The ploy worked. For the next quarter-century, Bolschwing and his family lived quietly in a Sacramento suburb, before finally coming to the attention of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the Nazi-hunting unit of the U.S. Justice Department, in the late 1970s. Destined to be the highest-ranking German war criminal ever prosecuted by the OSI, Bolschwing was stripped of his American citizenship in late 1981 for having lied on his immigration application, just weeks before his death from brain cancer.
