The policeman who hunted for Nazi war criminals in New Zealand reveals for the first time what he found. ANTHONY HUBBARD reports.

The Jews of Minsk "screamed like geese" as they were being shot, according to Jonas Pukas. A Lithuanian who served in a police battalion that massacred thousands
of Jews in 1941 and 1942, Pukas settled in New Zealand after the war.

He had heard the Jews dying, he told Detective Sergeant Wayne Stringer in Auckland in 1992, but he had not seen them. "They shout like geese you know," says the official transcript of the interview.

Pukas made the sound of the birds wailing or crying, the transcript notes. They "fly in air", he said, laughing. "Some of the Jews used to scream like that, like the geese." Stringer, now retired from the police, says this image "has haunted me since that time".

He did not believe Pukas' claim that he neither saw nor took part in the slaughter. The 12th Lithuanian Police Battalion was a notorious murder squad and the evidence of its part in the Holocaust was overwhelming. "If anyone was guilty," Stringer told the Sunday Star-Times, "he was."

Stringer was part of a two-man police unit set up in 1989 to investigate claims that war criminals were living here. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre had handed a list of names to the New Zealand government - and Pukas' was the most serious case.

However, there were no witnesses who would testify against Pukas, so the government decided to take no action. Pukas died in 1994, aged 80.

Stringer has handed his war crimes files to the Star-Times. He had been prompted, he said, by the visit to New Zealand last month of Efraim Zuroff, the centre's Nazi-hunter and the man who compiled the original list. Stringer wants to show the investigations were worthwhile, even if nobody was prosecuted or convicted. The guilty ones, he said, "to
their dying day know that other people investigated them and they know that other people know the truth. And so the axe is there waiting to fall.

"And the other reason is to bring to the consciousness of all people that genocide is still happening and you've still got people believing other people are inferior. You can't let that rest."

Pukas' two sons were shocked to learn that their father was accused of murdering Jews, although they knew the police had interviewed him in 1992.

The older son said his father had told him he spent the war "rolling out telephone wires for the German Army - he never talked about the Jews."

His mother, Kathleen - who died five years ago - had told him about the police interview, but he knew only that it had something to do with the war. "Mum sort of brushed it off, (saying) that there was nothing in it."

The younger son said his father "told me he was a policeman in Lithuania on horseback and that. I don't know what he did. He didn't really talk about it."

Pukas claimed that when the Germans invaded Lithuania in 1941 he had to join them or he would be shot. He also said he had taught German officers to ride horses. "He did have a violent streak to him. He could fly off the handle," the younger son said. He would hit his wife on occasions, "till I stepped in one day and gave him a clout around the head and told him to leave her alone. He never touched her again after that - but then I was old enough to stand up for her."

Stringer had two long interviews with Pukas in April and June 1992 at his house in Birkenhead . Pukas was then a spry 78-year-old, small and wiry, who had worked in New Zealand as a market gardener, a cleaner, and a watersider. The talks were messy and difficult. After more than 40 years in New Zealand, Pukas spoke a fractured and primitive English. Although a Lithuanian interpreter was present, Pukas would often reply in
English.

Pukas admitted he was in the first company of the battalion and that in late 1941 he had been stationed at Minsk in what was then Belorussia - the site of repeated and well-documented massacres by the battalion.

But he was evasive, contradicted himself, became vague at crucial points, and had "convenient" lapses of memory, Stringer said. The policeman's exasperation is clear from file notes.

"All in all, Pukas retains a lot of his native cunning," he writes after the first interview.

"It was obvious from some of his comments that he was in very close proximity to some of the killings in Minsk and it is hard to believe he was not involved in some way," he wrote after the second interview.

Pukas would, when pressed, reveal telling details about killings of Jews - and then back away from them, claiming he had only heard about this from other soldiers, or seen them from a distance. In Minsk, he saw pits with bodies in them.

