Allan A. Ryan Jr. (July 3, 1945 – January 26, 2023) was an American attorney, author and a law school professor at Harvard University, where he was teaching from 1985 until his passing. He is best known for his work as a Justice Department lawyer who in the early 1980s identified and prosecuted dozens of Nazi collaborators living in the United States, earning him a reputation as America’s foremost Nazi hunter.
Biography
Ryan was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 3, 1945, the oldest of eight children of Allan Ryan, an accountant, and Anne (Conway) Ryan, a homemaker.
Ryan graduated from Dartmouth College and magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota Law School. He served as a law clerk to Justice Byron White of the Supreme Court of the United States and as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. In the U.S. Justice Department, he was Assistant to the Solicitor General and from 1980 to 1983 Director of the Office of Special Investigations, Criminal Division, responsible for the investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the United States. From 1985 until his passing, he was an attorney at Harvard University, first in the Office of General Counsel and from 2001 as Director of Intellectual Property, Harvard Business School Publishing.
Ryan was the author of Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: A Report to the Attorney General (Government Printing Office, 1983), Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice and Command Accountability (University Press of Kansas, 2012), and The 9/11 Terror Cases: Constitutional Challenges in the War Against Al Qaeda (University Press of Kansas, 2015). He was historical advisor to the PBS documentary Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals (2011) and co-producer of PBS documentary Dead Reckoning (2018).
Ryan taught the law of war at Boston College Law School from 1990, and he was on the faculty of the Harvard University Division of Continuing Education, where he taught the courses War Crimes, Genocide and Justice; The Constitution and the Media; and Intellectual Property.
Ryan was a member of the Naval War College Foundation, the U.S. Naval Institute, and the Society for Military History, and served on the National Commission of the Anti-Defamation League. He formerly served on the Board of Directors of its New England Region of the League, where he was chair of its Civil Rights Committee. From 2016 until his death, he served as chairman of the Board of Veterans Legal Services, which provides legal assistance to economically disadvantaged veterans in Massachusetts.
Ryan died from a heart attack at his home in Norwell, Massachusetts, on January 26, 2023, at the age of 77.
Director of the OSI
The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) was created in 1979 to identify and expel from the United States those who assisted Nazis in persecuting "any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion." This involved the challenging tasks for decades-old crimes of gathering, verifying, and presenting in court eyewitness and documentary evidence that was incomplete and scattered around the world. Much of this evidence was then in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain. OSI received The Elie Wiesel Award, the highest award of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The award was established in 2011 and recognizes "internationally prominent individuals whose actions embody the Museum’s vision of a world where people confront hate, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity."
Early cases
As an assistant to the US solicitor general, Ryan had been arguing cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. By chance, he was assigned a case already lost by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to strip Feodor Fedorenko of his US citizenship and deport him. Fedorenko was alleged to have been a guard at various places, including a Jewish ghetto and Treblinka extermination camp where a total of 800,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Ryan considered himself a prosecutor rather than a Nazi-hunter, but he came to believe the case was important and recommended that it be pursued. He won the case in the court of appeals, and the Supreme Court later upheld the appeals court's ruling. That case, Fedorenko v. United States, became OSI's seminal case that set important legal precedent and led to Ryan's being asked to serve as the second Director of OSI, following the brief tenure of Walter Rockler. Federenko was later convicted of treason in the Soviet Union, sentenced to death, and executed.