July 12


USA/WISCONSIN:

A Nazi's Day of Judgment - Josias Kumpf, 80, faces deportation. The
former SS soldier denies killing Jews. 'I was a good boy,' he says -- but
tell that to a death camp survivor.


Two government lawyers knocked at the door of a brick, ranch-style house
here two years ago and, getting no answer, wandered around back. There
they found an old man sitting alone on a patio chair. He wore a cap to
shield himself from the afternoon sun. He noticed that one of the
lawyers was pregnant, and he cleaned off another chair. Sit down, he said.

Josias Kumpf had been living in the United States for nearly half a
century.

He had been an American citizen for 40 years. He had married, raised five
children and worked for 35 years stuffing sausage at a factory in Chicago.
Retired and a widower, his health failing, he was living at his daughter's
home in Racine.

His visitors were prosecutors from the Justice Department. They had come to
inquire about his immigration status. There was a more urgent matter too,
but before they could get to it, they recalled, Kumpf, 80, laughed out loud.

He knew why they were there. Without prompting, he snapped them a "Sieg
Heil" salute. They talked for more than an hour, and Kumpf signed a
four-page, 17-point, handwritten sworn statement that the lawyers drafted
right there on the patio.

Yes, he had been a "soldier for Hitler." Yes, he had served in the feared
Nazi SS corps and stood sentry over Jewish prisoners as an SS Death's Head
guard in concentration camps in Poland.

But, he added, "I have nothing to hide. I don't do nothing to nobody. My
fingers are clean."

In May, Kumpf became the 100th former Nazi successfully prosecuted by the
Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations. A federal judge in
Milwaukee ordered his citizenship revoked and, should his appeals fail,
Kumpf will be deported.

The Justice unit was formed in 1979 to identify, hunt down and remove former
Nazis who came into the United States after World War II. With a staff of
lawyers and historians, the office found Kumpf after matching newfound Axis
records and SS muster rolls with U.S. immigration documents.

In all such cases, federal officials are racing the clock. Just as America's
World War II veterans are dying, so are those who fought on the other side.
And so too are the concentration camp survivors who might be able to
identify their persecutors.

As memories fade, accounts of individual atrocities become murky. So it may
never be known for sure what role Kumpf played on Nov. 3, 1943, at the
Trawniki labor camp in Poland.

This much is known: Jewish prisoners had been forced to dig a network of
trenches and then lie down in them, naked. Guards machine-gunned them, a
hundred at a time, until thousands filled the earth. Nazis blared music from
the camp loudspeakers to drown out the cries all that morning, noon and
night. When it was over, up to 10,000 corpses were set ablaze.

Kumpf says that he cannot be held responsible for what happened that day.
But at least one survivor of Trawniki, Vivian Chakin of Beverly Hills,
scoffs.

Chakin, like Kumpf, immigrated to this country; she too became a U.S.
citizen and raised a family here. But she lost her parents and her only
brother in the camps. She wants Kumpf gone.

"He had a good life. He had a family," said Chakin, 78. "That's what all my
people never had. That's what my brother never had. So why not let him feel
a little bit of the suffering? Shouldn't he be punished at last?"

Kumpf's German accent remains thick and his round face shows his age.
Sometimes neighbors see him walking his scruffy gray dog up and down
Rodney Lane. Other times they spot him on his riding lawnmower.

"He's an upstanding man, and I would leave him alone," said Tom Fosbinder, a
neighbor. "Even before they broke the news about his past, he told me that
he had had no choice, that he was just a teenager when the Germans knocked
on his door with guns and conscripted him into the army."

Kumpf and his family will not discuss his past while he is appealing the
deportation order. But his story is documented in depositions, sworn
statements, historical records and other papers that make up the
government's case to remove him.

An ethnic German, Kumpf was born April 7, 1925, in Neu Pasua, Yugoslavia.
He attended the local Lutheran church and, after less than three years in
school, he quit to help his father on their small horse farm. Like most in
the town of 8,000, the Kumpfs were poor.

He grew to be a big man, nearly 6 feet tall with brown eyes and black hair.
They called him "Schwarze Hund," a nickname for a dog. "Here is a strong
man," he told prosecutors last year, patting his chest at the U.S.
attorney's office in downtown Milwaukee while giving a deposition. "I was
strong once. Strong."

