Former Nazi Camp Guard Loses Battle

(AP)  The Supreme Court let stand an order requiring the deportation of a retired Wisconsin stonecutter who was a World War II concentration camp guard in the Death's Head Battalion of the Nazi SS.

The court, acting without comment Thursday, turned away Anton Tittjung's argument that he received an unfair deportation hearing.

Justice Department officials said thousands of Jews, political prisoners and others were shot, gassed, hanged and electrocuted at camps where 75-year-old Tittjung served as a guard.

Tittjung's wife, Katie, said her husband has no public comment on the ruling.

"We are from Yugoslavia. We had nothing to do with the war in Germany. Why is this going on? I am sick of it. I am sick that in the United States there is no justice," Mrs. Tittjung said in a telephone interview from the couple's home in Kewaunne, Wisconsin.

Born in Erdud, Yugoslavia, which is now in Croatia, Tittjung was a guard at the Nazi-operated Mauthausen camp at Gross Raming in Nazi-occupied Austria. He joined the Waffen SS in October 1942 and remained an SS trooper until the end of World War II.

He applied for U.S. residence in 1952 but did not disclose his work as a camp guard or his membership in the Death's Head Battalion, which was known for its barbarism. Tittjung also hid those facts when he became a U.S. citizen in 1974.

He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in December 1990 after a federal judge in Milwaukee ruled that he had lied about working as a concentration camp guard.

In 1992, the government began deportation proceedings, and two years later an immigration court ordered him deported to Croatia for persecuting death camp prisoners.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last December that Tittjung got a fair hearing from the immigration court that ordered his deportation.

Tittjung's lawyer told the justices that the immigration judge improperly relied on court findings during his citizenship hearing, and that he was wrongly barred from introducing evidence of discrepancies in a camp survivor's account.



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