War Criminal Faces Deportation

Vilis A. Hazners, 71, a nationally prominent Latvian emigre, denied in a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) court here yesterday that he committed war crimes while an officer in the Nazi-backed Latvian SS Legion during World War II. Hazners, who is facing deportation proceedings, has been accused of responsibility for the deaths of an estimated several hundred to 1000 Jews in Riga, Latvia in July, 1941, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency was informed by Frederic U. Dicker, a reporter for the Albany Times-Union who first wrote an expose on Hazners in the newspaper last November.

Hazners, who lives in Dresden, N.Y., is president of the Committee for a Free Latvia and made broadcasts for the Voice of America in the 1960s, Dicker told the JTA. He is charged with entering the U.S. from Germany in 1956 in violation of the anti-war crimes proviso of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. He was served with a deportation notice on Jan. 28.

Dicker, in his investigative report last November, wrote that the accusations against Hazners came from official present-day Latvian publications and from Dr. Gertrude Schneider, a City University of New York professor, Latvian history scholar, survivor of the Riga ghetto and a naturalized U.S. citizen.

During a visit to Latvia in 1971, Schneider, who had been deported from her native Austria to Latvia by the Nazis at the beginning of World War II, recalled a discussion with the Latvian culture minister in which he spoke of alleged atrocities committed during the war by persons now living in the U.S. and mentioned Hazners, among others, Dicker reported Schneider told him during an interview last November.

CHARGES AGAINST HAZNERS

Hazners’ attorney, Ivars Berzins, of Babylon, L.I., declared yesterday in court that the charges against his client had “made in Moscow stamped all over them.” Lloyd Sherman, the INS attorney who presented the case said the government was prepared “to bring 4-5 witnesses from overseas” to testify against Hazners. Most of the witnesses, survivors of the Riga ghetto, are believed to be living in Israel.

The deportation notice states that Hazners participated “in the collection of a group of Jews in Riga and detaining them in the Big Synagogue (Choral Synagogue) on Gogol St., Riga, after which said synagogue was set afire and the detained Jews burned to death therein.” Hazners is also accused of helping select Jews for execution in an area known as Pogulanka Woods in Latvia in June, 1941. INS Judge Anthony De Gato set June 20 as the trial date.