Ex-Nazi guard faces deportation from US

A US federal judge has stripped a former Nazi death camp guard of his US citizenship.

US District Judge Paul Gadola ruled in Detroit that Iwan Mandycz, 85, had been an armed guard for nearly six months in 1943 at the Nazi labour camp Poniatowa near Lublin, Poland.

The ruling brings to an end a five-year legal battle to revoke Mandycz’s citizenship. Mandycz became a US citizen in 1955 and has lived in the Detroit area since.

“The government has proved by clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence that the defendant assisted in the persecution of civilian populations during World War II,” Gadola wrote in the decision.

Gadola said Mandycz concealed his Nazi past and therefore was ineligible to immigrate to the United States in 1949, The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press reported.

He now faces deportation.

Mandycz has denied working at the camp and said he worked at his parents’ farm in Poland and later as a forced labourer at a farm in Austria during the Second World War.

Gadola said Mandycz, who was born in Ukraine in 1920, was inducted into the Guard Forces, an auxiliary of the German SS, in Poland in 1943.

Mandycz arrived in April 1943 at the Trawniki Training Camp, Gadola said. He served as an armed guard in SS Labour Camp Poniatowa, where the Germans massacred 14,000 prisoners in a single day.