A move by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) to deport a war criminal was hailed here by Richard Berman, chairman of the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Commission on the Holocaust and the Prosecution of Nazi-War Criminals.
A deportation order was signed in Chicago on December 23 against Hans Lipschis, a 63-year-old retired factory worker. Lipschis, who served under the Nazis as a member of the SS Death’s Head Battalion at Auschwitz and Birkenau and as a camp guard, was ordered to leave the U.S. in 120 days. He has chosen to go to West Germany. He agreed no to contest charges that he had lied to immigration authorities about this past activities when he entered the U.S. illegally in 1956.
Allan Ryan, director of the OSI, said that Lipschis had been among those "intimately caught up in the process of killing as many people as possible as quickly as possible" at the Nazi death camps. Berman expressed hope that the speedy resolution of the case would serve as a model for a number of similar cases pending in the New York metropolitan area and that it could be the first deportation of a Nazi war criminal from this country since World War II.
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