AAARGH
The suspected Nazi war criminal Konrad Kalejs has not been properly investigated, according to the former head of Australia's war crimes unit, Robert Greenwood.
Scotland Yard's investigation, which concluded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute him, was partly based on Australian files.
The Guardian has also established that when British police interviewed Kalejs, 86, an Australian national, they did not question him about his alleged involvement in mass murder while second in command of a Latvian death squad during the second world war. Questions were restricted to confirming his identity and when he planned to leave Britain.
Dr Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal centre in Jerusalem, said: "I think it is outrageous. It is a classic example of a police force that has no desire to bring a mass murderer to trial.
"If you have allegations that someone served in a murder squad, it is common logic to ask elementary questions about his activities in world war two."
Comments by Mr Greenwood added to pressure for Kalejs to be stopped from leaving Britain - possibly as soon as today - which Nazi hunters fear will lead to him escaping justice.
Mr Greenwood said no "responsible investigative body" in Australia had scrutinised the Kalejs case with a view to bringing a prosecution.
He said his unit had monitored US and Canadian investigations into Kalejs during the late 1980s and 1990s. But by the time Kalejs came to Australia after being deported from the US in 1994, the war crimes unit had been disbanded.
Kalejs denies allegations that he is implicated in the death of 30,000 people, mainly Jews, while a member of the Arajs Kommando unit which collaborated with the Nazis.
Lord Janner, chairman of the Holocaust educational trust, said Mr Greenwood's claim was an "extraordinary development". Robin Corbett, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said Kalejs should be held in Britain while a full investigation was carried out to see if a prosecution was possible.
However, Scotland Yard said the Australian investigation, which was carried out when Kalejs moved there, was "by far the most in depth and extensive" into his past and included interviews with witnesses in Latvia in the early 1990s.
Speculation also intensified yesterday on where Kalejs may go if he chooses to leave Britain before being deported. The Mexican government responded to a Guardian report that he was believed to be heading there by announcing that he would be denied entry to the country.
A Scotland Yard spokeswoman, responding to questions about the scope of the interview with Kalejs, said: "We are not prepared to discuss who we may or may not have interviewed during the course of an inquiry."
Latvia asks Scotland Yard for help investigating Konrad Kalejs as accused Nazi collaborator dodges demonstrators on return to Australia
Latvia yesterday asked Scotland Yard for help with a criminal investigation into the wartime activities of Konrad Kalejs as the alleged Nazi collaborator and war criminal spent his first night in hiding in Australia after fleeing Britain.
Several years after being given access to US justice department files on Kalejs, the Latvian prosecutor general's office sent a request to officers from the Metropolitan police organised crimes group, asking for "legal assistance" and British-held information on the wartime acts of the 86-year-old Australian citizen who is a native of Latvia.
Mr Kalejs, alleged to have participated in the mass murder of some 30,000 people, mainly Jews, while serving as an officer in a pro-Nazi militia in Latvia during the war, left Britain on Thursday after the home secretary ruled there was insufficient evidence to mount a prosecution against him. He had previously been deported from the US and Canada.
Using the citizenship he was granted after the war, he returned yesterday to Australia where the federal government said it would need new evidence before reopening an investigation into his past.
In a cat and mouse game, Kalejs was whisked off Singapore Airlines flight SQ217 by officials soon after touchdown following his 24-hour flight from London, slipping past Jewish demonstrators and the media at Melbourne airport with the help of federal police.
He was kept out of sight for 90 minutes before being taken out of the airport through the valet parking exit. Police prevented reporters and photographers from following his vehicle.
His whereabouts are not known, but he is thought to be staying with friends. The Latvian retirement home in Melbourne where he spent two years before suddenly leaving the country in June 1998 said he would not be returning there.
The Latvian authorities began gathering information on the Kalejs case last year from archives at home, in Australia, Canada and the US.
Dzintra Subrovska of the prosecutor general's office said the government was also asking Israel and the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre for help with its investigation.
The Latvian consul general in Australia, Emils Delins, said yesterday the foreign affairs department in Riga had asked his office to examine the Australian files on Kalejs to see if there were grounds for having him extradited for crimes committed on Latvian soil.
