US plans to deport ex-Nazi SS camp guard

17 July 2006

WASHINGTON – The US government has asked a judge to deport an 81-year-old former SS member who admitted serving as a guard during a Nazi massacre in German-occupied Poland in World War II, according to the US Justice Department said.

Josias Kumpf has told investigators he was at the Trawniki labour camp on November 3, 1943 when 8,000 Jewish men, woman and children were killed in a single day, part of a Nazi mass murder operation in which 42,000 people were killed at three camps.

Kumpf, an ethnic German born in Serbia, immigrated to the United States in 1956 under a programme for postwar refugees in Europe and became a US citizen in 1964. He has been living in Racine, Wisconsin.

A US appeals court this year revoked his citizenship, clearing the way for the government to seek his deportation.

Kumpf has admitted that as an SS Death’s Head guard at Trawniki he “was watching them shoot some people” and that if any were still alive, his instructions were to “shoot them to kill,” the Justice Department said.

The 1943 massacres, cynically code-named Operation Harvest Festival by the Nazis, “were among the most barbaric crimes of the Holocaust,” said Eli Rosenbaum, head of the department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations.

“No one who participated in those atrocities has the slightest right to remain in this country,” he said in a statement.

It was unclear which country might accept Kumpf if he is deported. He has relatives in Germany, but could also be sent to former Yugoslavia.

DPA

Subject: German news