Posted on 01/28/2005 12:27:33 AM PST by M. Espinola
An 89-year-old Sutton man who worked in a Nazi training camp faces deportation after a federal judge ruled yesterday he had lied about killing Jews so he wouldn't be barred from entering the United States more than 50 years ago.
Born in Lithuania and once a sergeant in the Soviet army, Vladas Zajanckauskas claimed he was merely a prisoner of war forced into Nazi service as a barkeep at the Trawniki camp to survive.
But in an 18-page ruling after a bench trial earlier this month, Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton revoked Zajanckauskas' citizenship and found the retired factory worker's testimony denying he was a Nazi collaborator ``defied reason and common sense.''
Justice Department attorneys made their case with wartime documents, Holocaust experts and a photo of an apparently healthy and muscular Zajanckauskas when he first arrived at Trawniki.
``He tried to portray himself as if he's a great victim of the Nazis and that's baloney,'' one source said.
The judge cited ``clear and convincing'' evidence that Zajanckauskas was a high-ranking guard dispatched among 351 other men to ``liquidate'' Jews in the Warsaw ghetto April 17th, 1943.
Zajanckauskas emigrated from Austria in 1950 and became a citizen in 1956. He hid his Nazi collaboration by writing on his visa application that he had been a farmer in Lithuania until 1944.
Zajanckauskas' attorneys, Thomas Butters and Robert Sheketoff, could not be reached for comment. No eyewitness ever placed Zajanckauskas in Warsaw in April and May of 1943 when thousands of Jews were executed while Trawniki guards kept them from escaping the ghetto.
Zajanckauskas, a great-grandfather of four, may not live long enough to be deported. His appeals are expected to take years.
photos added
Maybe we could encourage this judge to yank the citizenship of a few commie Rats? J. Effin sKerry come immediately to mind, for some reason.
Assuming he is who Judge Gorton says he is and is guilty of the crimes for which his citizenship is being revoked, I have no sympathy for his plight. He got off easy.
Many Baltic collaborators were some of the most brutal, inhuman monsters who killed Jews with an enthusiasm that even the Einsatzgruppen could not stomach.
I do have to wonder though what led to such a late prosecution. Had the justice department been building a case against him for decades or did some evidence just recently surface?
George Soros.
This is a precedent for revoking citizenship from terrorist supporters and sympathizers. We can deport them. Its time for polygraph tests followed by hearings.
Peter Jennings next? Doesn't he still have his dual citizenship with Canada? Or am I thinking Dan Rather? If both, can we get a two-fer?
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