MADRID (AP) — A Spanish judge on Thursday
indicted three alleged ex-Nazi death camp guards who all
lived for many years in the United States, charging them
with being accessories to genocide and crimes against humanity.
Judge Ismael Moreno of the National Court issued international arrest warrants
for Johann Leprich, Anton Tittjung and Josias Kumpf. The
18-page indictment says Kumpf apparently now lives in Austria
and the other two are still in the United States.
Joseph McGinness, a lawyer in Cleveland,
Ohio, said he represents Leprich and Tittjung.
“They are both mentally and physically
incompetent,” McGinness said. “Spain’s going to have an enormous
amount of problems taking care of these people.”
He said they were simple guards forced into service who “stood out in the rain,
watched the snow come down. ... That’s your Nazi war criminal.
They hated it.”
Leprich is from Macomb County’s Clinton Township, near Detroit.
The judge acted in part under Spain’s
observance of the principle of universal jurisdiction, which
allows particularly heinous crimes such as genocide, torture
or terrorism to be prosecuted in Spain even if they are alleged
to have been committed elsewhere.
He also acted because thousands of
Spaniards were among the millions who died in Nazi concentration
camps. Moreno has been investigating the issue since July
2008 at the request of several Spaniards who survived their
ordeals.
A fourth suspect named in the original
complaint, retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, was deported
from the United States to Germany in May and faces trial
there. He is not included in the Spanish indictment.
Moreno wrote Thursday that he has
concluded the three suspects were members of the Nazis’ Totenkopf
SS guard corps and served in death camps, either Mauthausen
in Nazi-occupied Austria or Sachsenhausen in Germany.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel
said the Spanish indictment marks a huge change for a country
it described as a refuge for Nazi war criminals when Gen.
Francisco Franco was in power until 1975, and even after
the return of democracy in Spain after his death that year.
“But this is obviously something completely
different. This is a really welcome development,” said the
center’s chief Nazi-hunter, Efraim Zuroff. “We commend the
Spanish court for making this decision.”
All three suspects settled in the
United States after World War II and eventually acquired
U.S. citizenship, but were stripped of it in recent years
after U.S. authorities concluded they had concealed their
Nazi past. The United States has tried for years to deport
them but found no country willing to take them in until Kumpf
was deported to Austria in March.
Tittjung, born in what is now Croatia,
lives in Kewaunee, Wisconsin, and Romanian-born Leprich lives
near Detroit, Michigan. Both were born in 1925.
Kumpf, 84, was born in what is now
Serbia and had lived in Racine, Wisconsin before being deported.
In Vienna, Justice Ministry spokeswoman
Katharina Swoboda said Austria has not been officially notified
of the indictments but ministry officials were contacting
their Spanish counterparts about them. Still, she said there
was no legal basis in Austria for extraditing Kumpf to Spain
because his alleged crimes fall under a statute of limitations.
Swoboda stressed that Austria had
tried to make that point clear during intense negotiations
with the United States before Kumpf was deported. In the
end, Austria had to take him in because he emigrated to the
United States from there.
After his deportation, Kumpf spent
the first few months in the westernmost Austrian province
of Vorarlberg but was then reportedly moved to the Austrian
capital of Vienna after local authorities came under fire
for covering his health care costs.
Neither the Interior nor the Justice
Ministry on Thursday could provide information on Kumpf’s
whereabouts or medical condition.
Spanish judges have used the principle
of universal justice to go after former Chilean ruler Augusto
Pinochet in 1998 and Osama bin Laden in 2003, but extraditions
and convictions have been extremely rare.
The cross-border cases have angered
other countries and this summer Parliament narrowed the doctrine
to cases involving Spaniard victims or when the alleged perpetrator
of a crime was physically in Spain. But the change was not
retroactive, so cases already on the books remained active.
svherald.com
|