Ex-Nazi Guard Flies to Austria Before U.S. Acts

WASHINGTON —  A 60-year-old janitor from Chicago who hid his past as a Nazi SS concentration camp guard flew to Austria before being stripped of his U.S. citizenship Friday, the Justice Department announced.

Martin Bartesch agreed to leave the United States permanently after admitting that he had voluntarily enlisted in 1943 in the Nazi SS Death’s Head Battalion, which ran the Mauthausen camp system in Austria during World War II.

Tens of thousands of prisoners died at Mauthausen in shootings, gassings, hangings and as the result of starvation and forced labor.

Admits He Lied

Bartesch also acknowledged in a sealed agreement he made a month ago with the U.S. government that he lied when he came to the United States in 1955 by telling authorities that he had served in a different SS division.

The agreement was unsealed Friday as a U.S. District Court judge in Chicago issued a denaturalization order. Bartesch, a native Romanian, had been granted citizenship in 1966.

‘Death Book’ Evidence

One piece of evidence against Bartesch was the Mauthausen “Unnatural Death Book,” a log kept from October, 1942, to April, 1945, of prisoner deaths.

Entry No. 300 shows that on Oct. 20, 1943, a French Jew named Max Ochshorn was shot to death at the main camp of Mauthausen by SS Pvt. Martin Bartesch, then 17.

Move to Austria

Bartesch and his wife, Anna, moved to Austria on Wednesday, his son, Heinz Bartesch, said in Chicago.

Heinz Bartesch said his father, a janitor, renounced his citizenship to avoid “financial ruin” from a scheduled June 16 deportation hearing. He said his father served as a work-crew guard at a Mauthausen camp when he was 18 but was never a guard at the main death camp. He said his father “was adamant he never did anything wrong.”

Bartesch is the 15th person, and the third Mauthausen guard, to leave the United States as a result of activities by the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit.