Philadelphia man ordered deported for serving as Nazi guard

The main entrance to Buchenwald

A U.S. immigration judge has ordered an 85-year-old retired steelworker deported to Austria, or any other country that will accept him, for serving as an armed Nazi death camp guard during World War II.

Anton Geiser and his attorney did not immediately return calls and an e-mail for comment on the decision announced Tuesday by the Justice Department. Judge Charles Honeyman issued the 14-page order out of Philadelphia on Monday. Geiser was born in what is now part of Croatia and came to the United States from Austria in 1956. He has lived in Sharon, about 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, since 1960. He became a citizen in 1962 and is married with three sons.

"As a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II, Anton Geiser must be held to account for his role in the persecution of countless men, women and children," Assistant U.S. Attorney General Lanny Breuer said in a statement Tuesday. "The long passage of time will not diminish our resolve to deny refuge to such individuals."

A Department of Justice spokeswoman said Geiser was not in custody. He can appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals in Washington.

Geiser has acknowledged being an armed guard who watched over and escorted prisoners at three Nazi death camps. He has argued that his service was not voluntary and that he was therefore eligible to emigrate under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. Federal prosecutors have instead cited the 1978 Holtzman Amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act to exclude citizenship and deport "aliens who persecuted any person on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion, under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany."

Geiser, an ethnic German, was drafted into the German army at 17 and served as an armed SS Death Head guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin for much of 1943. He later was transferred to an SS officer training camp at Arolsen, where he escorted prisoners to and from the Buchenwald camp, where tens of thousands of Jews and others were exterminated. He was at Arolsen until April 1945. Geiser has denied harming any prisoners, though he has acknowledged having orders to shoot prisoners who tried to escape.

A federal judge in Pittsburgh revoked his citizenship under the Holtzman amendment, and he lost a U.S. Third Circuit appeal in 2008. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case last year.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Arbeit Macht Frei sign stolen from Auschwitz

Sign that spanned entrance to former Nazi death camp in Poland removed overnight

Thieves removed the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that spanned the entrance to the former Auschwitz death camp

The iron sign bearing the Nazi slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" that spanned the main entrance to the former Auschwitz death camp was stolen before dawn today, Polish police said. The sign with the German words for "Work Sets You Free" is believed to have been stolen from the gates of the Auschwitz memorial between 3.30am and 5am, when museum guards noticed it was missing and alerted authorities, said a police spokeswoman, Katarzyna Padlo.

The five-metre-long, 40kg sign across a gate at the main entrance to the former Nazi death camp in southern Poland, where more than 1 million people died during the second world war, was unscrewed on one side and pulled off on the other, Padlo said. A spokesman for the Auschwitz museum, Pawel Sawicki, called the theft a "desecration" and said it was shocking that the tragic history of the site did not stop the thieves. In Brussels, the European parliament president, Jerry Burzek, appealed for the sign to be returned "out of respect for the suffering of over a million victims".

Another museum spokesman, Jaroslaw Mensfelt, said the thieves carried the sign 300 metres to an opening in a barbed-wire gap in a concrete wall. The opening had been left intentionally to preserve a poplar tree dating back to the time of the war.

Fifty criminal investigators and a sniffer dog were sent to the grounds of the vast former death camp, where barracks, watchtowers and the ruins of gas chambers stand as testament to the atrocities inflicted by Nazi Germany on Jews, Gypsies and others. The sniffer dog led police to a spot outside the wall where the sign left an imprint in freshly fallen snow, then to a roadside where the sign appeared to have been loaded on to a getaway vehicle. A 5,000-zloty (£1,000) reward has been offered to anyone who can help track down the perpetrators.

Padlo said there were no suspects but police were pursuing several theories. Another police spokesman told TVP Info television: "The whole area is under surveillance. There are many cameras there. We are now analysing the film. I hope we will find the trail."

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, told Reuters the theft was "an attack on the memory of the Holocaust". Noach Flug, president of the International Auschwitz Committee in Jerusalem, said it "deeply unsettles the survivors" and the sign "has to be found".

Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said the thieves were guilty of desecrating a site of immense importance.

"If they are pranksters, they'd have to be sick pranksters, or someone with a political agenda. But whoever has done it has desecrated world memory," he said. "Auschwitz has to stand intact because without it, we are without the world's greatest physical reminder of what we are capable of doing to each other."

Sawicki said the museum authorities had already replaced the sign with a replica, which was used briefly a few years ago when the original was being repaired.

The original sign was made in the summer of 1940 by non-Jewish Polish inmates of Auschwitz in an iron workshop at the camp. After occupying Poland in 1939, the Nazis established the Auschwitz I camp in the southern Polish city of Oswiecim and initially used it for German political prisoners and non-Jewish Polish prisoners.

