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Kozminski
quickly rose to Oberkapo, the
SS-appointed overseer of other
Jews, and walked around
Gross-Rosen in boots and a
heavy sweater, while other
Jews tried to survive the
winter in tattered
clothes.
—
New York,
Controversial
Holocaust swindler to be subject of TV news segment
By Tom Tugend
LOS
ANGELES, July 1 (JTA)
Lucian Ludwig Kozminski was – or maybe is – a man convicted of swindling some 3,000 of his fellow Holocaust survivors. He did time in federal prison, and died, according to his death certificate, on Jan. 19, 1993 in Los
Angeles County. Ordinarily, this would be the end of the sordid tale of a man who preyed on his own people. Instead, it is only the beginning of a mystery, full of intrigue and skullduggery, which Dateline
NBC will telecast on Sunday.
It is also the story of Mark
Kalmansohn, a Los Angeles lawyer and former federal prosecutor, who for 20
years has sought to bring Kozminski to justice. Even today, Kalmansohn is not sure whether the man nicknamed the
“Schwindler” (German for swindler) by
Holocaust survivors and “The Weasel” by federal officials is dead or alive.
Even Kozminski’s birth date and age are in dispute, but apparently he was in his early teens when the German army invaded
Poland in 1939. In short order, the Nazis killed Kozminski’s parents, two sisters and a brother. Kozminski himself was sent first to the Lodz Ghetto and then to various concentration camps, including
Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen.
Despite his youth, Kozminski quickly rose to
Oberkapo, the SS-appointed overseer of other Jews, and, according to survivor testimony at his trial, walked around
Gross-Rosen in boots and a heavy sweater, while other Jews tried to survive the winter in tattered clothes.
After the war, Kozminski settled near
Munich, and between 1963 and 1967 was convicted of six crimes, including smuggling, bribing of officials, and running a scam involving the refurbishing of graves of Polish Holocaust victims.
Nevertheless,
Kozminski managed to enter the United
States on a visitor’s visa, settled in
a Jewish area of Los Angeles, and in
1969 advertised his services in Jewish
newspapers as a “reparations
counselor,” who could obtain
restitution money due Holocaust
survivors from the German
government.
During the next decade, according to court records at his 1982 trial, Kozminski swindled some 3,000 of his clients, charging exorbitant up-front and service fees and pocketing the German checks intended for the survivors.
Kalmansohn, who as assistant U.S. attorney prosecuted Kozminski, estimates that the survivor accumulated $1 million, which, with inflation and interest, would be worth $10 million today.
Two of Kozminski’s victims, still living in the Los Angeles area, are
Jacob Weingarten, a retired house painter, and Modka “Max” Wolman, a retired television repair shop owner.
They took their complaints to federal authorities and the criminal case was assigned to Kalmansohn in 1982. After he and Postal Inspector Lou Kinzler
obtained grand jury indictments, Kozminski pleaded guilty to eight counts of mail and bankruptcy fraud and was sentenced to 12
years in federal prison.
Bureau of Prisons records show that
Kozminski was released in 1989, even though he was spotted walking a street in
Beverly Hills in 1987.
The trail appeared to be at an end when a death certificate, bearing
Kozminskiís name, was filed in Los
Angeles County in early 1993, and the authorities closed the case.
KALMANSOHN was by then in private practice, but his obsession with the case had only intensified after meeting with
Holocaust survivors in Israel. He decided to scrutinize the death certificate, and found that it listed someone else’s Social
Security number, the description of the body in no way matched Kozminskiís actual appearance, and the purported age at death was off by 10 years.
In addition, someone cashed Social
Security checks in Kozminski’s name for 26
months after his ‘death,’ and there were continuous reports that he had been sighted, most recently only two years ago.
On the basis of this evidence, and in the belief that Kozminski could have faked his death to avoid paying survivors their rightful money, Kalmansohn filed civil suits against Kozminski on behalf of
Weingarten and Wolman. In 1999, Judge
John Ouderkirk ruled that
Kozminski’s death certificate was ‘false and/or fraudulent’ and that “Defendant
Kozminski may be alive today at an unknown location.”
A year later, a second judge concurred in the earlier finding.
Kalmansohn, now an entertainment and intellectual property lawyer in Century
City, Calif., continues to be haunted by the case. He deals with it in a 440-page book, “Nothing Is Too Late,” which he expects to be published by next year, and he hopes that the interest generated by the NBC program might lead to further clues about the elusive Kozminski.
“I really don’t know whether Kozminski, who would now be 76 to 78 years old, is dead or alive,” says Kalmansohn. “To cite
Winston Churchill’s observation on Russia, the case remains ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ “
Related
items on this website: How
to survive a Holocaust: Obituary of
Avraham Tory,
another Capo Index
to origins of anti-Semitism Index
to Binjamin
Wilkomirski,
another phoney survivor
Survey in The Independent: One in Three Europeans is Now anti-Jewish One in five
Britons: “Jews have too much power in the business world.” More than 10 per cent:
Jews are “more willing to use shady practices”.
One in ten: “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind” while one in three considers “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to this country.” Board of Deputies of British
Jews:
“These findings are shocking.”