The German army marched into Neu Pasua in fall 1942. Kumpf was 17 when he
was ordered to report for duty at the local train station.

Any young man not boarding the train, Kumpf said, "would be put up against
the wall." Some tried to run, and they "were brought back before the rest of
us and shot."

Valdis O. Lumans, a German historian retained by Kumpf's lawyer, said Kumpf
"certainly was not one of the enthusiastic ones. He did not volunteer.
They came and took him."

The army made Kumpf a private and gave him a gray and green SS uniform.
His hat had a skull sewn on it, as did the collar of his shirt. A Nazi
tattoo was etched under his left arm. He was issued firearms and trained
to use a rifle, a machine pistol and a light machine gun.

For 11 months, he served as a tower guard and sentry at several camps in
Germany. Thousands of prisoners arrived by truck or rail. Thousands never
left.

"I watch them, how they go," he said. Many went to the crematoriums. "I
hear they put the people in and that's all," Kumpf testified. "They don't
come out no more, that's what I hear."

On Oct. 29, 1943, Kumpf and others from his Death's Head battalion boarded
trains bound for Trawniki, site of an abandoned sugar factory, in eastern
Poland. They arrived early on the morning of Nov. 3. The Nazis, pestered
by a series of small uprisings at other camps, were cracking down.

The male Jews at Trawniki already had been forced to dig trenches in a
zig-zag pattern; they were told it would provide them cover in the event
of an air raid. Before dawn, prisoners awoke to the marches and waltzes of
Johann Strauss blaring from the camp speakers.

Stripped naked and prodded with nightsticks and rubber truncheons - some
were shot for not moving fast enough - the prisoners were taken to the
trenches, a hundred at a time. Not all went silently. Some of them, as if
trying to drown out the music, cried: "Shema Israel!" - "Hear! O Israel!"

When government lawyers deposed Kumpf in Milwaukee, he insisted he was not
a killer. "I was a good boy before and I'm still a good boy now," he said.
"I don't hurt nobody, and I don't even hurt the flies if they're
behaving."

But prosecutors were not ready to confront him with Trawniki. From a legal
standpoint, proving he came to America fraudulently would be enough to get
him removed. To get him deported was more important, they said.

Kumpf's war ended in the fall of 1945, when he was freed from a Russian
prisoner-of-war camp. He had been captured by the advancing Russian army
after leaving Trawniki and being sent to fight along the eastern front. He
later joined his father in Austria, married and, on the advice of a friend
in the Chicago area, decided to make America his home.

Elizabeth B. White, chief historian for the Office of Special
Investigations, said that on March 21, 1956, Kumpf applied for an immigrant
visa to enter the United States. He visited the U.S. consulate in Salzburg,
Austria, and stated on his application that his place of residence from
1942 to 1945 was "German Army: Germany, Poland, France."

During Kumpf's interview, White said, "he did not disclose his service as
an armed SS Death's Head guard." Richard Bloomfield, then the U.S. vice
consul in Austria, told prosecutors the system regrettably was lax.

Though Bloomfield could not specifically recall Kumpf, he processed
countless visa applications. "I wouldn't ever have anybody admit he was a
guard in a Nazi concentration camp," Bloomfield said. "That's why they got
visas. They lied. But if I knew they had been a guard in a concentration
camp, usually that would be a reason to deny it."

Prosecutors questioned Kumpf in Milwaukee about his visits to the Austrian
consulate.

"You did not tell them that you were a guard at Trawniki?"

"They don't ask," he said.

"You didn't tell them you were in the SS?"

"They didn't ask this either."

Kumpf received an immigrant visa and, on May 25, 1956, entered the U.S. via
New York. He settled in Chicago, and went to work at a Vienna Sausage
factory.

Eight years later, he petitioned to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Again, he listed his past as "German Army, 1942 to 1945." Under oath, Kumpf
told a U.S. immigration examiner in Chicago that he had served only as a
combat soldier. On May 9, 1964, he received a certificate of
naturalization.

For four decades, he told prosecutors, "I was happy in America."

When the two lawyers came to his patio in March 2003, they knew Kumpf was
more than just a German infantryman. They knew he was a Death's Head guard
and had arrived at Trawniki just as the first naked prisoners were being
hurried into ditches.

