The Soviet government is weighing the possibility of requesting the extradition of Boleslavs Maikovskis, a former Nazi collaborator who fled the United States and is seeking asylum in West Germany.
Maikovskis, reported to be living now in the West German city of Munster, left the United States facing the possibility of deportation to the Soviet Union, which in 1965 sentenced him to death in absentia for war crimes.
Maikovskis was chief of police of the village of Audrini, in his native Latvia. During the war, he ordered the town burned to the ground and the population massacred.
The 84-year-old retired carpenter had lived in Mineola, on New York’s Long Island, since 1951. His departure from the United States has variously been reported to have occurred as early as last November and as late as two weeks ago.
He requested asylum in West Germany last November, but it is not clear whether he did this in person or by mail. A witness claimed to have spoken personally to Maikovskis in Mineola two weeks ago.
A spokesman of the Soviet Embassy in Bonn told a West German television network Friday that the Soviet Union might request Maikovskis’ extradition.
An official of the Federal Republic of Germany responded that West Germany might allow Maikovskis’ extradition to the Soviet Union if that country were to waive the death penalty.
West Germany has no death penalty.
Last year, West Germany refused to extradite to the United States the Lebanese terrorist Mohammed Hamadei, who took part in the hijacking of a TWA airliner in 1985 in which an American was killed. The West Germans cited at the time the fact that they would be turning Hamadei over to a country that would allow the death penalty, in opposition to their own laws.
In New York, Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman and Menachem Rosensaft, founder of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, announced Monday that they will meet Wednesday with the West German ambassador to the United States and ask that Maikovskis be prosecuted for his war crimes.
The two attorneys, who have long been interested in seeing this case brought to justice, wrote a letter to the ambassadors “to urge your government to prosecute Maikovskis for his war crimes, or to send him to the Soviet Union so he can be held accountable for his crimes.”
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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.
