No Country For Old Men
You know, on one hand you would normally feel sorry for a senior citizen of 83 years old who is being told his remaining years are to be spent away from the life he rebuilt for himself decades ago after a massive and horrific world war. And I would, if this were a former US, or Brit, or Canadian, or Irish, or French soldier.
But Anton Geiser is not any of those. NOT a noble and good man like Jack Lucas that can be talked about proudly for his role in WWII.
Sharon, Pa. is actually about 20 minutes from me, as the crows fly. It’s where my Hungarian Grandparents’ families immigrated to, after WWI, and settled in until moving to Youngstown. Work to be had for everyone in the booming steel towns.
About a month or more ago I related the story to you about John Demjanjuk, another former Nazi concentration camp guard who has been living in Ohio. I won’t go deep into his case … Debbie Schlussel has back-story on him you can check into.
I will say that my Ukrainian Byzantine church supported this man, and my priest would openly pray for his being allowed to remain in our country … until I approached the priest after church one Sunday and expressed my ‘disagreement’ with him and my (and my family’s) possible future absence from the church (and the school) as protest if he didn’t cease the mentions. He did.
God does have a way, does He not? Men such as John Demjanjuk and Anton Geiser have been given the blessings of very long lives and family. And how incredibly ironic in that. When you think of all the shortened lives and destroyed families they assisted in exterminating. And now, when these elderly men should be reflecting on great, or even simple, accomplishments in their long lives, they are coldly reminded of the evil they inflicted on the world … Younger men would shrug it off and move on to rebuild again once deported … These two men would, in all reality, have NO country … NO home … and would be completely removed from their lives, and the lives of their families. Younger men would cope … Older men must suffer the penance of being reminded for their remaining days of the loneliness involved in having your life, your home, your family, your dignity removed from you …
I should feel sorry for them, these ‘old men’ … I almost wish I could … However, I can’t help but recall, as a child, the very first time I ever saw old black and white film footage of lonely and forsaken faces staring out like abandoned souls from barbed wire fences … Men such as John Demjanjuk and Anton Geiser stole my innocence from me through that film footage and photographs, and through my Grandmother’s story of how people she had known and loved as a young girl that she left behind (Jews and non-Jews) in Hungary to immigrate to America … had NOT survived men like John Demjanjuk and Anton Geiser … and how she would become very quiet, the lovely light fading from her warm brown eyes, and shake her head sadly as she would move to busy herself in that old world manner of moving on.
U.S. Court Orders Deportation of Former Nazi Guard Living in Pennsylvania
A retired steelworker who served as a Nazi guard should be deported even though the United States granted him a visa in 1956, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
Anton Geiser’s work as a guard meets the type of persecutory conduct banned under the Refugee Relief Act, which was in effect when he entered the U.S., the ruling said.
Geiser, 83, did not cite his Nazi ties on his visa application, but he is not accused of lying about them. Files from the period have been lost and it is not clear what questions he was asked.
His lawyer, Adrian N. Roe, argued to the court this year that guards not deemed war criminals were sometimes allowed in by the State Department. He complained that the Justice Department, in its efforts to expel former Nazis, was revisiting decisions made a half-century ago.
But the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court, which focused on the language of the Refugee Relief Act, said Geiser should have his U.S. citizenship revoked and be deported.
“We conclude, as have other Courts of Appeals, that according to the plain meaning of the RRA, concentration camp guards ‘personally advocated or assisted in … persecution,’ Judge D. Michael Fisher wrote.
Roe did not immediately return a message after office hours Tuesday.
The Justice Department had argued that Geiser’s visa approval was “a mistake” that should be corrected, however belatedly.
Geiser, an ethnic German, served as an armed SS Death’s Head guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. He then was transferred to an SS officer training camp at Arolsen, where he escorted prisoners to and from the Buchenwald camp, where tens of thousands of Jews and others were exterminated. Geiser was at Arolsen until April 1945.
Geiser has lived in Sharon, about 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, since June 1960. He married and had three sons. In 1987, he retired from Sharon Steel.
The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation has been pursuing naturalized citizens with alleged Nazi ties for three decades. The office has prevailed in more than 100 cases, leading to at least 65 deportations, a spokeswoman previously said.
(AP)
(nods Kurt)
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