The new investigation has been prompted by the flurry of publicity over the Kalejs case in Britain in the past fortnight. "We want to know on what information these publications were based and what the crimes supposedly committed by Kalejs were," Ms Subrovska said.
The move followed a visit to Riga by Tom Lantos, the US Democratic congressman and Holocaust survivor who is a leading lobbyist on war crimes issues.
"I have every expectation, having talked to the [Latvian] president, the prime minister, the foreign minister and others, that the Latvian government will proceed with full speed and determination," Mr Lantos, a native Hungarian, told the BBC.
According to documents lodged with the US appeals court seen by the Guardian, Mr Kalejs was an officer in the Latvian mobile death squad, known as the Arajs Kommando, which participated in the slaughter of tens of thousands.
The intense fury of campaigners over Konrad Kalejs' departure yesterday is understandable. They argue that we have allowed to slip between our fingers a man whom they alleged to be one of the last big Nazi war criminals yet to be prosecuted.
Mr Kalejs, it is claimed, was that rare prize, a commander who organised and gave orders in a Latvian unit which killed thousands of Jews. What adds bitterness to their exasperation is that this case is very likely to be the last reckoning in this country of the last century's great horror, the Holocaust. After the conviction of Anthony Savoniuk last year, there are no more war crime cases pending, the Scotland Yard War Crimes Unit has closed: it is the end of this story of frustrated justice.
That is the emotionally charged context for the fierce criticism of Jack Straw's decision not to detain Mr Kalejs, not to attempt to prosecute him in Britain, but to deport him. But it is hard to see what else Mr Straw could have done.
Firstly, even his fiercest critics admit it would have meant "stretching" the law to detain the 86-year-old long enough to decide whether a prosecution was possible. Comparisons with General Pinochet are completely spurious (and opportunistic on the part of his allies), since no one has requested Mr Kalejs' extradition. Secondly, the 1991 war crimes act applies to British citizens, while Mr Kalejs became an Australian in 1957.
Mr Kalejs' case exposes the inadequacy of the whole international effort over the last two decades to close the loop on Nazi war criminals who fled eastern Europe. Australia, the US and Canada have played an elaborate game of pass the parcel and now Mr Straw has joined in. But in the order of shame, Australia comes top. He has been deported back there twice, yet no prosecution was initiated. The political will in Canberra to pursue war criminals has sadly long since run out.
The disappointing irony is that this was
the country which was held out as a model of second world war
crime investigations. While this has led to an unrivalled archive
on the killing teams of Nazi-occupied Europe and investigation
skills which have been copied in Bosnia, it has been singularly
unsuccessful in achieving convictions. The ball is now back in
Australia's court. Its only way out is if Latvia decides putting
Mr Kalejs on trial in Riga might earn it a few brownie points
for its application for European community membership.
Straw admits Kalejs should have been on suspects' index barring entry
Home secretary Jack Straw branded Konrad Kalejs a war criminal yesterday as the alleged death squad lieutenant left Britain and dashed hopes that he would be prosecuted here.
Kalejs, 86, made a pre-dawn escape from the Leicestershire residential home where he had been staying. He left Britain voluntarily after the home secretary issued a notice that he intended to deport him.
Kalejs was accompanied to Heathrow by police and immigration officials. Just after 10.30am he left British soil en route to Australia aboard a Singapore airlines jet.
It is believed he will be greeted by protests in Melbourne today, which will renew pressure on the Australian government to prosecute him. Latvia stressed last night that it was investigating him.
Nazi-hunters wanted Kalejs, an Australian citizen, charged in Britain for involvement in the murder of 30,000 people, mainly Jews, while joint second in command of a Latvian mobile killing squad, the Arajs Kommando, that collaborated with the Nazi occupiers of Latvia during the second world war.
In London, the home secretary intensified his offensive against critics of Britain's decision that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Kalejs which let him leave the country as a free man.
The US and Canada had both considered the evidence of Kalejs's involvement in war crimes strong enough to deport him.
Mr Straw admitted that "with hindsight" Kalejs should have been on the suspects' index, which would have led to him being denied entry into Britain.
His name has now been added to the list of 500,000 to be refused entry.