"We believe that the perpetrators will be found soon and the inscription will be returned to its place," said Sawicki.

The slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" was used at the entrances to other Nazi camps, including Dachau and Sachsenhausen, but the long, curving sign at Auschwitz is perhaps the best known. More than a million people visit the Auschwitz site every year, but the barracks and other structures are in a state of disrepair and Polish authorities have been struggling to find the funds to carry out conservation work. This week, Germany pledged €60m to an endowment that will fund long-term preservation work – half the amount that Auschwitz memorial museum officials say is needed.

Guardian

Hunt for most-wanted Nazi war criminal ends in Egypt

Son says 'Doctor Death' died in 1992 after search tracks down SS fugitive to Cairo hotel

The hunt for the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Aribert Heim, appeared to have come to an end today with reports suggesting that he died in Cairo almost 17 years ago, after converting to Islam. According to new evidence published today, Heim, known as "Doctor Death" for the atrocities he committed against Jews as a physician at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps, spent the last decade of his life living in Egypt after reinventing himself as an apparently kindly old man called Uncle Tarek, who played ping-pong with local children.

While serving with the SS, he was accused of injecting petrol into his victims' hearts, removing organs from healthy patients and decorating his desk with the skulls of prisoners he killed.

Heim was the prime target of Operation: Last Chance, the campaign by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to track down the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust. After 240 leads, which mainly focused on south America, Heim appears to have been tracked down to a hotel in Cairo. His son, Ruediger Heim, has admitted for the first time that his father died of cancer on 10 August 1992, after watching the Barcelona Olympics on TV. He said he was with his father when he died.

An investigation by the New York Times and the German broadcaster ZDF discovered a briefcase belonging to Heim which included his passport, bank details, and newspaper clippings of reports of efforts to track him down and his trial in absentia. It also included letters protesting his innocence and accusing Simon Wiesenthal of inventing Heim's atrocities.

ZDF reported that Heim was buried in a cemetery for the poor in Cairo, where graves are reused after several years "so that the chance of finding remains is unlikely".

According to friends in Egypt, the doctor who had applied himself so vigorously to butchering and torturing his victims in the name of medicine had asked for his own body to be donated to medical research at his death. According to ZDF, his wish was not granted for religious reasons.

Today, the Wiesenthal Centre said that while there was "no doubt" that Heim had lived in Egypt, it had not been established that he had died there.

"What is not clear, what is missing from the presentation by ZDF and the New York Times, is the conclusive proof he indeed died in Egypt in 1992," Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the centre, told Reuters. "There's no grave, there's no body. We can't do any DNA testing."

Zuroff also pointed out that Ruediger Heim had previously said that the only contact he had had since his father went into hiding in 1962 were two notes, and that he had no idea if he was alive or dead.

"Ruediger has been lying," Zuroff told the Associated Press. "Either he is lying now or he was lying before, and he has a vested interest in this so anything he says has to be taken with a certain amount of scepticism and suspicion and the most important thing is missing: the body."

If it turns out to be true, however, Zuroff said that "the German police have a very important investigation on their hands in terms of prosecuting people who helped Heim escape justice". Ruediger Heim refused to comment when contacted at his home by the Associated Press.

Born on 28 June 1914, in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was annexed by Germany. He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941. He was held by the Americans after the war but released before the true extent of his crimes had become clear. He kept a low profile for the next two decades, even avoiding being photographed in the team picture of the ice hockey club he played for.

In 1961, German authorities were alerted that Heim was living in Baden-Baden and began an investigation, but when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed him, apparently after he had been tipped off. Heim fled through France and Spain before crossing into Morocco, and eventually settling in Egypt, ZDF and the New York Times reported, citing Ruediger Heim.

He lived in Cairo, under the name Tarek Hussein Farid, at the Kasr el Madina hotel for the 10 years leading up to his death, the report said. Mahmoud Doma, whose father owned the hotel, said Heim was known as Uncle Tarek, and that he played table tennis with him on the roof of the hotel. He said he bought sweets for children in the neighbourhood. Heim converted to Islam and worshipped at Cairo's famous al-Azhar mosque, the New York Times said.

Ruediger Heim told ZDF that he first visited his father in 1976, organising the trip through his aunt and arranging to meet with him in a hotel.

"He recognised me right away," Heim recalled. "It was a meeting of worlds. I was there for 14 days."

But, he said, he did not talk with his father about the allegations against him, largely because he said he was not fully aware of them himself.

"I didn't ask him: 'How many people did you kill?' because I didn't know. I didn't know any concrete details," he told ZDF. "Later, on other visits, I got to know his life better."

Guardian