Sitting in Judgment : Holocaust Survivors Relive Painful Memories at Former Nazi’s Deportation Hearing

Anna Fischer, whose family died at the hands of Nazis during World War II, was in a Los Angeles courtroom last week to see a man she believes symbolizes the evil of the Holocaust.

“How much blood has passed through your hands?” she asked Bruno Karl Blach.

Blach, a former Nazi concentration camp guard and longtime La Habra resident, stared back but did not answer.

“I felt like spitting in his face,” said Fischer, a Westwood resident and docent at the Martyrs Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust in Los Angeles.

Fischer was among a dozen or so Holocaust survivors to attend Blach’s deportation hearing, which began last Monday and is scheduled to continue through Wednesday.

The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations is trying to deport Blach for his service in the elite Waffen SS between 1939 and 1945. As a member of the SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head Battalion), he served as a guard and dog handler at three camps: Dachau in Germany, and Wiener Neudorf and Mauthausen concentration camps in Austria.

Blach allegedly supervised slave laborers and prevented prisoner escapes, according to the U.S. government’s “order to show cause,” which is the first step in a deportation proceeding.

A native of Czechoslovakia, Blach also “misrepresented and concealed” his Nazi activities when he entered the United States in March, 1956, according to the order. In 1951, he had been denied admission here, but five years later he lied about his military record to immigrate, according to court documents.

A retired clerk for a supermarket chain’s distribution center, Blach, 66, lives in an older, upper-middle-class house on Walnut Street. Although he is married and has grown children, no one from his family has been in the courtroom.

Blach admits his Nazi military service but denies that he harmed anyone. He claims he was drafted into the German army in 1939 and insists that he was just a private who was forced to follow orders.

Blach said he had been “the lowest grade you can have in the army. When you are drafted, what do you do? I didn’t have any choice. I had to do what they told me.”

At week’s end, Blach said in a brief interview: “It is very hard (to be here). Very, very hard.”

The Justice Department began its efforts to deport Blach in December, 1985. His case is among 27 in progress, said Michael Wolf, deputy director of the Office of Special Investigation in Washington.

Opened in 1979, the office has a $3-million annual budget and employs 15 lawyers and seven historians. Of the 63 people it has targeted for deportation, 12 have left the United States.

Throughout the hearing last week before U.S. Immigration Judge James P. Vandello, Blach listened intently, his face reddening as former concentration camp prisoners testified about torture, murder and barbarous medical experiments at the camps.

“He is ashamed and embarrassed that he was a part of it (the Nazi era),” said Ronald G. Parker, Blach’s Fullerton attorney. “But our position is that there should be something more than guilt by association.”

So far, Parker said, the government has failed to produce witnesses who can identify Blach as someone who persecuted them.

A government witness who can provide first-hand testimony about Blach’s conduct at the camps is scheduled to appear Monday, the prosecutor said.

But even without witnesses’ accounts, there is federal precedent to deport someone based solely on their wartime service as an armed concentration camp guard, said Bruce J. Einhorn, the government’s senior trial lawyer in the Blach case.

“To me, the Blach case falls squarely within the four corners of the precedent,” Einhorn said. “I think Mr. Blach is up against case law.”

Einhorn said the government’s request for Vandello to deport Blach is not “trailblazing.”

“I’m asking the judge to swim with the (legal) waters,” Einhorn said.

Einhorn traveled to Germany to interview Ernst Dura, a fellow dog handler who testified via videotape at Blach’s hearing. On the tape, Dura identified Blach as a colleague and picked out Blach from among pictures of eight men.

The judge also heard testimony from two survivors about the treatment of prisoners in the concentration camps.

The guards treated people in the “most inhuman and barbaric way a human being can be treated by another human being,” said Kadeusz Dahl, a Dachau survivor who now lives in New Jersey. He described how he was subjected to an unnecessary appendectomy as part of the Nazis’ medical experiments.

“One group of prisoners who were assembling the wiring for airplanes did it wrong,” Dahl testified. “They were accused of sabotage . . . for that reason they were shot.”

Father Robert Dabrowski, who said he was among 1,000 Catholic priests sent to Dachau in 1940, testified that prison guards kicked and beat him and that he was injected with malaria-tainted blood as part of a mass medical experiment. He said the West German government is still paying him for the physical damage he suffered in the camp.

But Dabrowski, a Polish native who now works as a hospital chaplain in Tulsa, Okla., said the guards “were brutal because they had to be.”

Their job, he said, was “to terrorize us at any moment at any location.” Prisoners who did not work fast enough or obey orders were lashed, hung on poles, deprived of food or shot by the armed camp guards.

On Wednesday, Charles W. Sydnor Jr., the government’s chief historical expert, linked Blach to the beating of two prisoners in April, 1945.

“Mr. Blach, Mr. Kos and Mr. Wilhemsen knocked both of the prisoners to the floor and stomped them . . . Thunke (another guard) shot them,” said Sydnor, who quoted and translated the passage from an official history of the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Blach later denied that he was the man described in the book, which was written by former camp prisoner Hans Marsalek.

“No one can remain unmoved by the witnesses,” Parker said in an interview. But, he added, most of the government’s evidence against Blach is 45 years old.

One point on which both Parker and Einhorn agree is that Blach’s case probably will be decided on appeal.

If Vandello orders him deported--and that decision probably will take months--Blach can appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, an administrative agency.

If he loses there, he can go to a federal appeals court and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court. The government also plans to appeal if it loses. The process could take years, Parker said.

If the government wins, it’s not clear where Blach would be sent because he is not a citizen of any nation.

Although Wolf would not comment on how the Blach case came to light, he said most of the cases filed in the last decade have been based on the work of his agency’s historians, who review lists of Nazi guards and others to determine whether any are living in the United States.

Meanwhile, a small corps of concentration camp survivors attended Blach’s hearing every day last week.

Fischer said she never planned to confront Blach and it surprised her when she did. She had survived the Holocaust only because someone pushed her off a train as it headed for a concentration camp, she said. She never knew who.

Later, as a slave laborer for the Nazis, she pretended to be a Polish Aryan.

Harry Kagan, who owns a jewelry business in Los Angeles, said, “Whatever is happening here was part of my life.”

Kagan, who was imprisoned in a Polish concentration camp, said he has testified against Nazis on trial five or six times, but this was the first time he attended a deportation hearing as an observer.

“We cannot forget,” Kagan said. “We must not forget.”

Val Rodriguez, a Banning High School history teacher, said he took the day off to attend Friday’s hearing because he wants people to know that 7,000 Spaniards were killed by the Nazis at Mauthausen.

“We also suffered,” Rodriguez said.