The prosecutors asked him about Trawniki, and he admitted he was there. But
he also said he never told U.S. immigration officials that he had belonged
to the SS. "I shut up," Kumpf told the prosecutors, explaining it had always
been his position to say nothing about Trawniki. Then, according to Michelle
L. Heyer, the pregnant prosecutor to whom Kumpf had offered a chair, he
made a zipping motion across his mouth.

He later would have to answer their questions about Trawniki.

Prosecutors already had reviewed interviews of other SS guards taken by
German authorities in the 1960s, when that country was beginning to
confront its past.

"The whole business was the most gruesome thing I have ever seen in my
life," recalled one guard, Martin Diekmann. "I often saw that, after a salvo
was fired, Jews were only wounded and were buried still more or less alive
together with the corpses of other victims, without the wounded receiving
a so-called coup de grace."

Diekmann added, "I myself did not shoot."

Aleksandr Kurisa, an SS officer from Ukraine, said: "You could hear the
moans, crying, and screams of those doomed to death. All Jews in Trawniki
were exterminated."

Kurisa added, "I did not directly participate."

Then there were the stories told by survivors.

Estera Rubinstein lay all day long among the dead. In interviews with a
Jewish historical commission soon after the war, she said:

"We were taken to the pits and I only saw SS men standing with machine
pistols and shooting the naked women in the head. The pits were already
full of corpses. Since I did not want to watch them kill me, I hid my
face in my hands and jumped into the depths with the call, 'Shema Israel!' "

She was not hit. But as bodies fell across her, she grew cold. "I was
pressed between the corpses.. I wanted to call out a few times, but
couldn't. It was as though I was being strangled."

An SS guard lifted her head, checking for signs of life. But she was smeared
with blood, and he moved on. She heard others pulled out and "finished
off."

Amid all that, her ears filled with the waltzes. Then, when night fell and
all was quiet, she said, she crawled over bodies and fled across the
fields. Weeks later, she made it to Warsaw, more than 100 miles away.

As Rubinstein was leaving Trawniki, Chakin, then 14, was arriving.

She remembers seeing the dead bodies overflowing the trenches. A few days
later, she said, a team of male prisoners was ordered to burn the dead.
When they finished, the guards shot them.

Chakin and other female prisoners were ordered to clean the barracks, and
they found a 4-year-old boy named Mark hiding in a pile of old bedding.
Mark's mother and brother had been killed earlier in the war; his father had
been shot to death after helping to burn the bodies. The Germans at first
let the women keep the young boy. For five months they mothered him,
encouraging him to hope. Then the SS took Mark away too.

"Because the children," she said, "they did not keep."

Chakin, her voice brittle with anger, added: "So you ask me how I feel I
about him, this Josias Kumpf, and how he got to live to be 80 years old?"


At his deposition in the fifth-floor conference room at the U.S. attorney's
office, Kumpf - now boxed in, confronted by prosecutors with SS documents
placing him at Trawniki - maintained that he did not fire, either. He
insisted that he merely served as a perimeter guard, standing a distance
away from the killing trenches.

When he arrived by train that morning, he said, he and other SS guards ate
breakfast. Then they heard the shouts and gunfire. "All the people were in
the hole.. I [went] over there too and look. I turn around and I . sorry,
it's not for me, that's what I told my friends."

He finished his breakfast, coffee and rye bread with butter. He said he
was ordered to watch, to make sure no one escaped.

"I was watching them shoot some people," he said. "Some people was shot
and not good enough so they was still able to move, you know. That's what we
have to watch so that they don't go no place."

Then, Kumpf said, "Everybody was excited because so many dead ones to see,
you know. I was not excited. I feel sorry for the people."

On May 10, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman in Milwaukee revoked Kumpf's
citizenship. He ruled that Kumpf had misrepresented himself to immigration
authorities. "American citizenship," the judge said, "is bestowed only
upon those who meet fundamental standards imposed by law."

The judge further ruled that Kumpf's mere presence at Trawniki meant he
"personally advocated or assisted" in the massacre, and as a result, was
ineligible for a U.S. visa in the first place.

Kumpf's attorney, Peter Rogers, said he was appealing the ruling before the
U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Should his client be forced out, Rogers
said, "it is murky territory on where he can go. A lot of countries won't
take people with his circumstances."

While he waits, his fate all but out of his hands, Kumpf often is frightened
awake by nightmares. For years he had hoped to keep his secret about
Trawniki.

