FEDERAL COURT UPHOLDS DEPORTATION ORDER AGAINST FORMER NAZI

A Federal judge has upheld a 1997 deportation order against Ferdinand Hammer on the grounds that he participated in Nazi persecutions.  In 1996, Hammer was stripped of his citizenship.  At this latest hearing, many of the suspected charges against Hammer were proven, including that he was an armed guard at Auschwitz, and that he supervised some of the prisoner marches from Eastern European concentration camps to Germany that occurred during the end of World War Two.

Hammer’s attorney fought the efforts to deport his client by arguing that there was no evidence that Hammer was personally involved in torture or persecution.  The judge rejected this argument out of hand, saying that anyone who worked as an armed guard in concentration camps was intimately involved in forced labor.  In short, according to the judge, “No such person has the right to claim that he did not aid and abet the Nazis.”

In a related story, the Justice Department has initiated denaturalization proceedings against another suspected Nazi, Wasyl Krysa.  He is alleged to have been a guard at the Poniatowa labor camp, where 14,000 men, women and children were executed in a single day in 1943.  Justice Department officials think he was then transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp.  On his visa application, Krysa claimed to have been a farmer during the war.  If this statement is proven to be false, Krysa can be denaturalized and likely deported.

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