Testifying through an interpreter at his trial last month, Bronislaw Hajda insisted he had been a victim of the Nazis himself during World War II, forced to work at a labor camp in his native Poland.
One survivor’s book described that camp as a violent, brutal place where prisoners were beaten and shot for the slightest infraction, but curiously, Hajda maintained he hadn’t seen a single prisoner punished.
“When I was there, I saw nothing,” he said, “Maybe it happened, but not in front of me.”
On Thursday, a federal judge scoffed at Hajda’s account and ruled that wartime military records unearthed in Czech and Russian archives proved “clearly and unequivocally” that the retired machinist in fact guarded prisoners for the SS at a slave labor camp during the war.
U.S. District Judge David Coar stripped Hajda, 73, of Schiller Park of his U.S. citizenship for lying to immigration authorities in the 1950s about his wartime activities.
“Seeking to discover the acts of a single individual across the temporal expanse of 50 years and a distance of an ocean and half a continent is a daunting task,” Coar wrote in his 21-page decision. “Yet, through the efforts of the Justice Department and the international community, the activities of Wachmann (private first class) Hajda have come to light.”
A woman believed to be Hajda’s wife who answered a call made to the family residence referred inquiries to his lawyer, who didn’t return repeated calls.
At Hajda’s four-day trial last month, lawyers for the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations didn’t put on a single witness who could identify him as a guard at the Treblinka labor camp.
Instead, the government relied on German wartime rosters, which showed on various dates in 1943 and 1944 that Hajda worked as a guard at Treblinka and retreated to Germany with the SS Battalion Streibel as Soviet troops advanced.
The birth date and birthplace on at least one of the rosters matched Hajda’s.
In addition, Russian records indicated that several other admitted Treblinka guards told interrogators after the war that Hajda had been a guard there and took part in the massacre of as many as 700 prisoners as the Soviet army approached the camp.
Furthermore, both Hajda’s father and sister, tried and acquitted for collaborating with the Nazis, testified after the war that Hajda had joined the SS.
Hajda’s lawyers had suggested that someone may have assumed his name and identity more than 50 years ago and pointed out that Hajda was several inches taller than one description of the man in wartime records.
But Coar said his review of the German personnel records indicated Hajda may have been the one who provided his height for the records. Given that, and the fact that was the only substantial discrepancy, the judge sided with what he called the government’s “overwhelming” documentary evidence.
Coar also rejected Hajda’s claim that he was actually a prisoner, calling it “unlikely, if not impossible” for Hajda to have been at the labor camp in Pustkow, Poland, and not have witnessed brutality.
The judge also discredited a sworn statement provided by Hajda’s only corroborating witness, who grew up in the same small town as Hajda and claimed to have seen Hajda at Pustkow. Coar noted that the witness now lives next door to Hajda’s brother in Poland and that his decision to come forward “was sealed over a bottle of vodka.”
Hajda is the 59th alleged Nazi stripped of U.S. citizenship since the creation of the Office of Special Investigations in 1979.
Hajda is likely to appeal Coar’s ruling to a federal appeals court in Chicago. If that proves unsuccessful, federal authorities would seek to deport Hajda in a proceeding before the U.S. Immigration Court.
