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A Nazi’s Day of Judgment

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Times Staff Writer

Two government lawyers knocked at the door of a brick, ranch-style house here two years ago and, getting no answer, wandered around back. There they found an old man sitting alone on a patio chair. He wore a cap to shield himself from the afternoon sun. He noticed that one of the lawyers was pregnant, and he cleaned off another chair. Sit down, he said.

Josias Kumpf had been living in the United States for nearly half a century. He had been an American citizen for 40 years. He had married, raised five children and worked for 35 years stuffing sausage at a factory in Chicago. Retired and a widower, his health failing, he was living at his daughter’s home in Racine.

His visitors were prosecutors from the Justice Department. They had come to inquire about his immigration status. There was a more urgent matter too, but before they could get to it, they recalled, Kumpf, 80, laughed out loud. He knew why they were there. Without prompting, he snapped them a “Sieg Heil” salute. They talked for more than an hour, and Kumpf signed a four-page, 17-point, handwritten sworn statement that the lawyers drafted right there on the patio.

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Yes, he had been a “soldier for Hitler.” Yes, he had served in the feared Nazi SS corps and stood sentry over Jewish prisoners as an SS Death’s Head guard in concentration camps in Poland.

But, he added, “I have nothing to hide. I don’t do nothing to nobody. My fingers are clean.”

In May, Kumpf became the 100th former Nazi successfully prosecuted by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. A federal judge in Milwaukee ordered his citizenship revoked and, should his appeals fail, Kumpf will be deported.

The Justice unit was formed in 1979 to identify, hunt down and remove former Nazis who came into the United States after World War II. With a staff of lawyers and historians, the office found Kumpf after matching newfound Axis records and SS muster rolls with U.S. immigration documents.

In all such cases, federal officials are racing the clock. Just as America’s World War II veterans are dying, so are those who fought on the other side. And so too are the concentration camp survivors who might be able to identify their persecutors.

As memories fade, accounts of individual atrocities become murky. So it may never be known for sure what role Kumpf played on Nov. 3, 1943, at the Trawniki labor camp in Poland.

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This much is known: Jewish prisoners had been forced to dig a network of trenches and then lie down in them, naked. Guards machine-gunned them, a hundred at a time, until thousands filled the earth. Nazis blared music from the camp loudspeakers to drown out the cries all that morning, noon and night. When it was over, up to 10,000 corpses were set ablaze.

Kumpf says that he cannot be held responsible for what happened that day. But at least one survivor of Trawniki, Vivian Chakin of Beverly Hills, scoffs.

Chakin, like Kumpf, immigrated to this country; she too became a U.S. citizen and raised a family here. But she lost her parents and her only brother in the camps. She wants Kumpf gone.

“He had a good life. He had a family,” said Chakin, 78. “That’s what all my people never had. That’s what my brother never had. So why not let him feel a little bit of the suffering? Shouldn’t he be punished at last?”

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Kumpf’s German accent remains thick and his round face shows his age. Sometimes neighbors see him walking his scruffy gray dog up and down Rodney Lane. Other times they spot him on his riding lawnmower.

“He’s an upstanding man, and I would leave him alone,” said Tom Fosbinder, a neighbor. “Even before they broke the news about his past, he told me that he had had no choice, that he was just a teenager when the Germans knocked on his door with guns and conscripted him into the army.”

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Kumpf and his family will not discuss his past while he is appealing the deportation order. But his story is documented in depositions, sworn statements, historical records and other papers that make up the government’s case to remove him.

An ethnic German, Kumpf was born April 7, 1925, in Neu Pasua, Yugoslavia. He attended the local Lutheran church and, after less than three years in school, he quit to help his father on their small horse farm. Like most in the town of 8,000, the Kumpfs were poor.

He grew to be a big man, nearly 6 feet tall with brown eyes and black hair. They called him “Schwarze Hund,” a nickname for a dog. “Here is a strong man,” he told prosecutors last year, patting his chest at the U.S. attorney’s office in downtown Milwaukee while giving a deposition. “I was strong once. Strong.”

The German army marched into Neu Pasua in fall 1942. Kumpf was 17 when he was ordered to report for duty at the local train station.

Any young man not boarding the train, Kumpf said, “would be put up against the wall.” Some tried to run, and they “were brought back before the rest of us and shot.”

