Josef Eckert, a former SS guard at Auschwitz who lived for many years in the Los Angeles area, was voluntarily deported to Austria this week.
The success of Eckert’s deportation was the fruit of a U.S. Justice Department effort that turned into an unexpected tragedy for the department’s Office of Special Investigations.
OSI’s deputy director, Michael Bernstein, was carrying Austria’s agreement to accept Eckert when he lost his life last December in the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Eckert’s deportation was announced here Wednesday night by OSI Director Neal Sher, who was in New York to receive the 1989 Raoul Wallenberg “Hero in Our Time” Award from Shaare Zedek Medical Center.
Sher was one of seven award recipients at a dinner ceremony here to benefit Shaare Zedek’s Raoul Wallenberg Pediatric Day Hospital in Jerusalem. All awards were given for fighting, seeking or capturing Nazis.
Other recipients of the award, which was presented by Texas billionaire businessman H. Ross Perot, included former Mossad chief Isser Harel; Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld; and Bruce Teicholz, a Holocaust survivor who commanded Jewish guerrilla fighters in Poland and Hungary.
Also, Franz Muller, a non-Jewish German who was a member of the anti-Nazi White Rose movement, and reserve Col. Henry Plitt, an American theater-owner who was first to parachute onto the Normandy beach on June 6, 1944, and who later captured Nazi Julius Streicher.
ARRIVED THURSDAY
Sher, who received the award for his dedication to seeking out and deporting Nazis who have found haven in the United States, said, “The award really belongs to my entire office, whose staff worked tirelessly.
“And it belongs as well to the memory of Michael Bernstein, who was murdered on board Pan Am Flight 103.”
Sher reminded his listeners that Bernstein was carrying with him that December day the Austrian government’s promise to take Eckert. He used the podium to break the news that Eckert was en route to Austria.
Eckert, 75, was observed getting on a British Air flight from Los Angeles to London on Tuesday evening, a trip for which he had paid his own way.
The retired factory worker from La Puente, near Los Angeles, reportedly fell asleep at Heathrow Airport and missed his connecting Swissair flight Wednesday to Salzburg, Austria.
He arrived there Thursday evening.
Eckert, a native of Yugoslavia, does not face charges in Austria, the country where he requested to be deported.
U.S. deportation proceedings against Eckert began on Dec. 21, 1987. The Justice Department charged that Eckert “participated in the persecution” of Auschwitz inmates as a member of the notorious SS Totenkopf-Sturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion) from 1943 to 1945.
On September 27, 1988, Eckert admitted having concealed his activities at Auschwitz from immigration authorities when he entered the United States from Austria on April 10, 1956. He agreed to be deported without a trial.
Austria did not ask to extradite Eckert and did not initially want to accept him.
In Washington, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh praised Bernstein’s work on the case during an official announcement of the deportation Thursday.
“The successful completion of the Eckert case is a fitting tribute to Mike Bernstein’s prosecutorial and diplomatic skills and to his dedication in the pursuit of justice,” he said.
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.
