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Message-ID: <000301bd74be$14e67de0$41661ece@dad>
From: "J Herring" 
To: Middle East discussion group & news releases from Zionist groups 
Subject: TEXT: FORMER OFFICER IN NAZI-SPONSORED UNIT TO BE DEPORTED 
Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 00:00:03 -0500
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TEXT: FORMER OFFICER IN NAZI-SPONSORED UNIT TO BE DEPORTED 
(Was commander in Nazi-sponsored battalions in Lithuania) 
(29 April 1998)

Following is the text of the announcement:

(Begin text)

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
APRIL 23, 1998

JUDGE ORDERS REMOVAL OF FORMER OFFICER IN NAZI-SPONSORED POLICE UNITS

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Justice Department today won a deportation
order against Jonas Stelmokas, a Philadelphia resident who served as a
platoon commander and acting company commander in two Nazi-sponsored
Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft (Protective Detachment) Battalions in
Lithuania from 1941 to 1944.

U.S. Immigration Judge Donald Ferlise issued an oral opinion this
afternoon, finding that Stelmokas was subject to removal to Lithuania
because, among other reasons, his service and activities in the
Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft constituted assistance in the persecution
of civilians on the basis of their race, religion, or national origin,
and assistance to the enemy Nazi forces in their military operations
against the United States.

In ordering Stelmokas removed from the United States, Judge Ferlise
cited captured wartime documents which established that Stelmokas, as
commander of the detachment that guarded the barbed-wire enclosed
ghetto in which the Jews of Kaunas, Lithuania, were forcibly confined,
was responsible for enforcing the internment of the Jews in the ghetto
where they were subject to inhumane conditions. Judge Ferlise ruled
that Stelmokas' testimony during the two-day removal hearing "lacked
both credibility and plausibility," adding, "Respondent's lying to the
Court pales in comparison to what he and his Nazi thug friends did to
the Jews in Lithuania and throughout Europe."

In 1995, the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia stripped Stelmokas of
his U.S. citizenship, finding that his Schutzmannschaft service and
misrepresentation of that service to U.S. immigration officials
disqualified him for the U.S. visa he received in 1949. In 1996, that
decision was upheld by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations (OSI), termed the Judge's order "a significant victory
and a powerful reaffirmation of the principle that those who helped
the Nazis carry out their diabolical programs of murder and oppression
cannot lawfully claim the privilege of U.S. residence."

He added: "The inhumane operation of the Kaunas Jewish Ghetto, one of
the most deservedly notorious in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, would
have been impossible without the active involvement of Stelmokas and
other Schutzmannschaft officers and men."

The case against Stelmokas was tried by the Criminal Division's Office
of Special Investigations and the Philadelphia Office of the
Immigration and Naturalization Service.

(End text)

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