Wisconsin ex-Nazi loses deporation battle

WASHINGTON, June 17 (UPI) -- An 83-year-old Wisconsin man faced deportation Tuesday after immigration officials upheld a finding that he was a Nazi guard who participated in war crimes.

The U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals upheld an earlier finding that Josias Kumpf, of Caledonia, Wis., should be deported because of his activities as a death camp guard during World War II who helped with the executions of 43,000 Jewish men, women and children at three German concentration camps in Poland, the Milwaukee Journal reported Tuesday.

"Josias Kumpf participated in a 1943 Nazi operation that resulted in the murder of thousands of innocent victims," Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich told the newspaper. "His culpability in this atrocity does not diminish with the passage of time."

Prosecutors said the deportation order was based on Kumpf's admissions that he was an SS Death's Head guard at the Sachsenhausen Camp, at slave labor camps in Nazi-occupied France and at Nazi forced labor camps for Jews in Trawniki, Poland.

Kumpf, who was born in Serbia and came to the United States from Austria in 1956, said he was forced by the Germans at age 17 to become a guard.