United States deports Nazi guard

The United States has deported a former Nazi concentration camp guard to Romania.

Nikolaus Schiffer, who is 83, had been stripped of his US citizenship after the authorities found he had withheld information about his past.

He was ordered to be deported eight years ago when an immigration judge ruled he had been involved in persecuting prisoners at Nazi camps during the Second World War.

However Mr Schiffer, a retired baker living in Pennsylvania, appealed against the decision.

He also said he had worked as a tower guard and had not taken part in any atrocities.

But the legal battles came to an end on Monday when he was flown back to Romania, a US immigration spokeswoman said.

Elite unit

Nikolaus Schiffer was born to Romanian parents in Philadelphia in 1919.

But soon afterwards, he was taken back to Romania and joined the national army in 1941.

He later served in the German Waffen SS – an elite branch of Adolf Hitler’s army.

US court records showed that as part of his duties, he worked in four concentration camps including Sachsenhausen in Germany and Majdanek in Poland.

In the original deportation order in 1997, a US immigration judge said Mr Schiffer had “personally testified to his participation in a death march from Hersbruck to Auschwitz on which weakened prisoners were shot or left to die when they could not continue”.

During Mr Schiffer’s time at the four camps, atrocities were committed against thousands of civilians including inhumane treatment, subjection to slave labour, abuse, torture and mass murder, US legal papers said.

He returned to the US in 1953, gaining citizenship in 1958.

However the authorities said he would not have been naturalised had they known about his past.