Shofar archives:
Last-Modified: 1994/08/25
Subject: Justice Department Moves to Revoke Citizenship of former Nazi Guard
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 1994 202-514-2007
(TDD) 202-514-1888
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT MOVES TO REVOKE CITIZENSHIP
OF FORMER GUARD AT NAZI SLAVE LABOR CAMP
WASHINGTON, D.C.– The Department of Justice announced today that
it has initiated denaturalization proceedings to revoke the U.S.
citizenship of a Schiller Park, Illinois, man whom it charges with
concealing his service and activities as an armed guard at a Nazi
slave labor camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II.
A complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago today by the
Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the Justice Department’s
Criminal Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago
alleges that the defendant, Bronislaw Hajda, 70, was trained as a
guard at the SS Training Camp in Trawniki, Poland, an SS training
facility and base camp that supplied guards and auxiliary police
personnel principally to assist the Nazis in implementing their
plans to annihilate the Jews of Europe.
The complaint also alleges that Hajda, a native of Poland and a
retired machinist, served as an armed guard of prisoners at the SS
Labor Camp at Treblinka, Poland, from March 1943 until the
liquidation of the camp in July 1944. During the course of the
slave labor camp’s existence, thousands of Jewish and Polish
prisoners died there from shootings, beatings, hangings,
malnourishment and exhaustion, the complaint said.
The complaint further alleges that in July 1944, during the
liquidation of the Treblinka Labor Camp, hundreds of Jewish
prisoners were shot to death in a single massacre and that the
defendant participated in this killing operation.
The Treblinka Labor Camp was part of a complex that also included
the nearby Treblinka Death Camp, where more than 800,000 people,
nearly all Jews, were murdered in gas chambers.
Hajda subsequently served in the “SS Battalion Streibel” until at
least April 1945, the complaint said.
The complaint alleges that Hajda’s service with the SS– adjudged a
criminal organization in 1946 by the International Military
Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany–constituted assistance in the Nazi
program of persecution based on race, religion and national origin.
It also charges that Hajda’s service constituted membership in a
“movement hostile to the United States,” which rendered him
ineligible to immigrate to the United States under United States
law. The complaint further alleges that Hajda willfully concealed
his service with the SS Training Camp Trawniki, his service at the
Treblinka Labor Camp, and his service with the SS Battalion
Streibel in applying for immigration to the U.S. in 1950, and for
naturalization as a U.S. citizen in 1955.
The initiation of proceedings to denaturalize Hajda is a product 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, 50 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of U.S.
citizenship as a result of OSI’s investigations and prosecutions,
and 42 have been removed from the United States.
