Immigration appeals board upholds deportation order for former Nazi guard.


A federal appeals board has upheld a deportation order for a Wisconsin man who served as a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II, the Justice Department announced Monday.

The federal Board of Immigration Appeals upheld a deportation order issued in January 2007 against 83-year-old Josias Kumpf of Racine, who had served as a guard at the Trawniki training camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. The Board of Immigration Appeals is part of the Justice Department.

Last year's deportation order, issued by Chicago-based immigration Judge Jennie Giambastiani, called for Kumpf's removal to Germany, Austria or Serbia. Kumpf can still appeal the deportation order in the federal court system.

In 2005, a federal judge in Milwaukee stripped Kumpf's U.S. citizenship, concluding that he "personally assisted" in the persecution of prisoners. That judge, Lynn Adelman, said Kumpf arrived at Trawniki no more than a day after 8,000 Jewish prisoners were killed at an adjoining labor camp in 1943.

Adelman wrote that Kumpf "stood guard near the pits where the massacre occurred with instructions to shoot prisoners who attempted to escape, including those who in his words were 'still halfway alive.'"

The judge also found that when Kumpf applied for an immigrant visa to the United States in 1956, he did not disclose that he had been an SS guard because he feared it would disqualify him.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich said in a statement that Kumpf participated in an operation that resulted in the murder of thousands of innocent victims.

"His culpability in this atrocity does not diminish with the passage of time," Friedrich said. The Board of Immigration Appeals ruling, he added, "bolsters the department's continuing efforts to ensure that those who took part in the crimes of the Nazi Holocaust are not allowed to enjoy the privileges and freedom the United States offers its citizens."

In 2003, the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, along with the local U.S. Attorney's office, moved to strip Kumpf of his citizenship. Kumpf, who was born in Serbia, said in an interview at the time that he was taken from his home in Yugoslavia as a 17-year-old and forced to serve as a guard, but he did not participate in any atrocities.

Messages left with Kumpf and his attorney were not immediately returned Monday

TAX EVADERS TAKE ME BACK TO HISTORY. DID YOU KNOW ADOLF HITLER WAS A TAX EVADER.



Adolf Hitler spent years dodging taxes, accumulating enormous debts as he led his Nazi party to power, a German tax expert has revealed. He owed the authorities 405,500 Reichsmarks ( about $ 8,000,000 usd in today's money) by 1934, when as German chancellor his debts were forgiven.

A retired Bavarian notary, Klaus-Dieter Dubon, found Hitler's tax secrets in papers from the Bavarian State Archive. "He was constantly challenging tax office rulings," Mr Dubon told Reuters.

The tax office inquired how Hitler had obtained funds to buy a luxury Mercedes car while he was in prison following his abortive 1923 coup attempt.....

Hitler replied that he had received a bank loan and the car "is for me just a means to an end".

After his release from jail, Hitler had declared his possessions simply as one desk and two bookshelves, the German newspaper Bild reported.

Mein Kampf earnings

Mr Dubon told Reuters that Hitler had earned 1.2m Reichsmarks in 1933 from sales of his book Mein Kampf - "a huge income, when you consider teachers then had annual salaries of 4,800 marks".

But he failed to pay tax on 600,000 Reichsmarks of that income, the researcher found.

By 1945 Hitler had made 7.6m Reichsmarks out of Mein Kampf, without paying any tax.

In his lengthy correspondence with tax inspectors, Hitler repeatedly asked to pay in instalments.

But once installed as chancellor in 1933, his tax troubles were over.

He was declared free of tax obligations in 1934 and the reward for the official who absolved him was a monthly tax-free income of 2,000 Reichsmarks.

"It's all so ridiculous," said Mr Dubon. "But in a dictatorship everything the dictator does is correct."

The Ha-Shoah the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European-Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler know is in Exhibition regarding the deportation of Jews opens in Berlin station.

An exhibition on the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps by train during World War II opened yesterday in a Berlin station after the national rail operator bowed to pressure and dropped its initial refusal to host it.
The exhibition traces the plight of, among others, 11,400 Jewish children who were deported from France to the Auschwitz death camp, often crammed together in cattle trucks, between 1942 and 1944.
It opened in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz station, four years after photographs and letters detailing the fate of the deported children were displayed in 18 railway stations in France.
State-owned rail operator Deutsche Bahn said the exhibition was meant to honour the memory of Holocaust victims and to reflect honestly on its own role in the abuses of the Third Reich.
The Nazi state paid Deutsche Bahn’s predecessor, the Reichsbahn, 25 Reichsmarks, the equivalent of 25 euros ($36), for each child it transported to the camp.
“No company should whitewash its past,” Deutsche Bahn chief Hartmut Mehdorn was quoted as saying recently. He did not attend the opening.
Susanne Kill, a historian employed by the company to research its history, said: “Without the Reichsbahn the systematic murder of millions of people would not have been possible.”
But the rail operator initially refused to give the go-ahead for the exhibition, saying its stations were not an appropriate venue.
“The subject is too serious. It deserves more than commuters’ divided attention as they run to catch their trains while gulping down a sandwich,” Mehdorn said in October 2006.
French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, whose foundation Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France has contributed to the exhibition, accused Deutsche Bahn of trying to disown a part of its past.
“We have noted with regret that the man whose predecessors transported millions of Jews to death camps has objected to an exhibition that would have drawn the attention of thousands of Germans to this tragedy,” he said.
German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee put pressure on Deutsche Bahn to relent, saying the exhibition deserved to be seen in the stations through which the deported children had passed more than 60 years ago.
“It was important to me that this exhibition should go ahead and expose the troubled past of the Reichsbahn,” Tiefensee said at the opening of the exhibition.
It will be at Potsdamer Platz until February 11 and will move on to at least eight other stations in Germany