Ex-Yale Lecturer Who Aided Nazis Loses Citizenship

A former Yale University lecturer who wrote World War II propaganda advocating the extermination of Jews was stripped of his U.S. citizenship Monday by a federal judge.

Valdimir Sokolov, 73, concealed his work for the Nazis in Russia from U.S. immigration officials when he entered the United States in 1951, federal prosecutors said.

Judge Thomas P. Murphy, who presided over Sokolov’s denaturalization trial in U.S. District Court in Waterbury in November, revoked Sokolov’s naturalization, making him subject to deportation.

Neither Sokolov nor his attorney Brian Gildea of New Haven could be reached for comment.

Between 1942 and 1944, Sokolov wrote for a Nazi-controlled newspaper in his hometown of Orel, south of Moscow.

Called for Allies’ Defeat

In addition to calling for the killing of Jews, Sokolov’s articles called for the defeat of Allied forces and encouraged Soviets to seek work in Germany to support the Nazi cause.

Sokolov said he wrote anti-Semitic articles when his country was occupied by the Nazis because he was interested in pushing anti-communist causes. He said he did not know then that Jews were being exterminated and that his anti-Semitic slurs were ordered by Nazi censors.

Sokolov was admitted to the United States in 1951 under the Displaced Persons Act, which granted visas to “victims of the war” who did not assist the Nazi war effort, prosecutors said. He would have been denied citizenship in 1957 had his past been disclosed, federal prosecutors said.

Sokolov became a lecturer in Russian literature at Yale, where he taught for 17 years, resigning when his past was uncovered by the Yale student newspaper in 1976. The government filed its complaint against Sokolov in 1982.

Sokolov can appeal Monday’s decision through the federal courts.