FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1996 (202) 616-2777 TDD (202) 514-1888 JUSTICE DEPARTMENT MOVES TO REVOKE U.S. CITIZENSHIP OF FORMER NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD WASHINGTON, D.C.-- The Department of Justice announced today that it has commenced denaturalization proceedings to revoke the United States citizenship of a Kansas City, Kansas, man charged with participating in the persecution of Jews and other civilians while serving as an SS guard during World War II at the infamous Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. A complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kansas, by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the Justice Department's Criminal Division and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Kansas City alleges that the defendant, Michael Kolnhofer, now 79, entered the German Waffen-SS in September 1942. After the war, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, ruled that the Waffen-SS was a criminal organization involved in "the persecution and extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied territories, the administration of the slave labor program and the mistreatment and murder of prisoners of war." To date, 57 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of U.S. citizenship and 48 have been removed from the United States since OSI began operations in 1979. There are more than 300 persons currently under investigation currently by OSI. Captured wartime Nazi records show that in January 1943, Kolnhofer became a member of the SS Death's Head Guard Battalion (SS-Totenkopf-Wachbataillon), also known as the SS Death's Head Battalion (SS-Totenkopf-Sturmbann), at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin, Germany, where he served as an armed guard of prisoners until January 1944. Members of virtually every European national group and religious denomination, as well as Allied prisoners of war and political opponents of the Nazis, were imprisoned and murdered at Sachsenhausen during this period because of their religion, national origin, race, or political opinion. Sachsenhausen was also the site of a variety of gruesome medical experiments that took the lives of many prisoners. Tens of thousands of prisoners were killed by shooting, hanging, gassing, beatings, and other means while the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was in operation. SS personnel records further show that Kolnhofer was transferred in January 1944 to the Death's Head Battalion at Buchenwald Concentration Camp near Weimar, Germany. The vast majority of prisoners at Buchenwald were confined for political, racial, or religious reasons. Thousands of prisoners died at Buchenwald during the war from exhaustion, exposure, epidemics and undernourishment. Many others were murdered by hanging, shooting, lethal injection and medical experimentation, and other means. "The defendant concealed his Nazi concentration camp guard service from U.S. immigration officials when he immigrated to this country from Germany, in 1952," OSI Director Eli M. Rosenbaum stated, "and he never would have received a U.S. visa had he disclosed the truth." Rosenbaum said that the initiation of proceedings to denaturalize Kolhnofer is a result of OSI's ongoing efforts to identify and take legal action against former participants in Nazi persecution residing in this country. # # # 96-613