FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM MONDAY, MAY 19, 1997 (202) 514-2008 TDD (202) 514-1888 FORMER NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD IS ORDERED DEPORTED WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Department of Justice announced today that its Office of Special Investigations (OSI) has won a court order of deportation against Nikolaus Schiffer, a New Ringgold, Pennsylvania, man who served the Nazis in World War II as an armed SS concentration camp guard at the Sachsenhausen and Hersbruck Concentration Camps in Germany and the Madjanek Concentration Camp and Trawniki SS training and base camp in Poland. U.S. Immigration Judge John J. Gossert, Jr., found that Schiffer, 78, participated in the persecution of persons because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion in association with the Nazi government of Germany, while serving as a member of the Nazi SS-Totenkopf Sturmbann (Death's Head Battalions) at the Sachsenhausen, Hersbruck and Madjanek Concentration Camps, at the Trawniki SS training and base camp and on two Nazi "death marches." In ordering Schiffer deported to Romania, Gossert noted that "Schiffer personally testified to his participation in a death march from Hersbruck to Auschwitz on which weakened prisoners were shot or left to die when they could not continue." Atrocities were committed against thousands of civilians at the Sachsenhausen, Majdanek, Trawniki and Hersbruck camps during the period of Schiffer's SS service there. Jews and other prisoners were subjected to inhumane treatment, including forcible confinement, subjection to slave labor, physical and emotional abuse and torture and mass murder at these camps. In a February 1995 decision revoking Schiffer's naturalized citizenship, Judge Franklin Van Antwerpen of the United States District Court in Philadelphia, wrote that it is "beyond dispute" that "the armed concentration camp guards played a major role in the persecution of these persons and in attaining the Nazi goal of annihilation...." The evidence, he declared, "clearly and unequivocally established" that Schiffer, a retired baker, "was an active participant in the persecution occurring at these camps in that he helped prevent inmates from escaping the grotesquely inhumane condition there." The Schiffer proceeding is a result of OSI's ongoing investigation of Nazi persecutors illegally residing in the U.S. OSI Director Eli M. Rosenbaum called the decision "an important victory in the quest to secure a measure of justice on behalf of the victims of Nazi inhumanity." Since OSI was created in 1979, 59 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of their illegally- obtained citizenship and 42 such persons have been removed from the U.S. Some 300 persons remain under investigation. ### 97-207