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ATLANTA, Oct. 1 — Federal officials said Monday that
they planned to deport an elderly German man living in Georgia
who they said was a guard and dog trainer in Nazi death camps.
Officials in the Office of Special Investigations in the
Justice Department identified the man as Paul Henss, 85,
of Lawrenceville, a document in the case said.
The document said Mr. Henss admitted in March in a sworn
statement that he had worked for the SS at the Dachau and
Buchenwald death camps, guarding forced labor details of
prisoners at both camps while armed. The file charges that
he used attack dogs to keep prisoners from escaping and that
he trained other guards to use the dogs.
Mr. Henss has not decided whether to fight deportation,
said Douglas S. Weigle, an immigration lawyer in Cincinnati
who said he had spoken to Mr. Henss and his family, but had
not been retained.
Speaking to reporters outside his house on Monday, Mr. Henss
said he had committed no war crimes. “The training
of dogs was no crime,” Mr. Henss said, according to
The Associated Press. “I was not training them to hurt
people.”
Federal officials said he was an important functionary in
the death camps. “The brutal concentration camp system
could not have functioned without the determined efforts
of SS men such as Paul Henss, who, with a vicious attack
dog, stood between these victims and the possibility of freedom,” said
Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the criminal division of the
Office of Special Investigations.
Mr. Rosenbaum would not say how Mr. Henss came to his attention,
but noted that staff historians had found a vast majority
of war criminals in the United States working with ledgers,
work schedules, rosters and other Nazi files and compared
those names to immigration records.
Mr. Henss, a German citizen, arrived in 1955 in New York,
the charging document said.
Since 1979, the Office of Special Investigations has pursued
cases against 136 war crimes suspects and lost 9, Mr. Rosenbaum
said.
nytimes.com
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