c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Current reports of Serbian atrocities have focused international attention on the grisly subject of war crimes. NATO leaders have promised that once the current military action is successfully concluded, there will be trials of the people who planned and carried out the horrific actions in Kosovo.

In the meantime, we should not forget that Nazi-era war criminals still dwell among us in America. The U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation (OSI) reports that 61 Nazi war criminals have been stripped of American citizenship, and 49 of them have been deported from the United States as a result of investigation and prosecution. More than 250 other persons still remain under investigation by the OSI.

John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto plant worker, is in the news again now that the OSI has decided to try and strip him of his U.S. citizenship for a second time. Suspected of being the infamous guard who operated a gas chamber at the Nazis’ Treblinka death camp during World War II, Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, first lost his U.S. citizenship in 1981.

But an Israeli court said later that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible _ enabling him to get back U.S. citizenship _ although it added that he probably did work for the Nazis.

Another deportation case involves Kazys Ciurinskas, formerly of Crown Point, Ind., who served as a member of a Nazi-sponsored killing battalion in Lithuania.

On April 15, a U.S. Immigration Court in Chicago issued an”Order of Removal”and on May 12 Ciurinskas was expelled and returned to Lithuania. The trial record indicates that in 1949 Ciurinskas illegally concealed his World War II service with the 2nd Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion when he applied for a visa to enter the United States.

According to the OSI, the murderous activities of Ciurinskas’ battalion in the autumn of 1941 were so brutal that captured wartime documents reveal the killings”repulsed even the Nazis.”In a 1941 report offered in evidence at the 1946 Nuremberg trials, Nazi District Commissioner Herman Carl documented in precise terms the battalion’s activities as he urged his superiors to”keep this police battalion away … by all means.” Two years ago, a federal district court in Indiana revoked Ciurinskas’ falsely obtained citizenship. The court noted that the infamous 2nd Battalion participated in more than 10″killing actions”in Lithuania and Belarus that resulted in the deaths of more than 19,000 Jewish men, women and children.

Ciurinskas appealed the verdict, but in 1998 the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the lower court’s denaturalization order. The appeals court called the 2nd Battalion”a force dedicated to the extermination of civilians.” The 81-year-old Ciurinskas admitted he served with the battalion and confessed he concealed and misrepresented his service in that Nazi-sponsored unit when he applied for his U.S. visa 50 years ago. Ciurinskas also conceded that he was subject to expulsion because a provision of the U.S. immigration law requires the removal of any alien, including naturalized citizens, who assisted in Nazi persecutions during World War II.

But Ciurinskas is not the only member of the 2nd Battalion to be prosecuted by the OSI. The case of Juozas Naujalis is currently on appeal, and several other members of the unit have been expelled from the United States, including Antanas Mineikis, who lived in Gulfport, Fla., until his deportation in 1992. In sworn statements, Mineikis admitted driving many truckloads of Jews to mass shooting sites. He stated,”I saw women and children shot.” What is striking is that these war criminals are not Germans. They are, instead, people who collaborated with the occupiers of their country and knowingly participated in the mass murder of Jews, many of whom were their fellow citizens. In almost every country that came under German rule in World War II, there were units like Ciurinskas’ 2nd Battalion that acted as a murderous police force for their masters from Berlin. Police work frequently included rounding up and killing Jews.

Tragically, the Germans were often able to count upon indigenous anti-Semites in many countries who did the ugly job of killing.

In the years immediately following the war, some of those local killers sought entry into the United States, claiming they were escaping harsh communist rule in their own lands. People like Ciurinskas, Mineikis and, it appears, Demjanjuk deliberately lied about their Nazi wartime activities.

Public officials both here and in Europe predict that many Serbs, tired of the constant warfare in their region, will seek to enter the safe haven of the United States. One hopes history will not be repeated and we will not see an influx of the very people who committed atrocities in Kosovo.

It’s clear that U.S. immigration authorities, already stretched thin along our nation’s long borders, will have additional difficult work in the next few years. War crimes, especially the mass murder of civilians, must have no statute of limitations.

IR END RNS