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. # # # 97-179