Efforts by the Justice Department to strip Elmars Sprogis a 69-year-old former Latvian police official of his American citizenship were thwarted last Friday when a U.S. district court judge ruled that the government had failed to prove beyond doubt that Sprogis had collaborated with the Nazis in Latvia and participated in the slaughter of Jewish residents there during World War II.
In an 87-page decision, Judge Frank Altimari wrote that “While it is evident that Elmars Sprogis … watched a hundred or a hundred fifty men, women and children being marched to an execution site, the court does not believe that Congress intended to exclude from citizenship persons who were present when others were persecuted.”
While Altimari wrote that people should “never forget the abominable atrocities inflicted at the hands of Hitler’s Nazis,” he said the government’s witnesses to Sprogis’ war crimes were not sufficiently credible and left room for doubt. The government relied on two videotaped interviews conducted in Riga, Latvia. One witness was a former Latvian policeman and the other witness said Sprogis ordered him to deliver valuables taken from Jews scheduled to be executed.
Sprogis, a retired construction worker living in Brentwood, Long Island, was accused by the Justice Department of concealing his wartime aid to the Nazis. He was charged specifically with concealing his role as assistant police chief in Gulbene and as police chief in Madona, both in Nazi-occupied Latvia, when he applied for U.S. citizenship in 1950. No decision has yet been made by the government on whether to appeal the court’s ruling.
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