The home secretary also hinted that even if there had been strong evidence, the war crimes act may not have covered Kalejs. He said Scotland Yard "considered it legally questionable whether Kalejs could be regarded as resident in the United Kingdom as would be required if he were to be tried under the war crimes act 1991".
He stressed that his decision that Kalejs should be deported required a lower standard of proof than a criminal prosecution: "My decision that reasonable grounds existed to believe that Kalejs was complicit in war crimes was, of course, reached where necessary on the balance of probabilities."
Mr Straw said nothing more could have been done, but sidestepped questions about the rigour of the police investigation into Kalejs, who was never questioned by officers about any of the war crimes allegations against him.
Kalejs entered Britain at Birmingham airport on September 27 1997, from Frankfurt and as an Australian national had permission to stay for six months.
He had a passport which had been renewed in February 1999 which did not contain stamps which could have alerted immigration officers to the fact that he had been deported from the US in 1994 and Canada in 1997.
Britain's refusal to prosecute Kalejs was condemned by one of his alleged victims Alfred Winter, 81, who lives in the US. Mr Winter told the Guardian he was guarded by Kalejs's unit at the Salaspils camp where he was held from December 1941 to July 1942 and saw executions, beatings and death from starvation: "It's a very bad feeling that he has escaped justice again."
Lord Janner, who campaigns for war criminals to be brought to justice, said: "I am deeply disappointed, frustrated and sad that this evil man was allowed to leave Britain before he was sent to jail for the rest of his days. It is now up to the Australian authorities. We are going to try to get them to investigate fully."
Shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe expressed dismay that Kalejs had departed without facing criminal action in the UK.
In Australia, ministers have also promised to reinvestigate Kalejs if new evidence comes to light, having dropped a prosecution for lack of evidence.
The Latvian government said yesterday that
criminal proceedings had been started against Kalejs in that country
and called for international help gathering information which
might provide evidence against him.
As Konrad Kalejs, an 86-year-old accused of Nazi war crimes, flees to Australia, Nick Hopkins looks at the fugitives topping the world's most-wanted lists.
Konrad Kalejs will probably be fetching his bags from one of the carousels at Melbourne airport this morning while the home secretary, Jack Straw, tucks into breakfast. The 86-year-old accused of Nazi war crimes will be chased by the media as he returns to his suburban house but, before long, he will probably sink back into relative obscurity.
The decision to chase Kalejs out of the UK with empty threats of deportation (he was never likely to hang around) is another blow to investigators at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. They have uncovered the whereabouts of numerous alleged war criminals, and watched goverments, with notable exceptions, proscratinate over what to do with them.
Kalejs was not the first to be let off the hook; he will not be the last. If truth be told, Kalejs was not even on their most wanted list, and he certainly does not feature on the books of either Interpol or the FBI, which compile their own. But many alleged war criminals are - both from the second world war and from recent conflicts in the Balkans.
The FBI top 10 has been biased in the past towards terrorists who have targeted US citizens, drug traffickers and murderers while Interpol's is necessarily biased towards criminals in Europe. Some detectives doubt their worth, saying they are a PR exercise.
Most terrorists are out of police jurisdiction, holed up in countries friendly to them, which would never consider handing them over. But agencies increasingly believe they can be a useful tool. Although they run the risk of being called by hoaxers, there is always the possibility that a criminal will be recognised and a vital lead provided. Investigators who support the use of lists remember the occasion in 1985 when Abu Nidal visited the police station at Paddington Green to report that his briefcase had been stolen. If his picture and details were as widely known then as they are now, he may have been caught.
No definitive list of the world's most wanted men is ever likely to be agreed. Here, we have 10 men currently wanted for heinous crimes. The names and details of the accused have come from different organisations and there is no attempt to put them in any order. The only strand connecting them is that the men are all accused of horrific crimes - and they are all at large...
Antanas Gudelis
Antanas Gudelis, 88, a Lithuanian living in Adelaide, Australia, is a prime target for Nazi hunters. He has been charged with genocide by the prosecutor general's office in Lithuania, but there is little likelihood he will ever be deported, let alone stand trial.
Gudelis was a lieutenant in Lithuania's Third Auxilliary Police Batallion during the second world war. The force, controlled by the Nazis, was instrumental in the persecution of Jews in the Kovno ghetto, and was responsible for the slaughter of 9,200 men, women and children on a single day in October, 1941: the worst mass murder in Lithuanian history.