But now, he said, it is too late. "I'm in trouble, more in trouble" than
ever, he said.

(source: Los Angeles Times)







USA//OHIO:

Is justice being served - and does anybody care?


The highest tribunal of the U.S. immigration court system is expected
tomorrow to hold what could be one of the final court sessions on
the endless John Demjanjuk affair. The court president will hear appeals
from Demjanjuk's lawyers on the decision to deport him, will ask
representatives of the Justice Department to name the country to which
they intend to deport the 85-year-old man, and will ask if this country
has already consented to accept him.

John Demjanjuk has been in and out of American courts ever since his
return there after the Israeli High Court set aside his original
conviction by the Jerusalem District Court, citing evidence that cast
doubt on his identity as "Ivan the Terrible" from Treblinka. The U.S.
Justice Department is now determined to deport him from the U.S., but his
family is determined to fight the decision so that he can live out his
days in America.

Demjanjuk was officially termed "removable" last week. The legal ruling,
issued by Chief Immigration Judge Michael Creppy, is considered one of the
last steps before the deportation order can be executed. From the moment
it is determined that an individual residing in the U.S. without legal
status - and Demjanjuk already lost his American citizenship three years
ago - is removable, then all that remains to do is decide on the technical
steps needed to effect the deportation, and enable representatives of the
deportation candidate to appeal the decision.

Citizenship revoked

Demjanjuk was sent back to America in September 1993, and to many it
seemed that this would put an end to the option of placing him on trial
there. The feeling of stinging defeat, after the State of Israel failed to
prove that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible from Treblinka - though the
court noted there was substantive evidence to show he was part of the Nazi
campaign of mass murder and genocide stemming from his service at the
Trawniki training camp, the Sobibor death camp and the Flossenburg and
Regensberg concentration camps - caused those involved in the case to
withdraw from any further legal proceedings against Demjanjuk. He went
back to his family in Seven Hills, a suburb of Cleveland, and his American
citizenship was restored in February 1998, after it was determined that
the Justice Department had accepted improperly in his case when it failed
to reveal all of the material in its possession to representatives of the
defense.

But not everyone gave up. The Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations, headed by Eli Rosenbaum, began attempts to renew
proceedings against Demjanjuk, based on the evidence of his having served
at Sobibor, Trawniki, Flossenburg and Regensberg. These efforts bore fruit
in 2002, and a federal court in Ohio again revoked Demjanjuk's American
citizenship. The reasoning was twofold: first, because he had lied to U.S.
immigration authorities when he arrived in 1952 regarding his past during
WW II, and second, because of the role he played in the Nazi camps.

Judge Paul Matia determined that Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor, where
an estimated 250,000 people were murdered, in the Majdanek camp where over
170,000 people were killed, and in the Flossenburg camp, where some 30,000
people were killed. What's more, the court determined that Demjanjuk had
received special training in Trawniki, which was the training ground for
Operation Reinhardt, the object of which was the deportation and murder of
all of Poland's Jews. Demjanjuk took part in a process in which thousands
of Jews were suffocated to death in the gas chambers in Sobibor, said
Judge Matia. In December 2004, the federal appeals court upheld the
judge's decision, and refused to restore Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship.

The act of losing citizenship does not in itself lead to immediate
deportation. Although Demjanjuk lacks legal status in the U.S., his
deportation requires a judicial procedure that can take much time. The
U.S. Justice Department has been trying to accelerate this process ever
since the decision to revoke Demjanjuk's citizenship was upheld. Officials
of the Office of Special Investigations - which was set up in 1979 to
investigate and take legal action against Nazi war criminals living in the
United States - want to see Demjanjuk removed from U.S. territory as soon
as possible.

"John Demjanjuk's role in helping to doom thousands of Jews to
annihilation in Sobibor's gas chambers renders him singularly unworthy of
continued residence in this country," said Rosenbaum, after the court
ruled that Demjanjuk was removable, "and the government will seek to
remove him as expeditiously as possible."

Since the OSI was founded, it has gained convictions against 100 people
who aided the Nazi regime, and another 170 files are now in legal
proceedings.

Judge Creppy, president of the High Court for Immigration Affairs, showed
no sympathy for Demjanjuk in his 16-page verdict, issued last week in
Washington. He determined that in his role as a guard in the camps, he
"prevented the escape of prisoners being held captive and who were left at
the disposition of the Nazis." As such, he abandoned them to "awful abuse
and almost certain death," as the judge wrote in his decision.

