MILLBURY, Mass., June 6 (UPI) -- An elderly retiree in Massachusetts is denying U.S. Justice Department allegations that he helped liquidate the Warsaw ghetto of Jews as a Nazi SS officer in World War II.
"That's very bad allegations, but they're not true," Vladas Zajanckauskas, 87, said in Thursday's Boston Herald.
In papers filed in U.S. District Court in Worcester on Wednesday, the Justice Department said it is seeking to revoke the man's U.S. citizenship because he allegedly lied to immigration officials about his Nazi role when he applied for a visa in 1950.
Eli Rosenbaum, director of the DOJ's Office of Special Investigations, said Zajanckauskas trained as a guard at the Nazi-run Trawniki Camp in German-occupied Poland, and became a trainer for guards.
Rosenbaum described the Trawniki Camp as a "school for mass murder."
He said there was an adjacent slave labor camp for Jews, and the guards at the camp "trained on live human subjects."
The government also alleged that Zajanckauskas volunteered to become an SS officer and took part in "Operation Reinhard," the clearing of some 40,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto in 1943.
Thousands of Jews were killed in the fighting against the Germans in the ghetto, and more than 7,000 were shipped off to extermination camps.
"Zajanckauskas and his men helped ensure that thousands of innocent Jewish men, women and children were violently killed," Rosenbaum said.
"I never killed anybody or helped to kill anybody," Zajanckauskas said.
Prosecutors said Zajanckauskas lied when he asserted that he had been a farmer in Lithuania from 1938 until 1944.
Now a grandfather of four living in Millbury, Zajanckauskas said he had been conscripted into the Lithuanian army and incorporated into the Soviet army after the Russians occupied his native Lithuania, and later was captured by the Germans in 1941 and sent to a concentration camp.
The government alleges, however, that he actually joined the Nazi SS.
A granddaughter, Denis Ronayne, 41, called the allegations "completely unfounded."
She said he never served as a guard, and had told his grandchildren about his life as a prisoner in the concentration camp, working in the camp's kitchen with Polish women until freed by Russians.
"We just can't get over the fact that they're doing this to him," she said in Thursday's Boston Globe.
"For someone to come up with allegations like this is just unbelievable," Ronayne said.
Zajanckauskas said he cried when officials came to his home Wednesday with the notice that the government was seeking to revoke his citizenship.
"I love this country," he told the Globe. "I don't know where they got these accusations."
Since the OSI was founded in 1979, it has stripped 68 immigrants of their citizenship, and deported 55 of them. More than 170 other residents are under investigation, according to Rosenbaum.
"This case serves as a reminder that the Justice Department will not allow this country to be a haven for Nazi-era war criminals," Rosenbaum said.