"One place they dug the holes very deep, as tall as the ceiling here. (The house is an old one with a high stud)," says the interview transcript. "They shot them in the day time and then at night. Then they used to fill up the hole with bodies, shot bodies, and then they put lime on top."

Asked if he saw this, Pukas replied: "No, I didn't, others told me. Then they used to push them together and there was more room for others." At another point he talked about shooting of Jews by an "elite unit".

"You'd see heaps of flesh and you would eat meat afterwards, we didn't want to see it. It wasn't our job. There's not much pleasure when you see those heaps of flesh flying, you wouldn't go near them. Not interested to see heaps of bodies. And there were nice females. Nice girls and everything."

Stringer asked him: "Were the nice girls, were they alive or dead when he saw them?" He replied: "No they were alive. It wouldn't be nice to ... " The nice girls were Jewish girls whom he saw in Minsk wearing the yellow star, he said.

One of the most infamous massacres of the war took place in Slutsk, near Minsk , on October 27 and 28, 1941 - and the 12th battalion was deeply involved. A report by the German Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that massacred Jews after the invasion of Russia , reported the shooting of 5900 Jews. Former members of the 12th battalion have also attested to the massacre in court cases.

A German court summarised the facts in a written judgement after the 1961 trial of German war criminal Franz Lechthaler. Lithuanian soldiers herded the Jewish men, women and children of the town into the marketplace.

There were "dreadful scenes. The Jews, who had either found out or had at least guessed what was going to happen to them, tried to cling to fences, rafters, trees and the corners of houses, screaming and wailing all the while. Children, weeping and screaming, clung to their mothers. The Jews were torn free with brutal force by the Lithuanians, and driven on with blows."

They were taken to the place of execution and shot by a Lithuanian firing squad.

"A thin layer of soil was then thrown over those who had been shot. When this was done, the next group of Jews was brought from the town to the place of execution.

"They too had to get into the graves and lie face down on the bodies of those who had previously been shot and lightly covered with earth. Then they were shot with rifle-fire by the Lithuanians. When one grave was full, the next was used."

The local German area commissioner, Heinrich Carl, was disgusted by the "indescribable brutality" of the round-up and wrote to his superiors: "I beg you to grant me one request: in future, keep this police battalion away from me by all means."

Pukas's company took part in the massacre, according to the testimony of former battalion members who participated. Stringer's police file records that Juozas Aleksynas, for instance, told Australian war crimes investigators in 1990 in Lithuania that "all members of all three companies were involved. The members of the company would be rotated between shooting and guarding. When each member had a turn at shooting, they would start the process again until all the Jews had been executed."

In one interview, Pukas denied going to Slutsk. In another, he said he had ridden there from Minsk with"maybe 70 or 80" others, including German and Lithuanian officers.

He heard no shooting in Slutsk nor did he see anyone shot.

"We went there and stayed for an hour or more to spell the horses, while the horses rested and then we went back. Maybe next day they were shooting, it wasn't our
job."

Slutsk was a very nice town, and they had lunch there. The German and Lithuanian officers "were looked after so they were very happy. They were happy that there were no Russians there because the Russians would have taken the women away."

A lieutenant in the first company, Antanas Gecevicius, took part in this and other massacres and after the war settled in Scotland under the name of Antanas Gecas. In 1987 he sued Scottish TV for defamation after a programme called Crimes of War accused him of atrocities. But in 1992 a Scottish judge, Lord Milligan, rejected his suit and found it proven that Gecas was a war criminal. Gecas died in 2001.

But Pukas told Stringer - and Scottish detective John Montgomery, who came to Auckland to interview him about Gecas - that Gecas was "a good man, beautiful man". Told that other battalion members had said Gecas had been at the shooting pits, he said: "That can't (be), that's a fairy story."

Told that other members of the battalion had said they were involved in shooting, Pukas "laughed loudly and said: `Maybe they were skiting that they were good soldiers."'