Gudelis was investigated by the Australian war crimes tribunal but he was not brought to trial. However, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre uncovered additional evidence which, three years ago, led to him being charged by the Lithuanians over the deaths of more than 10,000 Jews. The extra evidence was presented to the Australian authorities but seems to have been ignored. Gudelis's son, Edward, said recently that the Australian police investigated his father seven years ago and "did not find damaging evidence". Gudelis has denied any involvement in war atrocities.
Aleksandras Leleikis
Aleksandras Leleikis, 92, is another Lithuanian who has evaded prosecution, even though he was stripped of US citizenship, forced to return to Vilnius, and charged with genocide. Leleikis, a law graduate, lived in the US for 41 years. Suspicions that he was involved in war crimes were confirmed in 1990 when Lithuania declared its independence and opened its state archives.
The special investigations office of the US justice department has alleged Leleikis was district security chief of the Lithuanian police in Vilnius. The force, which was subordinate to the Gestapo, was responsible for the murder of 50,000 Jews between June 1941 and July 1944. Mike Macqueen, from the OSI, discovered documents for the arrest, detention and transfer for execution of hundreds of Jews signed by Leleikis.
In hearings to strip him of his American citizenship, Leleikis said he was only carrying out orders. In June 1996, he boarded a plane to Vilnius and two years later was charged over the deaths of 74 Jews by the Lithuanian authorities. The trial was halted because of his alleged poor health. America and Israel believe he is faking. "This is the latest episode in the tragic story of the Lithuanian government's consistent failure to achieve justice in cases of Nazi crimes against humanity," said Eli Rosenbaum, head of the OSI.
Alois Brunner
The arrest and conviction of Alois Brunner remains the top priority of war investigators. He was private secretary to Adolph Eichmann, who oversaw Hitler's "final solution". Brunner has been blamed for the murder of 128,500 Jews from Austria, Greece, France, Romania and Hungary. Several countries have issued arrest warrants for him and there is evidence he is currently living in Syria under the name Georg Fisher, though this has never been properly verified.
He joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931, aged 19, and the SS in 1932, where he was promoted because of his rabid anti-semitism. He was responsible for deporting 44,000 Jews in sealed wagons from Salonika, Greece, to concentration camps in six weeks. As head of the Drancy concentration camp, near Paris, he sent more than 23,500 Jews to their deaths. Claiming Jewish children were "future terrorists", he ordered 250 children onto a cattle wagon bound for Auschwitz in July 1944. More than 200 were murdered, mostly by gas, some from medical experimentation. Camp survivors referred to him as "the dark nightmare" and a "mad sadist". At the end of the war, he escaped from Europe with false papers and helped set up Syria's intelligence services.
Abu Nidal
Abu Nidal, which means "father of the struggle", has been one of the world's most wanted terrorists for the past 20 years. He is wanted by Italy, the US and the UK for attacks which have killed 250 people. Nidal, a Palestinian whose real name is Sabri al-Banna, is currently thought to be living in Libya.
In 1973, he formed the Fatah Revolutionary Council, described by the US as the "world's most dangerous terrorist group". At the time, Nidal was ambassador for the PLO in Sudan and Iraq, but he defected because he did not agree with Yasser Arafat's conciliatory attitude. Nidal was responsible for the attacks on Rome and Vienna airports in 1985, which killed 17, and the 1986 synagogue bombing in Istanbul, in which 21 people perished. He was also behind the attempted assassination in London 18 years ago of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador. In 1987, he shot 150 of his own agents to ward off traitors within his 800-strong organisation.
Osama Bin Laden
Osama Bin Laden is currently the FBI's most wanted man. It has offered a $5m reward for information leading to his capture. Investigators believe he is in Afghanistan, protected by 300 bodyguards, and do not believe he will ever be brought to justice. Bin Laden, also known as "the prince" and "the director", is head of the terrorist organisation, Al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, in August 1998. More than 200 people were killed in the blasts.
Bin Laden is the mastermind of most Islamic terrorism, and has an estimated fortune of $200m. He is thought to have been responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, and attacks on US soldiers in his native Saudi Arabia.
