WWII prison guard faces deportation

DAYTON, March 14 — The Justice Department will attempt to revoke the citizenship of 83-year-old Ohio resident Ildefonsas Bucmys in Dayton’s first federal trial involving the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice division charged with locating and prosecuting those who assisted in Nazi-sponsored acts of persecution. Bucmys was an armed guard with the Lithuanian national police force at Majdanek in 1942 and 1943. He is accused of concealing his service in the Nazi-controlled Lithuanian national police force and his service as an armed guard at the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, Poland, on his 1992 application for naturalization as a U.S. citizen. He also is accused of concealing the information during his naturalization interview. The non-jury trial, originally scheduled for Dec. 1, is expected to begin March 29 in the courtroom of Chief U.S. District Judge Walter H. Rice. Bucmys was a 19-year-old railroad worker with barely a sixth-grade education when Russians occupied his homeland of Lithuania in 1940. When the Germans stormed his village of Kretinga on June 22, 1941, an artillery shell hit his family’s home, killing his father, three of his seven brothers and an infant sister. In January 1942, six months after Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Lithuania, 21-year-old Bucmys voluntarily joined a Schutzmannschaft battalion, an auxiliary police force comprised of Lithuanian men created by German occupation authorities. According to the Justice Department, the Schutzmannschaft battalions assisted the Nazi government of Germany by, among other things, killing unarmed Jews and guarding locations where Jews and other prisoners were held. The Germans first assigned Bucmys to guard Russian prisoners of war working on a farm. In December 1942, the Germans assigned his unit to guard Jews and others at Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. The Nazis operated Majdanek from late 1941 until July 1944 as both a concentration camp and a death camp. An estimated 170,000 men, women, and children were systematically murdered at Majdanek, many by asphyxiation in gas chambers constructed for that purpose. The Lithuanian guard force at Majdanek was subordinated to the SS Death’s Head Battalion. According to OSI, Bucmys served as an armed guard at Majdanek principally to prevent prisoners from escaping — with standing orders to shoot to kill prisoners who attempted to escape. Wartime German documents state that in September 1943 all but 100 members of Bucmys’ Lithuanian battalion were withdrawn from Majdanek and reassigned because of disciplinary problems; Bucmys was not reassigned. OSI claims he was at the camp on Nov. 3, 1943, when 18,000 Jewish prisoners were shot to death during an action called Operation Harvest Festival. According to OSI, Bucmys departed Majdanek on two weeks of authorized leave in November 1943 after Operation Harvest Festival and didn’t return. Bucmys argues he returned to Lithuania in late summer 1943. Despite the uncertainty of the facts, he ultimately made his way back to Lithuania, then to West Germany, Italy, Argentina and eventually the United States. While in Italy, Bucmys married Russian-born Janina Prikuiis, now a U.S. citizen. They are the parents of two adult children, Maria and Raymond, also U.S. citizens. On May 6, 1958, Bucmys applied for and was granted a U.S. immigration visa at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires. He was admitted to the United States as an immigrant at Miami on May 12, 1958. Bucmys and his family moved to Dayton where he worked for Hobart until his retirement in 1985. His legal troubles began following his decision to travel to now-independent Lithuania and visit surviving family. He wanted to travel with a U.S. passport and applied for citizenship on Sept. 18, 1992. Based on paperwork that became available following the collapse of the Soviet Union, OSI learned that Bucmys had served as a guard at Majdanek. On Sept. 5, 2002, a day before the start of the Jewish High Holy Days, OSI sued to revoke Bucmys’ citizenship. Since then, a flurry of legal motions has been exchanged between OSI, led by its director Eli Rosenbaum, and Bucmys’ attorney, R. Mark Henry, a former Dayton city commissioner. “The legal question here is whether Mr. Bucmys willfully or intentionally disqualified himself for citizenship based on his conduct during the war,” Henry said. “There is no evidence that Bucmys participated in any atrocities, but there is evidence that he hated being there.” Henry called his client’s case a “dicey, ethical issue.” While Henry admits his client served in the Schutzmannschaft, which was guarding, at least on the periphery, a documented Nazi death camp, he has argued that Bucmys was there against his will. In September, prosecutors in the Bucmys case filed a motion for summary judgment, asking Rice to rule that OSI should prevail as a matter of law because there are no material facts in dispute. The defense disagreed and filed a motion asking Rice to overrule the OSI’s motion. Genuine issues of fact do exist, argued Henry, so a trial is warranted. If OSI prevails, Bucmys could be deported to Lithuania. Henry said, “Bucmys knew what was going on. He knew it was horrible. They” — the guards — “were prisoners too, but not like the Jews, the Poles, the Russians. But if they disobeyed orders, they got shot.” “This is not an ethically simple case,” Henry said. “It’s troublesome. How far does the notion of responsibility for the Holocaust go?” According to OSI’s Rosenbaum, responsibility extends to Bucmys. Rosenbaum said that U.S. courts have unanimously ruled for more than 20 years that SS concentration camp guards were “integral components in the Nazi machinery of persecution and annihilation.”