Valdis O. Lumans, a German historian retained by Kumpf’s lawyer, said Kumpf “certainly was not one of the enthusiastic ones. He did not volunteer. They came and took him.”

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The army made Kumpf a private and gave him a gray and green SS uniform. His hat had a skull sewn on it, as did the collar of his shirt. A Nazi tattoo was etched under his left arm. He was issued firearms and trained to use a rifle, a machine pistol and a light machine gun.

For 11 months, he served as a tower guard and sentry at several camps in Germany. Thousands of prisoners arrived by truck or rail. Thousands never left.

“I watch them, how they go,” he said. Many went to the crematoriums. “I hear they put the people in and that’s all,” Kumpf testified. “They don’t come out no more, that’s what I hear.”

On Oct. 29, 1943, Kumpf and others from his Death’s Head battalion boarded trains bound for Trawniki, site of an abandoned sugar factory, in eastern Poland. They arrived early on the morning of Nov. 3. The Nazis, pestered by a series of small uprisings at other camps, were cracking down.

The male Jews at Trawniki already had been forced to dig trenches in a zig-zag pattern; they were told it would provide them cover in the event of an air raid. Before dawn, prisoners awoke to the marches and waltzes of Johann Strauss blaring from the camp speakers.

Stripped naked and prodded with nightsticks and rubber truncheons -- some were shot for not moving fast enough -- the prisoners were taken to the trenches, a hundred at a time. Not all went silently. Some of them, as if trying to drown out the music, cried: “Shema Israel!” -- “Hear! O Israel!”

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When government lawyers deposed Kumpf in Milwaukee, he insisted he was not a killer. “I was a good boy before and I’m still a good boy now,” he said. “I don’t hurt nobody, and I don’t even hurt the flies if they’re behaving.”

But prosecutors were not ready to confront him with Trawniki. From a legal standpoint, proving he came to America fraudulently would be enough to get him removed. To get him deported was more important, they said.

Kumpf’s war ended in the fall of 1945, when he was freed from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp. He had been captured by the advancing Russian army after leaving Trawniki and being sent to fight along the eastern front. He later joined his father in Austria, married and, on the advice of a friend in the Chicago area, decided to make America his home.

Elizabeth B. White, chief historian for the Office of Special Investigations, said that on March 21, 1956, Kumpf applied for an immigrant visa to enter the United States. He visited the U.S. consulate in Salzburg, Austria, and stated on his application that his place of residence from 1942 to 1945 was “German Army: Germany, Poland, France.”

During Kumpf’s interview, White said, “he did not disclose his service as an armed SS Death’s Head guard.” Richard Bloomfield, then the U.S. vice consul in Austria, told prosecutors the system regrettably was lax.

Though Bloomfield could not specifically recall Kumpf, he processed countless visa applications. “I wouldn’t ever have anybody admit he was a guard in a Nazi concentration camp,” Bloomfield said. “That’s why they got visas. They lied. But if I knew they had been a guard in a concentration camp, usually that would be a reason to deny it.”

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Prosecutors questioned Kumpf in Milwaukee about his visits to the Austrian consulate.

“You did not tell them that you were a guard at Trawniki?”

“They don’t ask,” he said.

“You didn’t tell them you were in the SS?”

“They didn’t ask this either.”

Kumpf received an immigrant visa and, on May 25, 1956, entered the U.S. via New York. He settled in Chicago, and went to work at a Vienna Sausage factory.

Eight years later, he petitioned to become a naturalized U.S. citizen. Again, he listed his past as “German Army, 1942 to 1945.” Under oath, Kumpf told a U.S. immigration examiner in Chicago that he had served only as a combat soldier. On May 9, 1964, he received a certificate of naturalization.

For four decades, he told prosecutors, “I was happy in America.”

When the two lawyers came to his patio in March 2003, they knew Kumpf was more than just a German infantryman. They knew he was a Death’s Head guard and had arrived at Trawniki just as the first naked prisoners were being hurried into ditches.

The prosecutors asked him about Trawniki, and he admitted he was there. But he also said he never told U.S. immigration officials that he had belonged to the SS. “I shut up,” Kumpf told the prosecutors, explaining it had always been his position to say nothing about Trawniki. Then, according to Michelle L. Heyer, the pregnant prosecutor to whom Kumpf had offered a chair, he made a zipping motion across his mouth.

