The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations has initiated proceedings to revoke the U.S. citizenship of an Illinois man charged with concealing his services as an armed guard at a Nazi slave labor camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II.
The complaint against Bronislaw Hajda, 70, was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Chicago, with the OSI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago alleging that Hajda willfully concealed his wartime activities when he applied to immigrate to the United States in 1950 and to become a U.S. citizen in 1955.
The complaint alleges that Hajda, a native of Poland and a retired machinist living in the Chicago suburb of Schiller Park, had been trained as a guard at the SS training camp in Trawniki, Poland.
The complaint also alleges that Hajda was an armed guard overseeing prisoners at the SS labor camp at Treblinka, Poland, from March 1943 until the camp was liquidated in July 1944.
Thousands of Jews and Poles died at the camp from shootings, beatings, hangings, malnourishment and exhaustion, the complaint says.
The complaint also alleges that in July 1944, during the liquidation of the labor camp at Treblinka, hundreds of Jewish prisoners were shot to death in a single massacre and that Hajda participated in this killing operation.
The complaint alleges that Hajda subsequently served in the SS Streibel Battalion until at least April 1945.
Karl Streibel was a key staff member of Operation Reinhard, which recruited Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians for SS training.
These recruits were used for ghetto-clearing operations.
According to OSI, 50 Nazi persecutors have lost their U.S. citizenship as a result of OSI’s investigations and prosecutions and 42 have been removed from the United States.
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.
