U.S Extradites Man Accused as War Criminal

A federal magistrate Tuesday ordered a La Habra man extradited to West Germany, where he is sought on war crimes charges of murdering concentration camp prisoners during World War II.

U.S. Magistrate Ralph J. Geffen of Los Angeles took the action after Bruno Karl Blach voluntarily waived his right to a formal extradition hearing--the first time an accused Nazi war criminal has not fought extradition from the United States.

At a brief hearing, the 70-year-old retired grocery clerk told the magistrate that he fully understood what he was doing and had not been pressured into the decision. Had Blach fought extradition, the U.S. government would have been required to show that there was probable cause that he was guilty of war crimes.

Later in the day, federal marshals turned Blach over to West German authorities. German officials were unavailable for comment, but Assistant U.S. Atty. Peter Morris, who handled the case, said Blach would be immediately flown to Cologne, West Germany.

Blach was arrested at his La Habra home last October after a warrant was issued by a West German court. He has remained in custody ever since.

The warrant charged Blach with killing prisoners from April 2 to 14, 1945, while they were being led on a forced, 200-kilometer march from the Wiener Neudorf concentration camp in Germany to the Mauthausen camp in Austria.

Ronald Parker, Blach’s lawyer, said his client had decided not to fight extradition because he wanted to go back to West Germany to face the charges.

“He has told me he is not guilty,” the Fullerton attorney said. “He was a private first class; he gave no orders.”

When Blach was arrested last fall, Parker acknowledged that his client had been on the 1945 march but Blach denied killing anyone.

However, documents filed in federal court in Los Angeles said the West German government has testimony from eyewitnesses about murders Blach committed during the march.

Blach’s decision not to fight extradition, reached in the last few days, ended a lengthy struggle to stay in the United States.

When accusations about his past surfaced several years ago, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service began deportation proceedings on grounds that Blach had entered the country illegally. He had been living quietly in the United States since 1956 under his own name.

Blach was ordered deported in 1987 after an emotionally charged hearing in which a concentration camp survivor identified him as a Nazi guard who allegedly machine-gunned to death an elderly Polish Jew in 1945.

The eyewitness, Aleksy Bialas, a retired soil engineer living in Canada, tearfully testified that the guard shot the enfeebled man when he was having difficulty walking on the forced march between the two concentration camps. Bialas testified that Blach threw the man into a ditch before shooting him.

“I saw him (the victim in the ditch),” Bialas said. “I can’t ever forget. The old chap was looking at me when he died.”

A federal immigration judge said he found Bialas’ testimony “credible, convincing and persuasive.”

Blach appealed the deportation order, and the appeal was pending when West German authorities filed criminal charges against him last June and asked the United States to extradite him.

Bialas gave a statement to West German authorities, according to court documents.

In addition, two other witnesses have told West German authorities that Blach shot and killed an unidentified young Yugolsav prisoner who had fallen from exhaustion during the march, as well as another prisoner of unknown origin, according to documents filed in the case here. The West German warrant states that “well over 100 of the prisoners” on the march were killed by the guards.

Blach, a native of Czechoslovakia, joined the Nazi Party in January, 1939, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, the unit that has sought out Nazi war criminals in the United States. In 1940, U.S. officials claim, Blach joined the 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.

Parker contended that Blach is still a citizen of Czechoslovakia, but he acknowledged that Blach possesses a West German passport.

Blach is the fourth alleged Nazi war criminal extradited by the United States since the end of World War II. U.S. officials identified the others as:

* Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan of Queens, N.Y., a former concentration camp guard, who was extradited to West Germany in 1973. She was sentenced in 1980 to life imprisonment, which she is serving for multiple counts of murder.

* Andrija Artukovic of Surfside, Calif., the former interior minister of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, who was extradited to Yugoslavia in 1986. He was convicted of mass murder, sentenced to death and died in prison in 1988 while an appeal for clemency was pending.

* John Demanjuk of Cleveland, who was extradited to Israel in 1986. He was convicted in 1988 of mass murder at the gas chambers of the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland and was sentenced to death. His appeal is pending in Israel.