A
man who participated in the massacre of 8,000 Jews during
World War II has been deported to Austria, the US Justice
Department announced Thursday.
Austria does not want him in the country and is trying to send him on to Poland,
an Austrian embassy official told The Jerusalem Post,
but said he would not be able to be prosecuted in either
country due to the statute of limitations.
Josias Kumpf, 83, had been
living in Wisconsin when he was stripped of his American
citizenship and designated for deportation for having
served as an armed SS Death's Head guard at the Nazi-run
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Germany and at the
Trawniki Labor Camp in Poland.
While at Trawniki, Kumpf was
found to have participated in a mass shooting of 8,000
Jewish men, women and children in 1943. He had been given
the task of watching for victims who were still "halfway alive" or "convulsing," and preventing their escape. He stated his job had been to "shoot them to kill" if necessary, according to Justice Department records.
"Josias Kumpf,
by his own admission, stood guard with orders to shoot
any surviving prisoners who attempted to escape an SS
massacre that left thousands of Jews dead," said Acting Assistant Attorney-General Rita Glavin, who stressed America's "long-running effort to ensure that individuals who participated in crimes against
humanity do not find sanctuary in this country."
Though found in 2005 to have
lied on immigration forms from the 1950s asking about
his participation in Nazi activities, Kumpf's appeals
were finally exhausted only in June of last year. It
took until now for the US to identify a country that
would accept him and to make arrangements for his return.
He arrived in Austria on Thursday.
A similar process has long
been under way for John Demjanjuk, who lost his final
appeal to the Supreme Court last year to avoid deportation
for having lied about his role as a Nazi guard. The US
had not succeeded in finding a country willing to take
him until Germany filed a warrant for his arrest last
week as an accessory to the murder of 29,000 people.
The Justice Department and
German officials are currently in discussions about how
and when to remove him to stand trial in Germany, and
a decision could be made at any time.
In addition to deportation,
the Germans could also request Demjanjuk through its
current extradition treaty with the US, but that could
subject the process to further delay as Demjanjuk would
have legal recourses not available under the deportation
process. His relatives have also tried to make the case
that the 88-year-old retired Ohio autoworker is too sick
to travel.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi
hunter with Jerusalem's Simon Wiesenthal Center, urged
the quickest possible transfer to German authorities
so proceedings could begin against him.
Still, Zuroff said that his
fate would likely be harsher than that awaiting Kumpf,
as he blasted Austria for not doing more to prosecute
former Nazis.
"The Austrians
have a horrendous record in which not a single Nazi war
criminal has been successfully prosecuted in more than
three decades - and believe me, it's not for lack of
Nazis," he charged.
The Austrian embassy official
in Washington noted the despicable nature of Kumpf's
crimes, but said that "he can't be prosecuted in Austria because whatever he's done was done too long
ago."
Zuroff praised the Justice
Department's Office of Special Investigations, which
was established in 1979 to track down Nazi war criminals
on US territory, as being a "beacon of light in a relatively dark landscape."
By its own count, the OSI
has won 107 cases against Nazi war criminals since its
creation, and more than 180 individuals have been kept
out of the country because of its "Watch List" program.
"The removal of
Josias Kumpf to Austria has achieved a significant measure
of justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi inhumanity,
and it reflects the unswerving commitment of the US government
to continuing that quest for justice," said OSI director Eli Rosenbaum.
jpost.com
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