FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                         CRM
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1997                         (202) 616-2777
                                               TDD (202) 514-1888

       JUSTICE DEPARTMENT MOVES TO REVOKE U.S. CITIZENSHIP
             OF FORMER NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP GUARD


     WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Department of Justice today asked a
federal court in Missouri to revoke the United States citizenship
of a St. Peters, Missouri, man who it charged participated in the
persecution of Poles, Jews and other civilians while serving at a
Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II.

     A denaturalization complaint filed today in U.S. District
Court in St. Louis, Missouri, by the Office of Special
Investigations (OSI) of the Justice Department's Criminal
Division and the U.S. Attorney's Office in St. Louis alleges that
the defendant, Michael Negele, 77, entered the German Waffen-SS
in November 1943. 
 
     "The defendant concealed his Nazi concentration camp guard
service from U.S. immigration officials when he immigrated to the
United States from Germany, in 1950," OSI Director Eli M.
Rosenbaum stated. "Negele never would have received a U.S. visa
had he disclosed the truth," he added.

     The complaint alleges that upon joining the Waffen-SS in
November 1943, Negele became a member of the SS Death's Head
Guard Battalion (SS-Totenkopf-Wachbataillon), also known as the
SS Death's Head Battalion (SS-Totenkopf-Sturmbann), at the
Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin, Germany, where he
served as an armed guard of prisoners until June 1944.  Members
of various European national groups and religious denominations,
as well as political opponents of the Nazis, were imprisoned and
murdered at Sachsenhausen during this period because of their
religion, national origin, race, or political opinion.

      Sachsenhausen was also the site of a variety of gruesome medical
experiments that took the lives of many prisoners.  Tens of
thousands of prisoners were killed by shooting, hanging, gassing,
beatings, and other means while the Sachsenhausen concentration
camp was in operation.

     SS personnel records discovered by OSI state that in June
1944, Negele was ordered transferred to the Death's Head
Battalion at the Plaszow Concentration Camp in German-occupied
Cracow, Poland.  

     After the war, the International Military Tribunal at
Nuremberg, Germany, ruled that the SS, including the Waffen-SS,
was a criminal organization involved in "the persecution and
extermination of the Jews, brutalities and killings in
concentration camps, excesses in the administration of occupied
territories, the administration of the slave labor program and
the mistreatment and murder of prisoners of war."  The complaint
also alleges that Negele misrepresented his wartime activities
when he applied for a visa to enter the United States in 1950.   

     OSI Director Rosenbaum said that the initiation of
proceedings to denaturalize Negele is a result of OSI's ongoing
efforts to identify and take legal action against former
participants in Nazi persecution residing in this country.  To
date, 60 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of U.S. citizenship
and 48 have been removed from the United States since OSI began
operations in 1979.  There are some 300 persons currently under
investigation by OSI, according to Rosenbaum.
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