Feds seek to revoke citizenship of man accused of Nazi acts

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department initiated proceedings Wednesday to revoke the U.S. citizenship of a Millbury, Mass., man accused of participating in the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.

The complaint against Vladas Zajanckauskas, filed in U.S. District Court in Worcester, Mass., alleges that Zajanckauskas, 87, trained as a guard at the Nazi-operated Trawniki Training Camp in German-occupied Poland.

"That's not true," Zajanckauskas said of the accusations. "I never wore a German uniform."

Run jointly by the German Waffen SS, an elite unit of Adolf Hitler's army during the war, and the German police, the Trawniki camp trained Eastern European recruits to assist the Nazis in implementing their plan to murder Jews in Poland, the federal complaint said.

Zajanckauskas became a noncommissioned officer in the operation to clear and destroy the ghetto -- the district where Nazis forcibly confined Jews, it said.

That included bombing sewer tunnels in which Jews who resisted removal to concentration camps were hiding.

Zajanckauskas also trained other men to carry out the destruction, which took place in the spring of 1943, the complaint said.

Zajanckauskas said he never killed anyone for the Nazis. He said he was a sergeant in the Lithuanian army who was captured by the Nazis and put in a concentration camp.

"They didn't train me," he said. "They put me in a kitchen and made me work the canteen. The whole time I stayed in the kitchen. I was in a room without windows."

Justice's Office of Special Investigations looks for individuals who took part in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution and who subsequently entered or tried to enter the United States illegally or fraudulently.

Since 1979, 68 people have been stripped of U.S. citizenship as a result of those probes. More than 170 U.S. residents are currently under investigation.

When Zajanckauskas immigrated to the United States in February 1950, he concealed his Nazi service, the department said, telling U.S. officials he'd been a farmer in Lithuania until 1944, when he fled to Germany and then to Austria.

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On the Net:

Office of Special Investigations: http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/osi.html