Stringer, who with Sergeant Kevin Marlow went to the Baltic states and Israel to investigate the claims, found nine separate documents about Pukas in the state
archives in Lithuania . They show that he was in the 2nd Auxiliary Police Service Battalion, formed in Kaunas in August 1941 under German command (it later changed its name to the 12th Lithuanian Police Battalion.)

Military records show that on September 11-12 of that year members of the battalion shot 48 peasants at the village of Uzusaliai , near Kaunas . Order 17 takes Pukas "off rations" in Kaunas "for a special mission" between September 11-12. This strongly suggests Pukas went to the village with his battalion at the time the massacre took place. But there is no eye-witness evidence to prove he took part. And here, says Stringer, lies the problem. The main job of the battalion was to murder Jews and partisans. In October and November the battalion and the German Sonderkommando 1 between them killed 40,000 Jews, civilians and POWs, German military records show.

So when battalion members went to Uzusaliai, they went for one reason: to murder Jews. So what else would Pukas be doing but shooting Jews? "I think by implication, whilst the evidence is not enough to convict him, there has to be a prima facie case against him," says Stringer.

Pukas's claims he just "held the horses", says Stringer, "is just bullshit. When we were interviewing the guy you just knew that was pure obfuscation. We all came to the same conclusion.

"It's like fishing, you know? You could draw him in and draw him in - and that comment about the wild geese crying, there's something that clicked in his humanity there that he had to get off his chest. And you just knew then, hey, he was part of this."

Stringer, who was a policeman for 30 years, says:"There is a seed of guilt and with everyone who is guilty of something, funnily enough, they always want to admit it. There is this compulsion to admit it - but in admitting something you always want to minimise your involvement."

That's what Pukas had done, by talking about shootings and bodies in pits and heaps of flesh -and then denying he had even seen them.

Stringer's colleagues in the Australian, Scottish and Canadian war crimes units interviewed many other former members of the battalion. "Almost all witnesses were unhelpful." The only ones who did admit to war crimes - men who had already been punished by Soviet
courts after the war - refused to leave Lithuania to testify in foreign courts. None of the battalion members interviewed recognised Pukas's photo - or none said they did.

"It is possible, but unlikely, that Pukas took no part in the killings," Stringer wrote in his final report. There was no direct evidence linking him to the murder of Jews or civilians. The Crown Law Office, Stringer says, would have been willing to prosecute if there
was any chance of getting a conviction. There wasn't.

"We'd never put someone on trial simply by saying, `Well, he's a member of the Mongrel Mob and if he's a member of the Mongrel Mob he must be a rapist'."

Another image from his investigation still haunts the retired policeman. In Latvia , Stringer interviewed two old people who had gone into the forest of Bickernieki near Riga .

"They heard all this shooting all day and they went into the forest - there was fresh tilled soil and they saw hands sticking out of the soil `like lilies."' Some of the Jews were still alive - and the pair rescued them. A Latvian who settled in New Zealand probably belonged to one of the murder squads that carried out mass executions of this sort. Janis Licitis, who died aged 90 in 1992, was "in all probability" a member of the Arajs Command, Stringer's investigations found.

The Arajs Command was a notorious murder unit, a kind of Latvian equivalent of the Lithuanian police battalion. It killed more than 26,000 Jews, and liquidated the Riga ghetto in late 1941. Licitis, however, was old and sick at the time of the investigation. When he visited him at his Auckland home, he found Licitis was deaf, blind in one eye, had heart disease and could move only with difficulty, and had trouble speaking English.

"It was obvious from Licitis' appearance that it was pointless trying to interview him."

So why keep on investigating sick old men who will soon be dead anyway? Stringer's reply is not only firm, but passionate: "Horrible old men and women" who murdered when they were young and fit must be held to account for what they did. Very few of them, after all, were sorry for what they had done. He interviewed people in the Baltic States "who had spent 20 years in Siberia " after Soviet courts convicted them of murdering Jews.

"They said," says Stringer, "they would do it again."

Fairfax New Zealand Limited, 19.03.06