FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CRM

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1994 202-616-2771

(TDD) 202-514-1888

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT MOVES TO REVOKE U.S. CITIZENSHIP OF

FORMER SECURITY POLICE CHIEF OF NAZI-OCCUPIED
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Department of Justice announced today

that it has commenced denaturalization proceedings to revoke the
United States citizenship of a Norwood, Massachusetts, man who it
charged concealed his involvement in the mass murder and other
persecution of Jews and others while serving during World War II
as the head of the Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian Security Police for
the city and province of Vilnius, Lithuania.
A complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in Boston by
the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the Justice
Department's Criminal Division and the U.S. Attorney's office in
Boston alleges that the defendant, Aleksandras Lileikis, a
retired publishing company employee, was the chief of the
Lithuanian Security Police (Saugumas) for all of Vilnius Province
during the German occupation.
OSI Acting Director Eli M. Rosenbaum described the Lileikis
case as "one of the most important Nazi cases brought anywhere in
the world in recent history."
As the commander of a force whose responsibilities closely
paralleled those of the German Gestapo, the complaint alleges
that Lileikis, 87, was a senior figure in the Nazis' largely
successful effort to annihilate the Jewish population of Vilnius
Province. The Saugumas was a component of Einsatzkommando 3
(Operational Detachment 3), a unit of the German Security Police
and Security Service (Sipo and SD) responsible for the physical
destruction of the Jews of Lithuania, among other tasks.
During much of the 19th century and continuing in the 20th
century until the Nazi invasion, Vilnius and Warsaw were Europe's
two preeminent centers of Jewish cultural, intellectual,
religious and political life. In June 1941, at the start of the
German occupation, approximately 30 percent of Vilnius' 200,000
residents were Jews.
In the summer of 1941, the Nazis launched a genocidal
campaign of mass murder and deportations to concentration camps
that, in three years, systematically killed at least 55,000 of
Vilnius city's approximately 60,000 Jewish residents. The
complaint alleges that from August 1941 until the German
occupation ended in July 1944, Lileikis directed his force to
seek out and arrest Jews who violated the Nazis' anti-Jewish
decrees, especially those who escaped or attempted to escape from
the barbed wire-enclosed ghettos in which they had been interned
under catastrophically inhumane conditions.
Captured records preserved at the Lithuanian State Archives
and quoted in the complaint show that Lileikis repeatedly signed
and issued orders directing that arrested Jews, among them a six-
year-old girl, be held at his disposition in the Vilnius Hard
Labor Prison and then turned over to the infamous "Special
Detachment" (Ypatingas Burys) killing squad and the German
Security Police for execution. Most of the victims were executed
by gunfire at the killing pits in the nearby Paneriai woods. A
conservative estimate of the number of Vilnius Jews shot to death
there is 40,000, and the Paneriai killings are among the most
notorious Nazi atrocities of the Second World War.
The complaint alleges that Lileikis' activities constituted
assistance in Nazi-sponsored persecution based on race, religion
and national origin, and that Lileikis willfully concealed from
U.S. officials the nature of his wartime service in applying for
immigration to the United States from Germany in 1955, and again
in applying for U.S. citizenship in 1976.
The initiation of denaturalization proceedings against
Lileikis is a result of OSI's continuing efforts to identify and
deport participants in Nazi persecution who now reside in the
United States. To date, 50 Nazi persecutors have been stripped
of U.S. citizenship as a result of OSI's efforts, and 42 have
been removed from the United States.
Rosenbaum expressed gratitude to the Government of the
Republic of Lithuania for the archival access it authorized for
OSI personnel during the Lileikis investigation.
​ "The free access we were granted to Lithuanian archives
proved decisive in the development of this important case," he
said.
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