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.

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