Creppy's aggressive stand is one of the points on which Demjanjuk's
representatives intend to use, in the aim of overturning the decision.
Attorney Thomas Elliott, who represented Demjanjuk at the hearing, intends
to ask Creppy tomorrow to recuse himself from continued handling of the
case. He claims that Creppy is biased in the matter, and as evidence he
cites a long article written by the judge in which he speaks of the need
to judge war criminals harshly. Since Creppy appointed himself to handle
the case, Elliot now seeks to invalidate him and transfer the hearings to
other judges.

This is not the only defense that Demjanjuk intends to put forth. He
continues to vehemently claim that he is the victim of mistaken identity,
and that not only is he not Ivan the Terrible, as was charged in the past,
but that he did not serve as a guard in Nazi death camps in Europe.
However, at this stage, after all of the other courts have already
determined that Demjanjuk did aid Nazis, this argument seems to have
little chance of being accepted.

Abusing the elderly?

The strongest argument left Demjanjuk to prevent his deportation from the
U.S. is his age and state of health. His family and his attorneys claim
that the deportation of the 85-year-old, who suffers from poor health,
would constitute abuse and torture, forbidden by law. This claim will be
put to the judicial test, but so far it has not deterred the Justice
Ministry from its attempt to deport Demjanjuk.

Department officials have claimed in the past that the fact that the
subject is elderly should not deter them from demanding that the law be
upheld to the letter, and that the determination that he is in frail
health is subjective and not necessarily based on proven facts. The last
time that Demjanjuk was seen in public, when he appeared in a Cleveland
court in February, he was seated in a wheelchair and looked to be
suffering from respiratory difficulties. Members of his family say that he
is suffering from serious back troubles.

In many respects, the final hurdles left before Demjanjuk's deportation
from the U.S. are technical: will his lawyers manage to prove that his
state of health is so severe that he should not be deported, and will a
country be found willing to accept him. The court asked the State
Department to find a country that would accept Demjanjuk. The first option
being looked into is Ukraine, where Demjanjuk was born. But there is no
certainty that the Ukrainians would be interested in receiving him. He is
no longer a Ukrainian citizen, and the state itself bears little
similarity to the one he left 53 years ago.

Although Ukraine is defined as Demjanjuk's "country of origin" and would
therefore be in line to receive him, it has been an independent state
since its liberation from Soviet control and is not obligated to take him.
Another option being looked into is deporting Demjanjuk to Poland, but in
the case of the Poles, as well, there is no certainty that they will agree
to the proposal. Germany's name has also been mentioned, as a state to
which the U.S. may appeal in this matter.

If the appeal procedures are exhausted, and there is still no country
willing to take in Demjanjuk, he would be defined as a "person without a
nation" and could be imprisoned for several months, but unless there would
be a change in status, or if no country would be found to accept the
deportee, he would be released and sent back home.

From a major international story, the case of John Demjanjuk has in recent
years become an almost marginal matter. For the Justice Department's OSI,
he is still one of the biggest cases and constitutes a symbol that the
American justice system does not rest, even after 60 years, and brings to
justice those people who assisted the Nazi machinery of death.

But in the public opinion, his story has been nearly forgotten. The media
barely reported the latest decision to define him as "removable" from the
U.S., and the question of Demjanjuk's legal status and the possibility of
his deportation do not prominently feature on the agendas of Jewish
organizations, which have not invested any lobbying efforts in the case.

From the moment that Demjanjuk is determined to be removable, the
procedure takes six months to a year, and takes place in the immigration
courts system. Demjanjuk can appeal to the federal appeals court, but this
would not stop the deportation procedures. The new U.S. immigration laws
state that a person can be deported even when his case is being heard by a
federal appeals court, after the immigration court has upheld the decision
to deport.

The Demjanjuk affair is drawing to a close. What began as one of the most
important trials ever in the struggle to bring Nazis and their supporters
to justice is ending far from the public consciousness. Demjanjuk's age,
the drawn out legal procedures and the botched case in Israel have
transformed the affair from a symbol of doing justice at any cost and
placing the willing collaborators of the Nazis in the same ranks as the
murderers themselves, into a practically forgotten affair.

(source: Ha'Aretz)