FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1995 (202) 616-2771

TDD (202) 514-1888

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT INITIATES DEPORTATION PROCEEDINGS

AGAINST NAZI SS GUARD

WASHINGTON, D.C.--The Department of Justice announced today

that it had initiated deportation proceedings in U.S. Immigration
Court in Philadelphia against a New Ringgold, Pennsylvania, man
who served the Nazis in World War II as an armed SS concentration
camp guard at the Sachsenhausen and Hersbruck concentration camps
in Germany and the Majdanek Concentration Camp in Poland.
The Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and
the District Office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service in Philadelphia today served Nikolaus Schiffer with an
order to show cause why he should not be deported from the United
States for assisting in the persecution of civilians on the basis
of race, religion, national origin and political opinion.
In August 1993, as a result of a denaturalization suit
brought by OSI, Judge Franklin Van Antwerpen of the U.S. District
Court in Philadelphia, stripped Schiffer, 75, of his U.S.
citizenship. Judge Van Antwerpen found that Schiffer lacked the
requisite good moral character required for United States
citizenship because of his service as an armed guard on labor
details at the camps and his participation as an SS guard on two
Nazi "death marches." Judge Van Antwerpen's decision was
affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last
year.
Abundant evidence exists concerning the atrocities committed
against thousands of civilians at the Sachsenhausen, Majdanek and
Hersbruck camps during the period of Schiffer's SS service there.
Jews and other prisoners were subjected to inhumane treatment,
including forcible confinement, subjection to slave labor,
physical and emotional abuse and torture and mass murder at these
camps. In his decision denaturalizing Schiffer, Van Antwerpen
wrote that it is "beyond dispute" that "the armed concentration
camp guards played a major role in the persecution of these
persons and in attaining the Nazi goal of annihilation. . . ."
The evidence, he declared, "clearly and unequivocally
established" that Schiffer "was an active participant in the
persecution occurring at these camps in that he helped prevent
inmates from escaping the grotesquely inhumane condition there."
The Schiffer proceeding is a result of OSI's ongoing
investigation of Nazi persecutors illegally residing in the U.S.
Since OSI was created in 1979, 50 Nazi persecutors have been
stripped of their illegally-obtained citizenship and 42 persons
have been removed from the United States. More than 300 persons
remain under investigation.
95-062 ####