FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 1994 202-514-2007

(TDD) 202-514-1888

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT MOVES TO REVOKE CITIZENSHIP

OF FORMER GUARD AT NAZI SLAVE LABOR CAMP

WASHINGTON, D.C.-- The Department of Justice announced today

that it has initiated denaturalization proceedings to revoke the
U.S. citizenship of a Schiller Park, Illinois, man whom it
charges with concealing his service and activities as an armed
guard at a Nazi slave labor camp in German-occupied Poland during
World War II.
A complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago today by
the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the Justice
Department's Criminal Division and the U.S. Attorney's Office in
Chicago alleges that the defendant, Bronislaw Hajda, 70, was
trained as a guard at the SS Training Camp in Trawniki, Poland,
an SS training facility and base camp that supplied guards and
auxiliary police personnel principally to assist the Nazis in
implementing their plans to annihilate the Jews of Europe.
The complaint also alleges that Hajda, a native of Poland
and a retired machinist, served as an armed guard of prisoners at
the SS Labor Camp at Treblinka, Poland, from March 1943 until the
liquidation of the camp in July 1944. During the course of the
slave labor camp's existence, thousands of Jewish and Polish
prisoners died there from shootings, beatings, hangings,
malnourishment and exhaustion, the complaint said.
The complaint further alleges that in July 1944, during the
liquidation of the Treblinka Labor Camp, hundreds of Jewish
prisoners were shot to death in a single massacre and that the
defendant participated in this killing operation.
The Treblinka Labor Camp was part of a complex that also
included the nearby Treblinka Death Camp, where more than 800,000
people, nearly all Jews, were murdered in gas chambers.
Hajda subsequently served in the "SS Battalion Streibel"
until at least April 1945, the complaint said.
The complaint alleges that Hajda's service with the SS--
adjudged a criminal organization in 1946 by the International
Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany--constituted assistance
in the Nazi program of persecution based on race, religion and
national origin. It also charges that Hajda's service
constituted membership in a "movement hostile to the United
States," which rendered him ineligible to immigrate to the United
States under United States law.
The complaint further alleges that Hajda willfully concealed
his service with the SS Training Camp Trawniki, his service at
the Treblinka Labor Camp, and his service with the SS Battalion
Streibel in applying for immigration to the U.S. in 1950, and for
naturalization as a U.S. citizen in 1955.
The initiation of proceedings to denaturalize Hajda is a
product of OSI's ongoing efforts to identify and take legal
action against former participants in Nazi persecution who reside
in the United States. To date, 50 Nazi persecutors have been
stripped of U.S. citizenship as a result of OSI's investigations
and prosecutions, and 42 have been removed from the United
States.
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