[yonif]

Former Nazi concentration camp guard to be deported

The Associated Press
11/24/03 4:12 PM


DETROIT (AP) -- A federal judge has ruled that a former Nazi concentration camp guard found living in the United States will be deported, immigration officials said Monday.

Judge Larry Dean granted the government's request to deport Johann Leprich in a written ruling issued Friday.

The 78-year-old retired machinist will be deported to his native Romania or possibly Germany or Hungary, said Greg Gagne, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review.

Leprich came to the United States in 1952 and became a citizen in 1958. But the Justice Department later discovered his Nazi past and moved to revoke his citizenship in 1986.

Leprich acknowledged serving during World War II in the Death's Head Battalion, a branch of the Nazi SS that supplied guards to concentration camps. He worked as a guard at Nazi-ruled Austria's Mauthausen concentration camp, where 119,000 people were executed or worked to death in 1938-45.

At the end of a 1987 denaturalization hearing in Detroit federal court, Leprich moved to Windsor, Ontario.

But evidence surfaced that Leprich continued to live secretly in the United States. Federal agents began looking for him, and his case was featured on the television show "America's Most Wanted" in 1997.

On July 1, authorities found him hiding behind a panel under the basement stairs at his family's home in Macomb County's Clinton Township, about 25 miles northeast of Detroit.

He has been jailed since then while the Justice Department sought a deportation order.

[yonif]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1028172/posts?page=4#4

[coloradan]

On July 1, authorities found him hiding behind a panel under the basement stairs

... which was the way many of the people he oversaw the execution of were found in their own homes in Germany.

[anotherview]

Thanks!