Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 21, 1990                   TAG: 9004210243
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

VISITS FROM NAZI SUSPECTS INCREASE SINCE VISA CHANGE

Other suspected Nazis on a list of people banned from this country may have managed to slip into the United States because of the change, which allows West Germans to visit here without a visa, said Neal Sher, who heads the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting office.

In October West Germany joined other U.S. allies in a program that waives visitor visas for the United States. Since then, visitors are merely screened by Immigration and Naturalization Service officers at the passport control booths of airports, ports and border crossings.

The INS officials check a visitor's passport against lists in their computers and can stop a person whose name shows up. But some probably get through if, for example, a full flight lands late at night and the passport inspectors are flooded with work, Sher said.

Sher said he recently got a call from the INS at Boston's Logan Airport at 10:30 on a Saturday night about a West German whose name showed up in the computer when he went through passport control.

The man, whom Sher declined to name, had won a free trip to the United States, including a cruise from Florida. Sher said he went to his office to check the records and found that the man had been extradited to Poland in 1947 from the U.S. zone of West Germany for suspected involvement in Nazi atrocities. "We put him on a plane home the next morning," Sher said.