La Habra Man Held, Faces Extradition to Bonn on Nazi War Crimes Charges

A La Habra man sought by the West German government on war crimes charges of murdering concentration camp prisoners during World War II is being held in the custody of U.S. marshals and faces extradition, U.S. Justice Department lawyers disclosed Wednesday in Los Angeles.

Bruno Karl Blach, 69, a retired grocery clerk, was arrested Tuesday by U.S. marshals at his La Habra home. Blach was arraigned Wednesday before U.S. Magistrate Venetta S. Tassopulos, who said he would face a bail hearing Monday. She added that she was not inclined to release Blach pending his extradition hearing in December.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Peter Morris said the Justice Department acted in response to an arrest warrant issued June 28 by a court in Duisburg, West Germany. The warrant, followed by an official West German request for extradition, charged Blach with killing prisoners from April 2 to April 14, 1945, while they were being led on a forced march from the Wiener Neudorf concentration camp in Germany to the Mauthausen camp in Austria.

Morris said the crimes Blach is charged with having committed are among offenses covered by an extradition treaty signed by the United States and West Germany in August, 1980.

International paper work had delayed Blach’s arrest until this week.

Tassopulos gave federal prosecutors 45 days to present relevant documents from the West German government and indicated that the extradition hearing would be held shortly thereafter.

Blach was ordered deported to West Germany in April, 1987, by a federal Immigration Court judge, but he appealed the decision and that action is still pending.

Ronald G. Parker, Blach’s attorney, said that his client will resist extradition. Parker said Blach had expected that the appeal of his deportation case would be completed before any other action was taken by U.S. authorities.

“This is a back-door deportation,” Parker said.

Morris denied that. “This is a totally separate matter from the deportation case,” he said. “We are acting as an agent for the Federal Republic of Germany. They made a request for extradition. . . . Deportation means being sent away. This is more drastic than deportation--this is being sent to West Germany to face murder charges.”

Reached for comment at his Los Angeles County home late Wednesday, Mel Mermelstein, 63, a concentration camp survivor and witness against Blach, expressed little emotion over the extradition proceedings.

“I don’t look for revenge. I only want justice,” said Mermelstein, who said he was once guarded by Blach. “I can only speak for myself as a survivor and one who lived through that dreadful experience. It is not for me to go after them (Nazi war criminals). It has to be done by the people. West Germany, I’m sure, will handle the situation.”

A man answering the door at Blach’s well-kept La Habra home Wednesday refused to discuss the case. Standing in the doorway with a woman behind him, the man refused to identify himself and said only, “I don’t know anything, not at all.”

Neighbors said they knew very little about Blach’s alleged Nazi background but called him a good neighbor who kept to himself and offered a helping hand when needed.

“If everyone were like him, we’d have the best neighborhood in the world,” said a woman living up the street who declined to be identified. “He minds his own business, and that’s all I can say.”

The woman’s husband, a World War II Army veteran who fought against German troops, said he harbors no animosity toward Blach.

“What choice did those people have over there in following Hitler during the war?” the man asked.

A neighbor across the street, Carol Mooney, said Blach is well known in the neighborhood for keeping his home and lawn in “immaculate” condition.

“He’s a nice man,” Mooney said.

But several other neighbors did not even know Blach, who has lived on the street for several years. One man who has lived on the street for 25 years said he had never heard of Blach, despite having lived a few doors down from his house.

“This is like a city neighborhood, not a country neighborhood,” said the man, who declined to give his name. “This is a mind-your-own business neighborhood.”

Blach’s 1987 deportation order came after an emotional hearing in which a concentration camp survivor identified the La Habra man as a Nazi guard who allegedly machine-gunned to death an elderly Polish Jew in 1945.

The witness, Alexy Bialas, a retired soil engineer living in Canada, tearfully testified that the guard shot the enfeebled man when he faltered on the forced march between the two concentration camps.

Bialas testified that Blach threw the old man into a ditch before shooting him. Bialas said he saw the victim in the ditch: “I can’t ever forget. The old chap was looking at me when he died.”

In ordering Blach’s deportation, federal Immigration Judge James P. Vandello said he found the eyewitness testimony “credible, convincing and persuasive.” Vandello ruled that Blach “both assisted in and participated in the persecution of persons because of race, religion, national origin or political opinion between March 23, 1933, and May of 1945.”

A native of Czechoslovakia, Blach joined the Nazi Party in January, 1939, according to the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations.

Justice Department officials said that in 1940, Blach joined a Waffen-SS unit and was assigned to the SS Totenkopf (Death’s Head Battalion) at Dachau in Germany. He served there until the middle of 1943, when he transferred to Wiener-Neudorf near Vienna.

At both concentration camps, Blach acted as a guard and a dog handler, according to Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles.

In 1951, Blach applied for admission to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act. But an investigation by the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps revealed his military background, and his application was rejected, according to documents filed during the 1987 immigration case.

In 1956, however, Blach fraudulently gained admission into the United States by lying to immigration officials, Justice Department officials said later.

Blach, in a 1986 interview with The Times, acknowledged his German military service but denied that he had harmed anyone. He said he had been drafted into the German army and was forced to follow orders.

“When you are drafted, what do you do? I didn’t have any choice--I had to do what they told me,” said Blach, who did not testify at his deportation hearing.

Parker said Blach acknowledged being on the Mauthausen march, but said that “he didn’t kill anyone.”

Parker also asserted that it was “incredibly hypocritical” for the U.S. government to attempt to turn Blach over to West Germany after employing German scientists who once worked for the Nazis. He said that Blach has no criminal record in this country and had not associated with neo-Nazi groups or groups asserting that the Holocaust never occurred.

Joe Krovisky, a Justice Department spokesman in Washington, said the Blach case is the department’s fourth attempt to extradite an alleged Nazi war criminal since the end of World War II.

In 1973, Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan of Queens, N.Y., a former concentration camp guard, was extradited to West Germany. In 1980, after being convicted of multiple counts of murder in a Dusseldorf court, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She is still serving that sentence.

Times staff writer Jim Carlton in Orange County contributed to this story.