La Puente Man Believed to Be Fugitive From Austria Wanted for WWII Murders

A retired factory worker from La Puente facing deportation for alleged unspecified atrocities committed during World War II is believed to be a fugitive from Austria, wanted in that country on war-related murder charges, an Austrian official said Friday.

Josef Eckert, who allegedly served as a German SS guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp, was put on a wanted list in 1960 by state court officials in Vienna, according to Ulf Pacher, a spokesman for the Austrian consulate in Los Angeles.

However, until the U.S. Justice Department announced plans in December to deport Eckert, the Austrian government did not know his whereabouts, Pacher said.

Any decision by Austrian authorities to seek Eckert’s extradition will likely hinge on the Justice Department’s case pending against him, Pacher added.

The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations in December identified Eckert, 73, as having served as an SS enlisted man from 1943 to 1945 at Auschwitz, where he allegedly “assisted or otherwise participated in the persecution” of prisoners, most of them Jews. As many as 4 million people died at the camp in Nazi-occupied southern Poland, where slave laborers--as well as infants and the elderly--were tortured, hanged, shot and gassed.

Justice Department officials have refused to detail the specifics of what Eckert is suspected of having done while serving at the camp. But a notation in Austrian court records, recently forwarded to Los Angeles, shows that in 1960 Eckert was accused in absentia of “murder in concentration camp, Auschwitz,” Pacher said.

No other details of the Austrian case against Eckert could be learned Friday.

In U.S. Since 1956

The Austrian charges against Eckert were filed four years after he applied for and received an immigrant visa at the American consulate in Salzburg, Austria, records show. Eckert was born in Klein-Radinci, Austria-Hungary, in what is now Yugoslavia. He was admitted to the United States in New York in April, 1956.

It is not known when Eckert arrived in California, but property records show that in June, 1965, he and his wife, Theresia, bought their home in La Puente in the San Gabriel Valley.

While Eckert has declined to publicly discuss the case against him, he has told neighbors that he was forced to join the German army.

Eckert, according to the Justice Department, was a member of the Totenkopf-Sturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion) at Auschwitz, a unit described by an official at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies as “the most murderous” in the German armed forces.