charges that OSI lawyers, including Ryan, suppressed evidence in the denaturalization trial of one Nazi war criminal, Ryan's years at Justice have caught up with him again.

A Career

After graduating from Dartmouth in 1966 and the University of Minnesota Law School in 1970, he won a prestigious clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White, but then took an unusual turn, doing a stint in the Marines from 1971 to 1974.

"When I was in law school I devised a clever way to beat the draft by joining the Marines later," Ryan explained in an interview in his Holyoke Center office last week.

He then spent three years in a Washington law firm, working with, among others, Michael Tigar, who is representing Demjanjuk in the federal probe by Wiseman.

Ryan went to the solicitor general's office in 1977 because "the idea of writing briefs and then going out to represent the government of the United States in the Supreme Court of the United States seemed like an exciting thing to do," he says.

While at the solicitor general's office, Ryan argued the appeal against Fedorenko, after some hesitation.

In a memo suggesting the case not be appealed, Ryan called Fedorenko a "dead end" case. After reading the trial transcript, however, Ryan abruptly changed his mind and chose to prosecute.