Allan A. Ryan, 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, died on Thursday at his home in Norwell, Massachusetts. He was 77.
His daughter, Elizabeth Ryan, said the cause was a heart attack.
Ryan was the director of the Office of Special Investigations, a Justice Department unit created in 1979 at the behest of Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, D-N.Y. She had been shocked to learn that thousands of Nazi collaborators, including concentration camp guards and gas-chamber operators, had come to the United States after the war as refugees, often under assumed names.
