L.A. Center Accuses Briton of War Crimes

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, in documents presented to the British government, on Saturday accused a 71-year-old retired mining engineer living in Scotland of participating in the World War II murder of thousands of Jews in Lithuania and Byelorussia, both now part of the Soviet Union.

Citing what he described were five eyewitness accounts, Rabbi Marvin Hier, director of the Los Angeles center, said that Antanas Gecas, as a lieutenant in the Lithuanian police force, which collaborated with the Nazi occupation, forced thousands of Jews into pits where they were machine-gunned by men under his command.

After the shooting, Hier said, Gecas personally poked through the bodies, finishing off survivors with his pistol.

“His crimes, according to the eyewitnesses, make Klaus Barbie look like a minor criminal,” Hier said, comparing Gecas to the Gestapo police commander of Lyon, France, who was convicted last month of crimes against humanity.

Hier, interviewed by telephone from London, said more than 1,100 pages of documentation concerning Gecas, now a British citizen living in Edinburgh, was turned over to the British government.

Interviews in Soviet Union

At the same time, the British Broadcasting Corp.’s Scottish service broadcast interviews with five former Lithuanian policemen, one of whom had served a 10-year sentence for war crimes, who said they participated in killings carried out by Gecas’ command. The interviews were recorded in the Soviet Union.

Hier said Gecas was one of 17 suspected Nazi war criminals living in Britain whose names were submitted to the government last October. None of the other names have been made public.

Last October, the British government said that the Wiesenthal Center had not supplied enough evidence to take action against any of the 17. However, Hier quoted David Faulkner, a deputy undersecretary of state in Britain’s Foreign Office, as saying of the new information, “This material is what we were talking about, what we were looking for before we could take this any further.”

Hier said, “We now think that the British government will be forced to act in the Gecas case. At the very least, the government will have to send investigators to Moscow.

Hier insisted that the case against Gecas was strong, although all of the evidence comes either from captured Nazi documents or from material collected in the Soviet Union.

British Response Unclear

It is not clear just what action Britain might take. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in a letter to a member of Parliament last February said, “There does not appear to be any scope for the prosecution in the United Kingdom courts of people accused of war crimes committed abroad during the last war where the people concerned were not at the time British citizens.”

Hier said that Israel might be willing to try Gecas but that “the principal responsibility is Great Britain’s because he has been living in Great Britain since 1947.”