A federal judge here ruled today that Frank Walus, 55, a Germanborn Chicago resident, was guilty of having concealed his participation in Nazi war crimes when he applied for American citizenship which he obtained in 1970. That was II years after he migrated to this country from Poland as a Polish national.
The ruling by Judge Julius Hoffman, senior U.S. district judge in Chicago, stripped Walus of his citizenship. His attorney said he would appeal the ruling. A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which initiated the proceedings against Walus, said the INS would begin deportation proceedings against Walus if all appeals failed.
The civil hearing was based on an affidavit, submitted by the regional INS office here, that Walus committed crimes against civilians in Poland in 1939-43, including the murders of some two dozen Jews, including young children, and with being “particularly active in the merciless beating and mistreatment” of Jews in the Polish cities of Czestochowa and Kielce.
Among the II witnesses who implicated Walus in the acts charged in the affidavit were several from Israel. Defense witnesses included some Germans. Walus denied committing any of the acts charged against him.
The next legal step, observers here said, is a trial to determine if he is to be deported, assuming Judge Hoffman’s ruling is not overturned on appeal. When the civil complaint was filed here against Walus last year, a Justice Department spokesman in Washington said that if Walus was deported, Poland would be the most likely country to be asked to receive him.
Information leading to the complaint was provided by Simon Wiesenthal, the noted Nazi hunter, according to U.S. prosecutor Sam Skinner.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
