The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, undaunted by setbacks in the John Demjanjuk case, is moving ahead with proceedings to deport alleged Nazi war criminals from the United States.
On Tuesday, OSI reported it had initiated deportation proceedings against Alexander Schweidler, a 71-year-old resident of Inverness, Fla., who allegedly shot and killed two prisoners while serving as an SS guard at the Mauthausen concentration camp during World War II.
OSI alleges that Schweidler joined the SS in 1938 and served at Mauthausen from 1942 to 1945 as a member of the SS Death’s Head Battalion.
Schweidler, a native of Bratislava, Slovakia (then Czechoslovakia), was captured by U.S. forces in 1945 and immigrated to Britain in 1948 and to the United States in 1965.
OSI makes no mention of his whereabouts between 1945 and 1948.
The Justice Department filed an order to show cause requiring Schweidler, who is a citizen of the United Kingdom, to demonstrate why he should not be deported for assisting in the persecution of civilians on the basis of race, religion, national origin or political opinion, and for concealing his wartime activities when he immigrated to the United States in 1965.
In the order to show cause, the Justice Department alleges that Schweidler signed a statement in 1942 admitting that on April 28, 1942, while serving as a Mauthausen armed guard on a construction detail, he shot and killed two prisoners.
The information comes from what appears to be a German report found in captured Nazi files.
More than 67,000 Jews and others perished at the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.
‘BUSIER THAN WE HAVE EVER BEEN’
OSI continues to file new actions against alleged Nazi war criminals in the United States, despite its disappointment over the Israeli Supreme Court’s acquittal last week of Demjanjuk.
OSI currently has more than 400 cases under investigation. With the action against Schweidler, the Nazi prosecuting unit now has an additional 17 cases already in litigation.
Much new evidence has been unearthed in recently opened archives of the former Soviet Union, said Eli Rosenbaum, OSI’s principal deputy director.
“In individual cases, it is providing us with evidence of complicity in heinous Nazi crimes, crimes that were in some instances actually recorded by the Nazi forces,” said Rosenbaum.
“We just filed a case now and we will file another in the next couple of days and we are moving,” he said. “We are busier than we have ever been, both in litigation and in investigation.”
Of the setback in the Demjanjuk case, which the Justice Department worked on since the late 1970s, he said, “The result was obviously in part a disappointment.
“But I would say also that it was at least a consolation in the fact that two of the three charges that we originally brought against Demjanjuk were sustained by the Israeli Supreme Court, namely his criminal involvement at Trawniki and Sobibor,” he added, referring to an SS training camp and a concentration camp.
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