A Jew Who Beat Jews in a Nazi Camp Is Stripped of His Citizenship (original) (raw)
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- Feb. 5, 1988
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A Polish-born Jew accused of wartime atrocities surrendered his United States citizenship before a Federal judge in Brooklyn yesterday and admitted that he brutalized Jewish prisoners in a Nazi forced-labor camp and later entered this country illegally.
But under an agreement with the Justice Department, the 77-year-old Brooklyn resident, Jacob Tannenbaum, will not be deported - an action the Government had sought for a year - because doctors for both sides agreed that his age and failing health would make it life-threatening.
Mr. Tannenbaum, who apparently suffered a stroke last August while testifying in the case, acknowledged yesterday that he had beaten fellow prisoners, even out of the presence of Nazi guards, while serving as a kapo, or inmate overseer, at the Gorlitz concentration camp in what is now East Germany in 1944 and 1945.
He also acknowledged the Government's main deportation charge, that when he entered this country in 1949 he lied about his background, concealing that he had been a kapo in a camp and had participated in acts of persecution. Only three other Jews had been accused by the United States of war crimes, all in the 1950's, but none were deported.
''I think frankly that this was a fair resolution of the case,'' Neal M. Sher, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which brought the case, said after Judge I. Leo Glasser of Federal District Court signed an order stripping Mr. Tannenbaum of the citizenship he had held since 1955.
''It's the best solution for all concerned,'' said Mr. Tannenbaum's attorney, Elihu S. Massel. ''It will also avoid a truly ghastly trial, in which Jews would have had to testify against Jews, none of whom really want to remember.''
Elan Steinberg, the executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement that his organization ''feels that the Justice Department handled a very sensitive matter in a most fair and equitable way, insuring that justice was applied in a firm but proper manner.''
The case of Mr. Tannenbaum had provoked what many war-crimes experts and Jewish leaders called deep complexities and passions, raising such questions as why a Jew would have collaborated with the Nazis, whether the persecuted can also be the persecutor and how such questions can be answered more than 40 years after the fact.
Some Jewish leaders, while disavowing sympathy for any collaboration with the Nazis, drew distinctions between those who volunteered to help the Nazis and those who thought they were saving their own lives by cooperating, often with the intention of easing the brutal life of fellow prisoners.
Kapos - from the German word Lagerkapo, or camp captain - were appointed by the SS, which supervised the camps, and enjoyed special privileges such as better food, clothing and housing. In return, they supervised the work of other inmates.
According to members of his family, Mr. Tannenbaum, a retired dairy worker with three children who has lived in Brighton Beach for almost 40 years and has been a respected member of a synagogue, was born in Sieniawa, Poland. Conscripted into the Polish Army, he was sent to three Nazi camps during World War II.
After some time in a Polish camp in 1942, he was sent with other relatively healthy prisoners to the forced-labor camp in Galicia, where his Nazi captors blinded him in one eye and severely injured his back in a beating.
Finally, for eight months in 1944 and 1945, he served as a kapo in Gorlitz, supervising 1,000 prisoners who worked there in an armaments factory. His children have said that, far from persecuting Jews, Mr. Tannenbaum - the sole wartime survivor of a family of 12 - protected fellow prisoners from far worse treatment by Nazi officers. Admitted All Allegations
But the Government, relying on what it called eyewitness accounts of camp survivors now living in the United States and Israel, accused Mr. Tannenbaum in a detailed complaint of ''brutalizing and physically abusing prisoners'' and of sometimes doing so ''outside the presence of German SS personnel.''
Mr. Sher, of the Office of Special Investigations, said yesterday that Mr. Tannenbaum had ''admitted each and every allegation in the complaint, specifically that while he was a kapo he engaged in physical abuses against prisoners even outside the presence of Germans.''
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