FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM
APRIL 28, 1997 (202) 514-2008
(202) 514-1888
FORMER NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD
IS ORDERED DEPORTED
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Department of Justice announced
today that it has won a court order of deportation against
Ferdinand Hammer, a Sterling Heights, Michigan, man who served as
an armed Waffen-SS guard at the Nazi-operated Auschwitz and
Sachsenhausen concentration camps during World War II.
Chief U.S. Immigration Judge Michael J. Creppy found that
Hammer, 75, participated in persecuting persons because of race,
religion, national origin, or political opinion in association
with the Nazi government of Germany, while serving as a member of
the Nazi SS-Totenkopf Sturmbann (Death's Head Battalions) at the
Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, and at the
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp outside Berlin from 1944 through
1945. Judge Creppy also found that Hammer guarded prisoners on
transports from Auschwitz to Sachsenhausen in January 1945, when
the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz in the face of approaching Soviet
troops, and later from Sachsenhausen to the Mauthausen
Concentration Camp in Nazi-occupied Austria.
"This is a significant victory, the ruling reaffirms that
those who helped the Nazis carry out their programs of murder and
oppression may not claim the privilege of U.S. residence," said
Director Eli M. Rosenbaum of the Office of Special
Investigations.
In ordering Hammer's deportation, Judge Creppy cited
captured German documents which proved Hammer's service in the
Waffen-SS at Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and on prisoner
transports. The Waffen-SS was adjudged a criminal organization
by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg following
World War II.
At least one million people, the overwhelming majority of
them Jews, were murdered at the Auschwitz death camp between mid-
1940 and January 1945, when the Germans abandoned the camp
complex. The complex was the largest in the Nazi concentration
camp system and contained the Third Reich's largest extermination
facilities. During the period of Hammer's service as an armed
guard, people were confined and murdered (mostly through the use
of poison gas) at Auschwitz because of their religion, national
origin, race, or political opinion.
During the evacuation of Auschwitz, prisoners were forced to
march long distances in freezing conditions without adequate
winter clothing. Those unable to keep up with the march were
routinely shot. Prisoners were then loaded onto open train cars
for the journey to Sachsenhausen. Many prisoners died during the
evacuation, often from exposure. The subsequent transports from
Sachsenhausen to Mauthausen were conducted under similar brutal
conditions, and many people died as a result.
While Hammer was an armed SS guard at Sachsenhausen
Concentration Camp, tens of thousands of individuals, including
Jews, political prisoners, and civilian forced laborers from
nations throughout Europe, along with Soviet prisoners of war,
were murdered by shooting, hanging or other means, or died as a
result of torture, malnourishment, illness, hard physical labor,
medical experimentation, or other forms of mistreatment.
The case against Hammer was brought by the Criminal
Division's Office of Special Investigations (OSI). In May 1996,
the United States District Court in Detroit stripped Hammer of
his naturalized U.S. citizenship on the ground that the retired
foundry supervisor misrepresented his activities during World War
II and concealed his service as an armed SS guard from U.S.
officials when he applied for naturalized citizenship in 1963.
Fifty nine such persons have now been stripped of U.S.
citizenship and 48 have been removed from the United States as a
result of cases brought by the Office of Special Investigations
since the unit's creation in 1979.
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