La Habra Man in Nazi War Crimes Trial Acquitted

A former Nazi SS corporal who lived in La Habra and was extradited to Germany in 1990 has been acquitted on charges that he shot and killed four slave laborers on a forced march during World War II, the man’s attorney said Friday.

Bruno Karl Blach, 73, a retired grocery store clerk, was found not guilty on Thursday by a court in Duisburg, Germany, said Ronald G. Parker, who represented Blach in a 1990 extradition proceeding.

“I spoke to Mr. Blach on the telephone this morning (Friday) and he sounded exhausted from all this,” Parker said. “But he is glad that all this was over and that he could finally put this all to rest.”

The not-guilty verdict was reached despite emotional testimony from a concentration camp survivor who identified Blach as a Nazi guard who allegedly shot to death with a machine gun one of the four victims in 1945--an elderly Polish Jew.

The witness, Alexy Bialas, a retired soil engineer living in Canada, also testified at Blach’s deportation hearing.

According to German news reports, the court found there was insufficient evidence to convict Blach. However, Dominik Glebe, 71, Blach’s co-defendant and a former SS trooper, was convicted as an accessory to murder and received a two-year suspended sentence. The prosecution had sought life in prison for both men.

In April, 1987, a federal immigration judge ordered Blach deported to Germany on the grounds that he withheld information about his Nazi affiliation when applying to immigrate to the United States in 1956.

Blach appealed the decision, delaying his departure until he was arrested on Oct. 17, 1989, on murder charges. A warrant accused him of 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.

Parker said that Blach did not fight his extradition because he felt he did not do anything wrong and wanted to answer the charges.

In a 1986 interview with The Times, Blach acknowledged his German military service but denied harming 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,” Blach said.

Parker said he never believed Bialas’ testimony, and portrayed him as a “strange witness” who never really knew Blach.

“But he testified (at the deportation hearing) that Blach shot and killed Bialas’ friend although Bialas didn’t know the name of the friend,” Parker said.

Rules of evidence at deportation hearings are more liberal than in court, Parker said. He added that “if it had happened in a real court, they wouldn’t have gotten to first base” with the accusations.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, with the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles, said he was not surprised by the acquittal, saying that German courts are now using a much narrower prosecution focus.

“The thing with Bruno Blach is, in Germany the only cases they will prosecute have to meet some specifics. Now, they also need witnesses who can testify that (the defendant) murdered specific individuals and with intent,” Cooper said. “It’s a very, very narrow definition of what they would convict on.”

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

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

German news reports quoted Blach as saying he regrets that his former Nazi affiliation bans his return to Orange County. “I’d rather be in the United States. I think it is a good land,” he said. “It has more freedom.”