NY Judge Orders Ex-Nazi Deported

V I E N N A, Aug. 15 -- Austria is preparing to receive yet another relic of its Nazi past.

A New York immigration court ordered self-confessed ex-Nazi Michael Gruber, 84, deported. Gruber, of New City, NY, has admitted to his role as a Waffen SS guard in Oranienburg, Germany.

Gruber denies that he served in the SS Death’s Head Guard Battalion at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp there.

But the Nazi regime’s obsession with control, carefully documenting every move of every person in Hitler’s Third Reich, indicated otherwise.

Immigration Judge Robert Weisel said captured Nazi documents found by the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations — which hunts Nazis — proved the court’s satisfaction that Gruner served at the Sachsenhausen death camp from January 1943 to September 1944.

‘A Place of Death’

Judge Weisel ruled that Sachsenhausen was “a place of death and extreme human suffering,” and that Gruber’s service there constituted assistance in the persecution of civilians on the basis of their religious or national origin — thus making him ineligible to immigrate to the United States.

“Gruber and the other SS Death’s Head guards at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were essential components in the Nazi machinery of degradation, brutality and murder,” said Eli M. Rosenbaum, head of the special investigations office.

He called the ruling “an important victory.”

Sachsenhausen was one of the earliest and worst of the Nazi concentration camps, established in 1936. Jews, Gypsies and opponents of Hitler’s regime were herded there, often crammed into cattle trucks and passed on to the other death camps that mushroomed all over Germany and other occupied Nazi territories over the next 8 years.

Few survived.

Right to Appeal

Gruber has the right to appeal the verdict to the Board of Immigration Appeals, and then to the federal courts.