FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM TUESDAY, JULY 22, 1997 (202) 616-2771 TDD (202) 514-1888 JUSTICE DEPARTMENT MOVES TO REVOKE U.S. CITIZENSHIP OF FORMER NAZI COLLABORATOR WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Justice Department today asked a federal court in Connecticut to revoke the U.S. citizenship of a Guilford, Connecticut man who served in two infamous SS units that participated in the Nazi campaign to annihilate the Jews of Europe. In a complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in New Haven, the Criminal Division's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and Christopher F. Droney, the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut, allege that Walter Berezowskyj, 73, served the Nazis as an armed guard beginning in April 1943. The complaint says Berezowskyj, a former machine operator in the steel industry, first worked at two SS slave-labor camps for Jews in Nazi- occupied Poland, then in at least one Nazi concentration camp in Nazi-annexed Austria. For approximately six weeks in the spring of 1943, the complaint alleges, Berezowskyj trained at the Trawniki Training Camp, an SS training and base facility in Poland that prepared eastern European recruits to assist in "Operation Reinhard," the Nazi campaign to annihilate the Jews of Poland. As part of his training at Trawniki, the complaint states that Berezowskyj served as an armed guard at the SS Labor Camp Trawniki, a slave-labor camp adjacent to the training camp. The complaint further alleges that in May 1943, Berezowskyj was transferred to serve as an armed guard at the nearby SS Labor Camp Poniatowa. Thousands of innocent Jewish civilians were interned under inhumane conditions at each of these camps as forced laborers. On November 4, 1943, while Berezowskyj was serving as an armed guard at Poniatowa, all of the prisoners still alive there were murdered as part of the final phase of Operation Reinhard. The Complaint further alleges that by at least July 1944, Berezowskyj was guarding prisoners at the Gusen subcamp of the infamous Mauthausen Concentration Camp near Linz, Austria, as a member of the "SS Death's Head Battalion Mauthausen" (SS Totenkopf Sturmbann Mauthausen). Thousands of prisoners from all over Europe were incarcerated at Gusen because of their race, religion, national origin, or political opinion. They were forced to work under brutal conditions and were subjected to savage punishments. As a result, the mortality rate among prisoners at Gusen was extremely high. Many prisoners were murdered directly by the guards, while others died from exhaustion, starvation, and disease. OSI Director Eli M. Rosenbaum stated that the so called Trawniki-men "played an instrumental role in realizing Adolf Hitler's genocidal ambitions. The Trawniki-men rounded up and murdered Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Poland and brutally enslaved thousands of non-Jewish Poles." The complaint also alleges that Berezowskyj was ineligible for citizenship because he misrepresented and concealed his true wartime activities from immigration and naturalization officials when he applied for a U.S. visa in 1949 and for U.S. citizenship in 1981. Specifically, the complaint states that Berezowskyj failed to disclose his service on behalf of the Nazis as an armed guard and that he claimed that he spent the war as a farmer. Rosenbaum said the initiation of proceedings to denaturalize Berezowskyj was a result of OSI's ongoing efforts to identify and prosecute former participants in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution who reside in the United States. To date, 59 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of U.S. citizenship as a result of OSI's efforts, and 48 such persons remain under investigation. An additional 123 Nazi persecutors who sought to enter the United States in recent years have been blocked from doing so as a result of OSI's "watch list" program. ### 97-301