U.S. to Deport L.A. Man for Actions as Nazi Guard

A retired grocery clerk who the government says oversaw the murders of thousands of Jews as a Nazi concentration camp guard has been ordered deported, the man’s attorney said Friday.

U.S. Immigration Judge James Vandello ordered the deportation of Bruno Karl Blach, 66, of Los Angeles, for persecuting Jews as a guard at three concentration camps, Dachau in Germany and Wiener-Neudorf and Mauthausen in Austria between 1939 and 1945, attorney Ronald Parker said.

Vandello ruled Thursday that Blach’s war past make him deportable under the 1978 Holtzman Amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows expulsion of Nazis who persecuted Jews during World War II, Parker said.

Parker said Vandello also accepted as fact the word of Alexsy Bialas, a Wiener-Neudorf survivor who testified at Blach’s trial last fall that he saw Blach shoot an old man on a march from Wiener-Neudorf to Mauthausen.

Parker said he intends to appeal the decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. He said Blach is free to live in Los Angeles until the outcome of that appeal.

Blach said he was drafted into the military and had no choice but to serve as an armed guard and dog handler at the camps. He said he never had direct contact with the camp prisoners.

“I didn’t do anything wrong at all,” Blach told the Los Angeles Times last fall. “I didn’t have any contact at all (with inmates). I was 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.”

Blach’s deportation hearing, presided over by Vandello in Los Angeles last fall, erupted into violence several times as concentration camp survivors screamed or lunged at him, accusing him of murdering their friends and relatives.

In seeking to deport him, the Justice Department claimed Blach concealed his violent past when he entered the country from his native Czechoslovakia in 1956.

But Parker said Vandello found Blach had entered the country legally because service as a Nazi was not a deportable offense until the Holtzman Amendment passed in 1978.

Parker contends that despite Bialas’ testimony, the government never produced hard evidence that Blach had taken part in any of the camp atrocities.

“All the evidence in Mr. Blach’s trial was hearsay three times removed,” Parker said. “He never appeared on any war documents as being involved with anything.

“The only witness that was specific was Mr. Bialas and he based his identification of Mr. Blach on an old photograph. He said Blach was 5 feet, 4 inches. He’s 6 feet tall.”

Wartime Service

But Bruce Einhorn, who represented the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, said the government could deport someone solely on their wartime service as an armed concentration camp guard even without witness accounts of brutality.

The Justice Department contended Blach became a member of the Nazi Party and the Waffen SS, the largest branch of Adolf Hitler’s elite protection units, in 1939.

While serving at Dachau, Wiener-Neudorf and Mauthausen, Blach also served as head of the SS Totenkopf, or Death’s Head Battalion. He was denied entrance to the United States in 1951, but the government claimed he won entrance in 1956 by falsifying his military record.