Ex-Nazi guard living in Wis. deported

Kumpf was a guard at concentration camps in 2 nations.

WASHINGTON - A former Nazi concentration camp guard living in Wisconsin has been deported to Austria, Justice officials said yesterday.

Prosecutors said Josias Kumpf, 83, served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany and the Trawniki labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, and at slave labor sites in occupied France.

US investigators found he participated in a 1943 mass shooting in Poland in which 8,000 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered in pits at Trawniki in a single day.

"Josias Kumpf, by his own admission, stood guard with orders to shoot any surviving prisoners who attempted to escape an SS massacre that left thousands of Jews dead," Acting Assistant Attorney General Rita Glavin said in a statement.

Peter Rogers, Kumpf's immigration attorney, said Kumpf was stationed at Trawniki, "but he never laid a finger on anyone, he never shot at anyone."

"In fact, even the government never asserted that he took any particular action," Rogers told The Associated Press. "The court found his mere presence at a place where admittedly horrible, horrible things happened, was sufficient to find him a persecutor."

Kumpf joined the SS Death's Head guard forces in 1942. Kumpf was born in what is now Serbia, immigrated to the United States from Austria in 1956, settled in Racine, Wis., and became a US citizen in 1964.