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The Justice Department today announced that DMYTRO SAWCHYK, 74, formerly residing in Glen Spey, New York, had left the United States and renounced his United States citizenship, thereby mooting the suit filed against him by the Government, which has therefore been dismissed.

The suit sought to revoke SAWCHUK's United States citizenship for guarding Nazi slave-labor camps, participating in a liquidation of a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II, and failing to disclose these activities on his visa application.

In the complaint filed in Manhattan federal court on June 3, 1998, the Government alleged that, starting in 1943, SAWCHUK served at the Trawniki Training Camp, an SS-run training and base camp facility in Nazi-occupied Poland, and then served as an armed guard at both the SS Labor Trawniki, which was a slave-labor camp for Jews adjacent to the training and base camp facility, and the SS Labor Camp Poniatowa, a slave-labor camp near a Polish village of the same name. Thousands of Jewish men, women and children were incarcerated under inhumane conditions at these two camps as forced laborers, according to the Complaint.

The Complaint also alleged that in April 1943, SAWCHUK was sent with a battalion of Trawniki guards to the Belzec death camp in Belzac, Poland. Between March and December 1942, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were murdered at the Belzec death camp, and their bodies were buried in large pits. The Complaint alleged that SAWCHUK served at Belzec as an armed guard of Jewish prisoners who were forced to exhume the corpses from the pits where they had originally been buried, and then burn the corpses.

The Complaint also charged that in August 1943, SAWCHUK assisted in the liquidisation of the Jewish ghetto in Bialystok, Poland. In August and September of 1943, tens of thousands of residents of that ghetto were forcibly sent to Treblika death camp, the Auschwitz and Majdenek concentration camps, and elsewhere. The Complaint also alleged that by late 1944, SAWCHUK was serving in the SS Battalion Stribel, a unit whose primary function was to round up and guard thousands of Polish civilian forced laborers at the fortification and construction sites in south-central Poland.

The Government contended that when SAWCHUK applied for a visa to enter the United States in 1951, he concealed these wartime activities. On the basis of SAWCHUK's fraud as well as his wartime activities, the Government sought a judgment revoking his United States citizenship.

On March 23, 1999 SAWCHUK appeared at the United States Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany, renounced his citizenship and surrendered his United States passport. On May 11, 1999, the United States Government's border control "watchlist," which bars him from re-entering the United States. Because this achieves the ultimate relief sought in the lawsuit, the District Court has dismissed the pending suit as moot.

Ms. White said: "The Government will continue its efforts to ensure that those who have assisted in persecution do not retain the benefits of illegally procured citizenship."

ELI M. ROSENBAUM, Director of the Office of Special Investigations in the Justice Department's Criminal Division, said: "The conclusion of this case is one more step in the Government's ongoing efforts to identify and take legal action against former participants in Nazi persecution residing in this country."

Assistant United States Attorneys WENDY H. SCHWARTZ and MEREDITH E. KOTLER in the Southern District of New York, and Trial Attorney JONATHON C. DRIMMER and Senior Trial Attorney DAVID W. FOLTS in the Office of Special Investigations are in charge of the case.

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