The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

Liudas Kairys
Deported to Germany

Treblinka Guard Sent Home


Here is a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Former Nazi Concentration Camp Guard Deported to Germany
To: National Desk
Contact: U.S. Department of Justice, 202-514-2007

WASHINGTON, April 9 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The Department of Justice announced today that Liudas Kairys, 72, of Chicago was deported to Germany last night for his role as an armed Nazi SS guard and platoon commander at the Treblinka labor camp [Treblinka I, the muderous labour camp. knm] during World War II.

Kairys immigrated to the United States in 1949 under the Displaced Persons Act and became a U.S. citizen in 1957. The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the Justice Department's Criminal Division brought a suit to revoke Kairys's citizenship in 1980, alleging that it had been procured illegally and fraudulently as a result of his concealment of his service and activities at the Nazi labor camp at Treblinka, Poland, in 1943-44. Kairys's name first appeared in the 1960s, when it surfaced during the West German trial of another former SS-man at the camp, Franz Swidersky.

In 1984, the federal district court in Chicago agreed that Kairys had illegally procured his citizenship and ordered him denaturalized. In 1986, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed the denaturalization order. In 1987, a U.S. immigration judge ordered Kairys deported, a decision that was affirmed by the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) in 1989. In December, 1992, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that BIA decision. On April 5, the United States Supreme Court denied Kairys's petition for certiorari from the order of the Seventh Circuit. Kairys had been in federal custody since Feb. 26.

The deportation was carried out by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Chicago. Tens of thousands of Jewish and other prisoners were incarcerated and forced into slave labor at the Treblinka Labor camp. Thousands died from the inhumane conditions there or were murdered by SS guard personnel. The labor camp was located near the infamous Treblinka death camp, in which 900,000 Jews were murdered.

The deportation order against Kairys is a result of OSI's ongoing efforts to identify and take legal action against former participants in Nazi persecution who reside in the United States. To date, 43 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of U.S. citizenship and 35 have been removed from the United States.

-30-

-- Nigel Allen, Toronto, Ontario, Canada ndallen@r-node.hub.org


The original plaintext version of this file is available via ftp.

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