The Justice
Department filed suit Friday to revoke the citizen ship of Albert Deutscher, a 61-year-old Illinois man accused of participating in the murder of Jewish men, women and children in the Ukraine as a member of a Nazi paramilitary group during World War II. Just hours later, Deutscher was struck and killed by a train.
The Justice Department action, filed in a Federal District court in Chicago, accused Deutscher of participating on more than one occasion “in the shooting and killing of many hundreds of unarmed Jewish civilians including women and children” and that he lied about his war time activities when he applied for admission to the United States in 1942 and for U.S. citizenship in 1957.
ELEMENTS IN THE COMPLAINT
The complaint said Deutscher was a native of Worms in the Soviet Ukraine, and the Nazis, who captured the city in 1941 created a paramilitary organization called the Selbstschutz to maintain Nazi control of Worms. The complaint said Deutscher joined the paramilitary group in early 1942. The complaint charged, the Nazis took many Eastern European Jews to Odessa and then took them north and “on more than one occasion during January and February 1942, the trains halted at or near Berezovka, a few kilometers west of Worms.” The Jews were then “forcibly unloaded from the freight cars” and marched in columns to the village of Worms, where they were slaughtered by the Selbstschutz, the complaint said.
Deutscher’s death in the Burlington Northern railroad’s Clyde station in suburban Cicero, where he had worked as a carman since coming to the United States in 1942, came just hours after the Justice Department suit was filed.
According to a spokesman for the railroad, Deutscher, a resident of Brookfield, III., complained of being ill and asked to leave work early. He was struck by the train despite repeated warning whistles from the oncoming train, the spokesman said. Authorities failed to speculate at this time whether Deutscher’s death was an accident or suicide.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
