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Thursday, July 3, 2003

FBI nabs suspected Nazi guard

Man became fugitive when U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1987

By Mike Wowk and Edward L. Cardenas / The Detroit News

The accused Longtime fugitive Johann Leprich, 77, of Clinton Township is at least the third Macomb County man to be accused in recent years of lying about being a Nazi concentration camp guard. The others were: * Ferdinand Hammer of Sterling Heights, who was deported in 2000 to Austria. Hammer had worked as a guard to escort prisoners from a camp in Poland to Berlin. * In 2000, federal authorities filed a lawsuit to deport Iwan Mandycz, then 80, and also of Sterling Heights. Mandycz was accused of working as an SS guard in 1943 at a camp near Lublin, Poland. Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

CLINTON TOWNSHIP -- Federal immigration agents Wednesday arrested a Clinton Township man, once featured on "America's Most Wanted," who they say had been an SS guard in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, and a fugitive for 16 years.

Fugitive Johann Leprich, 77, was stripped of his naturalized U.S. citizenship in 1987 by a federal judge in Detroit, after his alleged Nazi past came to light. In 1997, he was spotted in Canada and authorities in the United States and Canada had sought to arrest him since.

William Swor, who was Leprich's attorney in 1987, said he hasn't been in contact with Leprich since his arrest.

Leprich was charged in May in a criminal complaint in U.S. District Court with failing to register with the government.

His wife was believed to be living in the brown brick ranch on Capper Street in Clinton Township where Leprich was arrested Wednesday.

"We know he renewed his Michigan driver's license (in the 1990s), but we don't know where he's been living," said Greg Palmore, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Palmore said Leprich was seen in Canada recently.

Leprich said in a deposition in 1986 that he was a member of the Waffen SS Death's Head Battalion, a Germany army unit that guarded concentration camps during World War II. But he said he never heard gunshots and never received orders to shoot prisoners trying to escape.

Leprich was a guard at the Mauthausen concentration camp, near Linz, Austria, according to federal court documents. An estimated 150,000 prisoners died at Mauthausen before it was liberated by the U.S. Army in 1945.

Many prisoners were Jews; some were Soviet soldiers.

At a war crimes trial in 1946, 58 former Mauthausen camp guards were sentenced to death.

Leprich told U.S. immigration officials in 1952, when he entered the United States, that he had been a soldier in the Hungarian army, an ally of the Germans. He became a U.S. citizen in 1958.

He was de-naturalized and ordered deported in 1987 because he had lied about his past when he came to the United States, Palmore said.

Leprich, who is being held at an undisclosed location, now faces a deportation hearing before a federal immigration judge in Detroit, Palmore said.

You can reach Mike Wowk at (586) 468-0343 or mailto:mwowk@detnews.com

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