FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 1997 (202) 514-2008 TDD (202) 514-1888 JUDGE REVOKES U.S. CITIZENSHIP OF FORMER MEMBER OF NAZI MOBILE KILLING UNIT WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Department of Justice announced today that the Criminal Division's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Dyer, Indiana, had won an order from the U.S. District Court in Hammond, Indiana, revoking the U.S. citizenship of Kazys "Casey" Ciurinskas, a Crown Point, Indiana man who served during World War II as an armed member of a Nazi-sponsored mobile killing unit that murdered thousands of Jews and others in German-occupied Byelorussia (now Belarus) and Lithuania. U.S. District Court Judge James Moody found yesterday that Ciurinskas, 79, participated in the Nazi-sponsored persecution of civilians while serving as a member of the infamous 2nd Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion. The court also found that Ciurinskas had procured his U.S. visa and U.S. citizenship by fraud and that he lacked the good moral character necessary to become a U.S. citizen. He immigrated to this country from Germany in 1949 and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1955. The 2nd Battalion was a mobile killing group recruited in Lithuania that perpetrated numerous mass shootings of Jewish men, women and children, as well as Soviet POWs and suspected communists and their families, in both Lithuania and Byelorussia. During the month of October 1941 alone, battalion members participated in massacres that claimed the lives of some 10,000 innocent civilians in Byelorussia. OSI Director Eli M. Rosenbaum noted that the Ciurinskas decision is a result of OSI's ongoing investigation of Nazi persecutors illegally residing in the United States. He called the court's decision "an important victory for historical truth," adding that the ruling "provides further proof that Hitler's henchmen can still be brought to the bar of justice despite the many years that have passed since the Third Reich's infamous crimes were perpetrated." Rosenbaum stated that the Justice Department was grateful to the German government for what he termed "outstanding assistance" in the case. During the June 1995 trial, the Government proved that the Battalion was ordered to Byelorussia from its base in Kaunas, Lithuania in October 1941. Prosecutors introduced testimony from a Jewish survivor and from two former members of the battalion living in Lithuania. The former battalion members recounted in chilling detail how their unit, along with German personnel, surrounded villages, forcibly assembled the victims, and then drove them en masse to wooded areas where they were murdered by gunfire. In 1962, Major Franz Lechthaler, the German officer under whose command the battalion conducted the killing operations in Byelorussia, was convicted in Germany on multiple murder charges. He has since died. Judge Moody found that the Germans made "extensive use" of Schutzmannschaft personnel in carrying out the so-called "Final Solution," the Nazi program to annihilate Europe's Jews. He specifically found that Ciurinskas was a member of the 2nd Battalion, that he participated in a September 11-12, 1941 "special mission" to execute civilians in Lithuania, and that he travelled with the battalion to Byelorussia later that year on an assignment to kill Jews and others deemed to be enemies of the Third Reich. The Court found that Ciurinskas' battalion took part in at least nine killing actions in Byelorussia, resulting in the deaths of over 19,000 civilians, including at least 6,000 men, women and children from the Jewish ghetto in Minsk, Byelorussia, who were killed on November 7-12, 1941. Judge Moody found that Ciurinskas had been assigned on November 6, 1941 as a guard in Minsk in accordance with orders from a German killing squad. "As a member of the 2nd Company of the 2nd Schutzmannschaft Battalion, Ciurinskas participated in at least one, and more likely more than one of the killing actions" perpetrated by the battalion, Judge Moody wrote in a 58-page opinion. In denaturalizing Ciurinskas, Judge Moody relied in part on statements that the defendant made in a 1966 application for a German military disability pension. Throughout the case, Ciurinskas steadfastly denied that he had travelled to Byelorussia and that he had served the Germans. In his pension application, however, he confirmed his service under German command and stated that he had been "wounded by a land mine explosion while on an official duty assignment during the return from Minsk." The German government provided Ciurinskas' pension file to OSI in 1994 and arranged for the former German consular official who processed the application to testify in the case, establishing that the statements made in the application were Ciurinskas' own. The German authorities recently cancelled Ciurinskas' pension based on the evidence amassed against him. OSI was created in 1979 to investigate and take legal action against Axis persecutors living in the United States. To date, 60 participants in Nazi-sponsored persecution have been stripped of U.S. citizenship and 42 such persons have been removed from this country. According to Rosenbaum, some 300 persons remain under investigation. A deportation proceeding against another member of the 2nd Battalion, Juozas Naujalis, is scheduled to reconvene in Chicago on August 11, 1997. ### 97-255