A federal court has revoked a man’s U.S. citizenship because of his service in the Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian security police during World War II.
Kazys Gimzauskas, 88, went back to Lithuania more than two years ago while he was under investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.
He had been living in St. Petersburg, Fla.
The government charged that Gimzauskas headed the Saugumas Interrogations/ Investigations Section in Kaunas, Lithuania, between July 1941 and October or November 1941.
He then served in Vilnius, Lithuania, as deputy chief of the Saugumas until July 1944, in which he became second in command to chief Aleksandras Lileikis.
Lileikis was stripped of his U.S. citizenship on May 24 and returned to Vilnius on June 19. He was interrogated this week by Lithuanian authorities.
Documents signed by Gimzauskas and found by the OSI at the Lithuanian Central State Archives established that he had ordered civilians turned over to the German police for execution. One of the civilians was an American-born woman who had been arrested because she was “suspected of being a Jew.”
Gimzauskas arrived in the United States in 1956 under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953.
Eli Rosenbaum, director of the OSI, said, “Others who, like Kazys Gimzauskas, played a provable role in the Nazi regime’s genocidal reign of terror should be on notice that the government remains steadfast in its commitment to tracing them, revoking their ill-gotten U.S. citizenships and removing them from these shores as expeditiously as possible.”
The OSI has filed a denaturalization suit against another former Vilnius Saugumas member, Algimantas Dailide, now living in Cleveland. The trial is scheduled for November.
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.
