An 88-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard who concealed his role in the Holocaust has been stripped of his US citizenship and barred from the United States, the Justice Department said Thursday.
Romanian-born Martin Hartmann joined the Nazi SS Death's Head Guard Battalion at the Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin in July 1943 and served with the Nazis until World War II ended in May 1945. He withheld his Nazi past when he immigrated to the US in 1955 and when he later applied for US citizenship, according to a complaint in federal court in Washington. Both times, revealing his service with the Nazis would have disqualified him.
In a recent settlement with US authorities, Hartmann acknowledged that he served as an armed SS guard of civilian prisoners and aided in Nazi persecution, the Justice Department said in a statement. He left the United States for Germany before an August 31 deadline for his departure set by US authorities, the department said.
"Martin Hartmann and other members of the SS Death's Head Guard Battalion were indispensable accomplices in the brutal crimes committed in the Nazi concentration camp system," said Eli Rosenbaum, head of the department's Office of Special Investigations, which tracks down Nazi perpetrators. |