Eric Robert Rudolph
Also on the FBI top 10 list, Rudolph was charged two years ago with bombing the Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The blast killed one woman and injured hundreds of others. He is also thought to have bombed two abortion clinics and a lesbian nightclub in 1997 and 1998.
The FBI first heard about him the day after the explosion at the clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, on January 30, 1998. A witness noticed the registration number of his pick-up truck and when officers searched his house they found bomb-making material.
Rudolph, 34, has been on the run ever since. An army veteran and specialist in survival techniques, he is thought to be hiding somewhere in the Great Smoky Mountains Range, which divides North Carolina and Tennessee. The FBI has offered $1m for information leading to his arrest.
Antonio Angeles Martins
One of Interpol's most wanted men, the poster with his name and details describes him as "dangerous, violent, infectious and addicted to drugs". Born in Brazil, Martins, 34, has been charged in Spain with the kidnap, rape, torture and murder of three teenage girls in November 1992. The girls, who came from a village near Valencia, were hitchhiking to a disco when Martins and an accomplice abducted them. Their bodies were found 65 days later, buried in shrubland near Tous. Post mortems confirmed the girls had been shot and subjected to horrific torture. Martins, who has Spanish citizenship, has been on the run ever since. There have been unconfirmed sightings of him in Lisbon and Brazil.
Ramon Eduardo Arellano-Felix
Leader of the notorious Mexican drug syndicate, the Tijuana Cartel. The FBI believes the 34-year-old, a former policeman, is one of the world's biggest cocaine smugglers. Thomas Constantine, former head of the US drug enforcement administration, said the Tijuana Cartel, and its rival the Juarez Cartel, are more powerful than the Mexican government. He described Arellano-Felix as one of the new breed of "narco-juniors" who are better educated, more sophisticated and more entrepreneurial than their predecessors. He is on the FBI's current top 10 wanted list.
Radovan Karadzic
Wanted for genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs has been specifically charged with responsibility for killing up to 6,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995 "in order to kill, terrorise and demoralize the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat population". He was also charged over the shelling of Sarajevo, and the use of 284 UN peacekeepers as human shields in May and June 1995. Karadzic, a poet and one-time petty criminal, lives under armed guard just outside Pale.
Slobodan Milosevic
The Yugoslav president has also been indicted
by the UN war crimes tribunal "for crimes against humanity
and violations of the customs of war" - that is rapes, killings,
forced deportations and illegal detentions.
Nothing is to be gained by trying to prosecute suspected war criminals of half a century ago
If Konrad Kalejs committed one 10th of the crimes he is said to have been involved in at the Salaspils concentration camp, he was and remains a monster who will, if there is any justice, die a lonely and painful death. Not before time either.
But should an 86-year-old be prosecuted, in Britain, 55 years after the second world war ended, for what he did long ago in his native Latvia? Even if the evidence against him (and identification evidence is always tricky) were rock-solid, the answer should be "no", just as it was when the ill-fated war crimes act was pushed through parliament in 1991.
It is not that the Holocaust was not the darkest moment of modern European history. An uncle of mine was present when British troops liberated the camp at Belsen ("Tough soldiers from the slums of Glasgow wept," he said). I have known about it almost all my life and, if anything, the sheer horror gets worse with the passage of time.
Of that other great stain on Europe's recent past, the Atlantic slave trade, it can at least be said that instrumental rationality underpinned it; that, however brutal and morally repugnant it was and is, there was a point to it: economic exploitation of the weak by the strong.
The Holocaust was a costly and bureaucratic form of industrialised murder with no point at all and we are right to remember it as something special, a warning to us for ever. But there are objections, both practical and principled, to the pursuit of old men, understandable though the obsession is among many Jewish survivors. It is only human to feel guilty to have survived at all.
But for the rest of us, no. The practical obstacles are serious and few late prosecutions around the world have succeeded - just one in Britain, where last April Anthony Sawoniuk, a 78-year-old retired railway ticket inspector, was sentenced to life imprisonment by Mr Justice Potts after an eight-week trial at the Old Bailey, for murdering 18 Jews in a remote area of Nazi-occupied Belarus.
