NEW YORK, June 23 (JTA) — The United States is one step closer to deporting an 80-year-old man who served in a Lithuanian mobile killing squad during World War II. A federal appeals court in Chicago unanimously affirmed last Friday a 1995 court decision to strip Kazys Ciurinskas of his U.S. citizenship. The U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations charged that Ciurinskas had lied about his past when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1949. Ciurinskas, who now lives in Hammond, Ind., became a citizen in 1955. The court found that Ciurinskas was a member of the 2nd Lithuanian Battalion, a mobile killing unit allied with the Nazis that murdered thousands of civilians, primarily Jews, in Belarus and Lithuania. Evidence was cited that he personally took part in the killing actions, and that in 1941, Ciurinskas was promoted for “conscientiously fulfilling his duties.”
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