US to deport ex-Nazi concentration camp guard
A judge has ruled that a former Nazi concentration camp guard found living in the US will be deported, immigration officials said today.
Judge Larry Dean granted the government’s request to deport Johann Leprich in a written ruling issued on 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.
A date for the deportation had not been set.
Mr Gagne declined to provide a copy of the judge’s ruling, saying that such information generally is not made available to the public until the case is resolved.
Leprich’s lawyer, Joseph McGinness, had argued in a court hearing earlier this month that his client remained a US citizen. He said that the government and the judge in the case failed to complete the revocation of his citizenship 16 years ago.
Leprich moved to the US 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 the Second World War in the Death’s Head Battalion, a branch of the 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 denaturalisation hearing in Detroit federal court, Leprich moved to Canada.
But evidence surfaced that Leprich continued to live secretly in the US. 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 about 25 miles north east of Detroit, Michigan.
He has been jailed since then while the Justice Department sought a deportation order.
