FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM

MONDAY, JUNE 22, 1998

COURT OF APPEALS AFFIRMS DENATURALIZATION OF FORMER MEMBER

OF NAZI MOBILE KILLING UNIT

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A federal court of appeals in Chicago

has unanimously affirmed a decision to denaturalize Kazys
Ciurinskas, a Hammond, Indiana man who served during World War II
as an armed member of a Nazi-sponsored unit that murdered
thousands of Jews and others in German-occupied Byelorussia (now
Belarus) and Lithuania, the Department of Justice announced
today.

Eli M. Rosenbaum, Director of the Criminal Division's Office

of Special Investigations (OSI), noted that the Ciurinskas
decision, which was made available Friday by the Court of Appeals
for the Seventh Circuit, is a result of OSI's ongoing
investigation of Nazi persecutors residing illegally in the
United States.

He termed the court's decision "an extremely important

victory, the first appellate decision anywhere in the world
involving this infamous Nazi-backed battalion that massacred so
many thousands of men, women and children."

The court found that Ciurinskas, 80, assisted in the Nazi-

sponsored persecution of civilians while serving as a member of
the infamous 2nd Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion. The
court noted that members of the 2nd Battalion committed
atrocities in Byelorussia, killing thousands of civilians,
predominantly Jews. Ciurinskas immigrated to this country from
Germany in 1949; he became a citizen in 1955.

The 2nd Battalion functioned primarily as a mobile killing

unit. Recruited in Lithuania, it perpetrated numerous mass
shootings of Jewish men, women and children, as well as Soviet
military prisoners and suspected communists and their families,
in both Lithuania and Byelorussia.

During October 1941 alone, battalion members participated in

massacres that claimed the lives of over 10,000 innocent
civilians in Byelorussia. The court found that, while serving in
the Battalion in 1941, Ciurinskas was promoted for
"conscientiously fulfilling his duties."

During the trial of this case in Hammond in 1995, the

government proved that the Battalion was ordered to Byelorussia
from its base in Kaunas, Lithuania, in October 1941. Prosecutors
introduced wartime documentation as well as evidence from Jewish
survivors and former members of the Battalion. The former
Battalion members recounted in chilling detail how their unit,
along with German personnel, surrounded villages, forcibly
assembled the victims, and then drove them en masse to wooded
areas where they were murdered by gunfire. In 1962, Major Franz
Lechthaler, the German officer under whose command the battalion
conducted the killing operations in Byelorussia, was convicted in
Germany on multiple murder charges. He has since died.
 The court noted that members of the 2nd Battalion assisted
in rounding up doomed Jews and others and in bringing them to
pits, and that it participated in their mass execution by
gunfire. The court cited evidence that Ciurinskas personally
took part in the killing actions. It also affirmed findings that
Ciurinskas should not have been given a visa to enter the United
States in 1949 because he voluntarily served in an organization
under German command, he served in an organization that was
hostile to the United States, he "advocated or acquiesced in
activities or conduct contrary to civilization and human
decency," he misrepresented his personal history when applying
for a visa, and because he lacked the good moral character
necessary for citizenship. While applying for immigration to the
United States in 1949, Ciurinskas falsely stated that he had been
a miller from 1936 to 1944.

OSI was created in 1979 to investigate and take legal action

against Axis persecutors living in the United States. To date,
59 participants in Nazi-sponsored persecution have been stripped
of U.S. citizenship and 47 such persons have been removed from
this country. Nearly 300 persons remain under investigation.
Rosenbaum stated that his Office "will seek to have Kazys
Ciurinskas removed from this country as expeditiously as
possible." He noted that, in September 1997, Judge O.J. Brahos
of the United States Immigration Court in Chicago ordered the
deportation of Juozas Naujalis, a Chicago man who had been a
member of the same 2nd Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion.

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