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. ####