Forensic Files - Season 5, Episode 13 - Unholy Vows - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-[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 war.
Trifa denied it. To see whether Trifa played a role in these horrific war 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 1950, 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 war. 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 war, 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 1948
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 1957, 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 war, and that Trifa was a leader
of the Iron Guard, a pro-Nazi 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 Nazi movement in Romania.
NARRATOR: This picture shows an Iron Guard rally during the early years of World War 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 violence 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 Nazi war criminal. Romanian immigrants living in the United States
identified a high-ranking religious figure, Archbishop Valerian Trifa, as a Nazi war criminal from World War 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 violence against Romanian Jews.
-[speaking foreign language] NARRATOR: On January 20, 1941, Viorel Trifa had broadcast a hate-filled radio address
from the Romanian capital city of Bucharest. That radio address encouraging violence 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 200 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 violence 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 violence 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 killed
at the hands of Romania's Iron Guard. And he vowed to bring Archbishop Trifa to justice.
For 20 years, he petitioned the US government to examine the case. In 1973, the Department of Justice
officially opened an investigation into whether Archbishop Trifa had played a role
in murdering Jews during World War II. US prosecutors approached the West German government for assistance.
The Germans kept meticulous records during the war. And in their archives, investigators
found 22 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 Nazi government, and spent the war 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-Nazi group that encouraged the murder of hundreds of Jews during World War II.
Archbishop Trifa denied he was a member. But when US government officials found 22 postcards allegedly
written by Trifa from Germany during the war, 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 30 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 1970s, 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 1970s, 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 1982, 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 1982, 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 murder of hundreds of Jews during World War 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-Nazi Iron Guard movement. The case came down to one postcard signed by Viorel Trifa
in Germany during World War 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 40 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 1950. 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 40-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 1942 would seal his fate some 40 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 40 year wait for justice was a long one.
-I would have been much more satisfied if the trial went on continuously, and exposed this murderer with all the crimes
that he committed, and let the people at large know that a man that's changed the gun for the cross
does not belong in the United States. NARRATOR: For two years, no other country was willing to accept Trifa.
In 1984, 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 1987. -[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 murder weapon. 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]

The story of Archbishop Trifa, former head of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America, is related. Survivors of Nazi atrocities recognized Trifa as having directed a bloody attack against Jews. He was deported in 1984 and died three years later.

Forensic Files is the longest-running true crime series in television history. Evidence and interviews with experts help solve real crimes, disease outbreaks and accidents around the world.

Brief Summary

Archbishop Valerian Trifa's Nazi ties were proven through forensic evidence, leading to his loss of U.S. citizenship.

Key points

Archbishop Valerian Trifa's Controversial Past. Archbishop Trifa, a high-ranking religious figure, is accused of being a Nazi war criminal.
The Discovery of Postcards. Investigators find postcards that could prove Trifa's lies about his past.
The Fingerprint Match. A 40-year-old fingerprint from a postcard matches Trifa's, sealing his fate.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

They went for the fingerprint to see if they could get it.

Discussing the importance of evidence in the case.

20:00WatchNov 11, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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