VILNIUS
A U.S. immigration judge
has ordered the deportation
of a 91-year-old
Lithuanian man for his role in
the Nazi destruction of Warsaw's
Jewish ghetto during World War
II, U.S. justice authorities
announced on Aug. 16.
Immigration Judge Wayne R.
Iskra issued a removal order for
Vladas Zajanckauskas, a retired
factory worker who had been living
in Massachusetts, stating that
Zajanckauskas participated in
Nazi atrocities in German-occupied
Poland and then lied about his
wartime activity when he immigrated
the U.S. in 1950.
"Vladas Zajanckauskas was an
accomplice in Nazi mass murder,"
said Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of
the Justice Department's Office of
Special Investigations.
"Had he
told the truth after the war, he
never would have been permitted
to enter this country."
Zajanckauskas was a member
of the Lithuanian army and then
the Soviet army when the U.S.S.R
occupied Lithuania in 1940. A year
later, he became a German prisoner
of war, but was recruited into
the German service in 1942. He
falsely told U.S. officials that he
had been a farmer in Lithuania
until 1944.
Zajanckauskas is accused of
being part of a unit based at a
training camp in Trawniki,
Poland, which carried out
Operation Reninhard in the
Warsaw Jewish Ghetto during
1943.
In his Aug. 2 decision, Iskra
said Zajanckauskas and other
members of his unit "were trained
to assist in all aspects of Operation
Reinhard, the Nazi plan to murder
all Jews in Poland."
In a 41-page decision, the judge
noted Zajanckauskas conceded
that "Trawniki men sent to
Warsaw stood in the cordon to prevent
Jews from escaping, guarded
the transit square where captured
Jews awaited transportation to
labor and concentration camps,
conducted house-to-house searches
for hidden Jews, skirmished with
resistance fighters, and took part
in the shooting of some captured
Jews," according to a U.S.
Department of Justice press
release on Aug. 16.
Zajanckauskas admitted to
lying about his wartime past
because he feared it would get in
the way of his naturalization, but
claims that he only worked as a
cook in the Trawniki training center.
U.S. Department of Justice
Press Assistant Jaclyn Lesch told
The Baltic Times that an expert
historian and several Nazi documents
seized by federal prosecutors
were used as evidence for the
court proceedings.
The Zajanckauskas case is not
a new one. He had been stripped of
his citizenship two years earlier
after it was discovered that he had
lied to immigration officials.
"Mr. Zajanckauskas' U.S. citizenship
was revoked by a federal
district court judge in Boston in
2005 on the basis that he had
obtained his U.S. visa fraudulently,"
Ilya Levin, a press representative
in U.S. Embassy in Vilnius,
told The Baltic Times.
What happens next, however, is
unclear.
"The removal order was handed
down, but Zajanckauskas hasn't
exhausted his appeals [to higher
courts] yet," Lesch said.
Even if the deportation is carried
out, there is no guarantee that
Zajanckauskas will be prosecuted in
Lithuania.
Gintaras Valentukevicius, the
prosecutor for the Special
Investigation Division of the
Prosecutor General's Office, told
BNS he will only begin a legal
process against Zajanckauskas if
U.S. representatives provide
Lithuania will pretrial investigation
material into Zajanckauskas'
crimes against humanity.
"I didn't receive any official letter
from the U.S. nor do I know
where or when he will be deported.
The crime was in Poland, not in
Lithuania," Valentukevicius told
The Baltic Times.
"When it will be done, we
[Prosecutor General's Office] will
decide whether to start a pretrial or
not," he added.
Valentukevicius also said that
there is no guarantee that
Zajanckauskas, after being forced to
leave the U.S., will in fact arrive in
Lithuania since U.S. law enforcement
officials are not going to
accompany him on the journey.
The case echoes another that
occurred in March 2006 when
Algimantas Dailide, 85, who had collaborated
with Nazis in Lithuania
during World War II, was stripped of
his citizenship and given a removal
order by U.S. courts.
