FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE	CRM

THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 1998                                                                                                                           (202) 514-2008

                                                                                                                                                                                 TDD (202) 514-1888




JUDGE ORDERS REMOVAL OF FORMER OFFICER


IN NAZI-SPONSORED POLICE UNITS





	WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Justice Department today won a
deportation order against Jonas Stelmokas, a Philadelphia
resident who served as a platoon commander and acting company
commander in two Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft
(Protective Detachment) Battalions in Lithuania from 1941 to
1944. 

	U.S. Immigration Judge Donald Ferlise issued an oral opinion
this afternoon, finding that Stelmokas was subject to removal to
Lithuania because, among other reasons, his service and
activities in the Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft constituted
assistance in the persecution of civilians on the basis of their
race, religion, or national origin, and assistance to the enemy
Nazi forces in their military operations against the United
States. 

	In ordering Stelmokas removed from the United States, Judge
Ferlise cited captured wartime documents which established that
Stelmokas, as commander of the detachment that guarded the
barbed-wire enclosed ghetto in which the Jews of Kaunas,
Lithuania were forcibly confined, was responsible for enforcing
the internment of the Jews in the ghetto where they were subject
to inhumane conditions.  Judge Ferlise ruled that Stelmokas'
testimony during the two-day removal hearing "lacked both
credibility and plausibility," adding, "Respondent's lying to the
Court pales in comparison to what he and his Nazi thug friends
did to the Jews in Lithuania and throughout Europe." 	

	In 1995, the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia stripped
Stelmokas of his U.S. citizenship, finding that his
Schutzmannschaft service and misrepresentation of that service to
U.S. immigration officials disqualified him for the U.S. visa he
received in 1949.  In 1996, that decision was upheld by the Third
Circuit Court of Appeals.

	OSI Director Eli Rosenbaum termed the Judge's order "a
significant victory and a powerful reaffirmation of the principle
that those who helped the Nazis carry out their diabolical
programs of murder and oppression cannot lawfully claim the
privilege of U.S. residence."  

	He added: "The inhumane operation of the Kaunas Jewish
Ghetto, one of the most deservedly notorious in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, would have been impossible without the active
involvement of Stelmokas and other Schutzmannschaft officers and
men." 

	 The case against Stelmokas was tried by the Criminal
Division's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and the
Philadelphia Office of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service.   

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