Liudas Kairys, who allegedly served as a guard at the Treblinka death camp, was deported last Friday to Germany, ending a 13-year legal battle against him waged by the U.S. Justice Department.
Kairys, 72, who lived in Chicago, was charged with lying about his wartime past when he entered the United States in 1949 and when he became a U.S. citizen in 1957.
The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation filed suit against Kairys in 1980, charging he had personally assisted in persecuting Jewish civilians during World War II from 1943 to 1944.
But his name first became known publicly in the 1960s, when it came up during the West German trial of another former guard in the Nazi SS, Franz Swidersky.
Testimony against Kairys came from other former SS guards as well.
The Kairys case is one of the most assiduously litigated ones in the annals of U.S. efforts to prosecute alleged Nazi war criminals. It went through the U.S. legal system twice — before eight courts, including the U.S Supreme Court.
Kairys, who was originally from Lithuania, denied the charges against him. He claimed to have been a farmer in Lithuania from 1940 to 1942 and said he was then captured and deployed as a forced laborer in various locations in Lithuania and Poland.
Although Germany, Kairys’ destination of choice, agreed to take him, it is not known what fate awaits him there.
Kairys, who worked for some 25 years for the Crackerjack firm, espoused racist views during his court appearances.
He wrote a letter charging that the Jews and the Communists were behind his troubles. And in a deposition he referred to his saviors, black U.S. soldiers, as “niggers.”
During one judicial proceeding, Kairys cried out to a prosecuting attorney, “You can’t prove this.”
When the attorney said, “You mean you did it, but we can’t prove it?” Kairys replied, “That’s right.”
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