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He later would have to answer their questions about Trawniki.

Prosecutors already had reviewed interviews of other SS guards taken by German authorities in the 1960s, when that country was beginning to confront its past.

“The whole business was the most gruesome thing I have ever seen in my life,” recalled one guard, Martin Diekmann. “I often saw that, after a salvo was fired, Jews were only wounded and were buried still more or less alive together with the corpses of other victims, without the wounded receiving a so-called coup de grace.”

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Diekmann added, “I myself did not shoot.”

Aleksandr Kurisa, an SS officer from Ukraine, said: “You could hear the moans, crying, and screams of those doomed to death. All Jews in Trawniki were exterminated.”

Kurisa added, “I did not directly participate.”

Then there were the stories told by survivors.

Estera Rubinstein lay all day long among the dead. In interviews with a Jewish historical commission soon after the war, she said:

“We were taken to the pits and I only saw SS men standing with machine pistols and shooting the naked women in the head. The pits were already full of corpses. Since I did not want to watch them kill me, I hid my face in my hands and jumped into the depths with the call, ‘Shema Israel!’ ”

She was not hit. But as bodies fell across her, she grew cold. “I was pressed between the corpses.... I wanted to call out a few times, but couldn’t. It was as though I was being strangled.”

An SS guard lifted her head, checking for signs of life. But she was smeared with blood, and he moved on. She heard others pulled out and “finished off.” Amid all that, her ears filled with the waltzes. Then, when night fell and all was quiet, she said, she crawled over bodies and fled across the fields. Weeks later, she made it to Warsaw, more than 100 miles away.

As Rubinstein was leaving Trawniki, Chakin, then 14, was arriving.

She remembers seeing the dead bodies overflowing the trenches. A few days later, she said, a team of male prisoners was ordered to burn the dead. When they finished, the guards shot them.

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Chakin and other female prisoners were ordered to clean the barracks, and they found a 4-year-old boy named Mark hiding in a pile of old bedding. Mark’s mother and brother had been killed earlier in the war; his father had been shot to death after helping to burn the bodies. The Germans at first let the women keep the young boy. For five months they mothered him, encouraging him to hope. Then the SS took Mark away too.

“Because the children,” she said, “they did not keep.”

Chakin, her voice brittle with anger, added: “So you ask me how I feel I about him, this Josias Kumpf, and how he got to live to be 80 years old?”

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At his deposition in the fifth-floor conference room at the U.S. attorney’s office, Kumpf -- now boxed in, confronted by prosecutors with SS documents placing him at Trawniki -- maintained that he did not fire, either. He insisted that he merely served as a perimeter guard, standing a distance away from the killing trenches.

When he arrived by train that morning, he said, he and other SS guards ate breakfast. Then they heard the shouts and gunfire. “All the people were in the hole.... I [went] over there too and look. I turn around and I ... sorry, it’s not for me, that’s what I told my friends.”

He finished his breakfast, coffee and rye bread with butter. He said he was ordered to watch, to make sure no one escaped.

“I was watching them shoot some people,” he said. “Some people was shot and not good enough so they was still able to move, you know. That’s what we have to watch so that they don’t go no place.”

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Then, Kumpf said, “Everybody was excited because so many dead ones to see, you know. I was not excited. I feel sorry for the people.”

On May 10, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman in Milwaukee revoked Kumpf’s citizenship. He ruled that Kumpf had misrepresented himself to immigration authorities. “American citizenship,” the judge said, “is bestowed only upon those who meet fundamental standards imposed by law.”

The judge further ruled that Kumpf’s mere presence at Trawniki meant he “personally advocated or assisted” in the massacre, and as a result, was ineligible for a U.S. visa in the first place.

Kumpf’s attorney, Peter Rogers, said he was appealing the ruling before the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Should his client be forced out, Rogers said, “it is murky territory on where he can go. A lot of countries won’t take people with his circumstances.”

While he waits, his fate all but out of his hands, Kumpf often is frightened awake by nightmares. For years he had hoped to keep his secret about Trawniki.

But now, he said, it is too late. “I’m in trouble, more in trouble” than ever, he said.

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