FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 1995 (202) 616-2771 TDD (202) 514-1888 JUSTICE DEPARTMENT INITIATES DEPORTATION PROCEEDINGS AGAINST NAZI SS GUARD WASHINGTON, D.C.--The Department of Justice announced today that it had initiated deportation proceedings in U.S. Immigration Court in Philadelphia against 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 Majdanek Concentration Camp in Poland. The Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and the District Office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Philadelphia today served Nikolaus Schiffer with an order to show cause why he should not be deported from the United States for assisting in the persecution of civilians on the basis of race, religion, national origin and political opinion. In August 1993, as a result of a denaturalization suit brought by OSI, Judge Franklin Van Antwerpen of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, stripped Schiffer, 75, of his U.S. citizenship. Judge Van Antwerpen found that Schiffer lacked the requisite good moral character required for United States citizenship because of his service as an armed guard on labor details at the camps and his participation as an SS guard on two Nazi "death marches." Judge Van Antwerpen's decision was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit last year. Abundant evidence exists concerning the atrocities committed against thousands of civilians at the Sachsenhausen, Majdanek 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 his decision denaturalizing Schiffer, Van Antwerpen 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 "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. Since OSI was created in 1979, 50 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of their illegally-obtained citizenship and 42 persons have been removed from the United States. More than 300 persons remain under investigation. 95-062 ####