Even at Nuremburg, before the victors decided to draw what Churchill called "a sponge across the horrors of the past," the acquittal rate was one in three.
The theoretical problems are as vivid as they were when the House of Lords, full of old soldiers and lawyers who knew the score, rejected the first war crimes bill by 207 votes to 74 in April 1990. Retrospective legislation to prosecute offences outside British jurisdiction, let alone so long ago, was a bad idea, their lordships opined. Terrible things were done on all sides, time to move on.
Many Tory ministers felt the same. But Margaret Thatcher had been determined (she had recently the visited the massacre site at Babi Yar), so her successor dutifully pushed it through under the parliament acts.
The average age of MPs sitting in that parliament had been six in 1939, one peer had noted. The disparity of experience is far greater now. Sir Edward Heath (83) is the Commons's sole surviving serious combatant from the second world war. For most of us it is book learning and selective hindsight.
Lady Thatcher (who did not volunteer when she reached 18 in 1943) is a good case in point. She was happy to see the dregs of Hitler's genocide pursued, the corporals and the Kalejses, less keen on the prosecution of General Pinochet, whose alleged crimes and responsibility were more easily documented.
Pro-Pinochet forces argued that this was Chile's issue, not ours. A good point, not least in Spain where a far bloodier past has been swept under history's carpet in the interests of what South Africans call truth and reconciliation, if not the whole truth and reconciliation. Imagine our feeling if Gerry Adams had been arrested in New York last year ?
Yes, there is a declared determination by the international community to hold domestic tyrants to greater account, in Serbia or Iraq, currently in that Scottish Lockerbie court in Holland. As with Latvian camp capos, we seem to pick on easy targets, pariah states, just as we picked on the Germans (but not the Austrians) for war guilt in 1945, while taking care to exempt their rocket scientists.
All states have their dark secrets, too painful to behold, ours in Ireland, the Swiss in their bank vaults, France's - perhaps the most interesting case in post-war Europe - in uncovering what really happened to at least 200 Algerian demonstrators in Paris, said to have been murdered by police and secretly buried outside the city in 1961.
On those allegations the European parliament is eloquently silent. The same selective indignation applies, does it not, to the post-Holocaust state of Israel, whose determination to ensure that (as their soldiers say) "Masada shall not fall again", has frequently taken it well beyond justifiable conduct at home and abroad. That calculation is part of the current Latvian uproar too, a useful distraction from current realities.
Do not take my word for it. Here is a Jewish Holocaust refugee, quoted in the 1991 debate: "Retribution is both evil and futile. This is England. We do not indulge in show trials, however fairly conducted."
.
NAZI-HUNTERS are renewing pressure on the Government to investigate
the case of a war criminal who runs a guest house in Edinburgh.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies has called on the Home Office to strip Anton Gecas of his British citizenship and deport him to Lithuania to stand trial for the murder of Jews during the Second World War.
Mr Gecas, 84, was branded a war criminal by Lord Milligan in a civil case at the High Court in Edinburgh in 1992. A former mining engineer from Lithuania, Mr Gecas had sued Scottish Television after it broadcast a documentary implicating him in the murder of 32,000 Jews in concentration camps in occupied Eastern Europe.
He lost the case and Lord Milligan said: "I am clearly satisfied on the evidence as a whole that Gecas participated in many operations involving the killing of innocent Soviet citizens, including Jews in particular, in the last three months of 1941."
At the time there were calls for a criminal prosecution, but the Crown Office in Scotland claimed that there was not enough evidence.
The case has now been taken up by a group of cross-party MSPs, who plan to raise the issue in Parliament in Edinburgh this week.
Mike Russell, the SNP's business manager, said: "I'm entirely in favour of pursuing alleged war criminals as long as they remain alive. If the law as it stands doesn't allow for that, the Scottish Parliament must look at strengthening the War Crimes Act."
Gecas, who is married to a Sri Lankan nurse, Astrid, and has three adult children, moved to Britain in 1947. He was granted citizenship after claiming to have fought in the Polish Army.
During the war he was a Lithuanian Air
Force cadet and later became a member of a police battalion that
killed thousands of Jews. He was awarded the Iron Cross by the
German Army for bravery.
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