CHICAGO, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- Fifty-six years after he was arrested in Germany as a suspected concentration camp guard charges have resurfaced against Joseph Guzulaitis.
The frail 77-year-old former baker is accused of working as an armed guard at two Nazi death camps between 1943 and 1945 and could be stripped of his U.S. citizenship if convicted.
Guzulaitis immigrated to the United States in 1950 and settled in the ethnic enclave of Marquette Park on the Southwest Side. He became a U.S. citizen in 1964 and has lived quietly in the same house on California Avenue for more than 35 years.
Prosecutors said Guzulaitis was arrested in Germany immediately after World War II when he was recognized by two Holocaust survivors on a Munich street as a brutal Nazi guard. He was accused of being a member of a Lithuanian battalion assigned to Hitler's Waffen SS Tolenkopf in 1943 and allegedly was a guard at the Majdanek death camp in Poland in 1944, where at least 17,000 Jews were killed, according to a civil complaint filed in federal court Monday.
Guzulaitis allegedly also was a guard at the Hersbruck Forced Labor Camp in Germany and guarded prisoners during the infamous death march from Hersbruck to Dachau in 1945, as the Nazis tried to move thousands of prisoners ahead of the advancing Allied troops.
Statements showed he was released in 1947 after American officials misplaced his records. Now, the Justice Department is seeking to revoke his citizenship for hiding his wartime history.
Since 1979, the federal government's Office of Special Investigations has stripped 66 alleged Nazis of U.S. citizenship, the Chicago Tribune said.
Guzulaitis' lawyer said his client was forced to guard a German prison camp but that he was not aware of what was going on inside and had only vague recollections.
"At worst he was a lowly guard," attorney John Gibaitis told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Guzulaitis suffers from a number of health problems, including heart trouble and diabetes.
