Wednesday, July 9, 2003

SS guard's capture ends secret life in Metro suburb
For Nazi in hiding, the tables were turned
By Tony Manolatos and Edward L. Cardenas / The Detroit News

CLINTON TOWNSHIP -- Johann Leprich endured 16 years as a fugitive -- evading capture for a period many times greater than most of the hunted Jews he watched over as a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Like those few who successfully escaped the Nazis, Leprich survived by craftiness.
When he went outside -- usually at night -- he was careful to pay attention to his surroundings. He looked closely at the people he passed and reacted nervously to unusual sounds and quick movements.

Leprich, who turned 78 Monday and entered the United States illegally in 1952, worked hard at blending in with his neighbors.
But the fear of discovery never allowed a normal life. Among other things, he built a secret hideout in the basement of his Clinton Township house. He was there last week when federal authorities finally caught him.

After serving at one of the most brutal Nazi concentration camps in World War II, lying about his past, fooling dozens of government officials, ducking investigators, sneaking between the United States and Canada and blending into middle America, it all came crashing down for Leprich on July 1. "It is ironic that thousands of people hid in their homes (during World War II) and would be dragged out of the house by the Nazis -- and now he is one of those people 55 years later," said Robert Kowalkowski, a Farmington Hills private investigator who tracked Leprich for years with a team of investigators.

Neighbors said they last saw Leprich in 1987 after he fled from federal authorities, who discovered he had lied about his Nazi past to gain entry into the United States.
The man they remember was soft-spoken, gentle and neighborly.
Leprich would stop over unannounced, neighbors said. He chatted easily about the weather or his children, never leaving without saying goodbye in his faint German accent. At home, he spent hours in the back yard of his tidy ranch in Clinton Township tending to his vegetable garden.
"He grew everything in that garden and he shared his vegetables with everyone -- that's just the way he was," neighbor Clarence Sonntag, 73, said Monday across the street from the home where Leprich's wife and son still live.

Leprich's care-free life took an unexpected turn in 1987 when U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Hackett revoked Leprich's United States citizenship because he lied about his past.
But Leprich refused to give up the life he made for himself. The former Nazi soldier skipped a deportation hearing in Detroit. Instead, he moved to Windsor.
Authorities suspect Leprich used fake identification to sneak across the U.S.-Canadian border.
He may have had help and he may have used illegal entry points to cross. In either case, it worked for 16 years.
"If we would have had the answer to how he eluded us, we would have had him a long time ago," said Greg Palmore, spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Detroit.

Ex-Nazi loathed
Holocaust survivors can't say if they crossed paths with Leprich, but they know of him and loathe the ex-Nazi guard.
"His neighbors were not there -- other prisoners and I can attest to the fact that guards like Mr. Leprich performed brutal tasks," said Sam Offen, 81, of West Bloomfield, who was at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in the mid-1940s, when Leprich was stationed there.
Leprich, charged with illegally entering the United States, is tentatively scheduled to appear Friday in U.S. Immigration Court in Detroit.
A judge will decide whether to keep him in custody pending a deportation hearing. Federal officials won't say where he is being held.
William Dance, Leprich's attorney, said Tuesday he has yet to speak to his client.
"I know very little about it because (the Bureau of of Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has not discussed it with me," Dance said.

Admits he was a guard
The U.S. government has no evidence linking Leprich to killings in Nazi death camps, Palmore said. Offen, a fur shop owner who was at Mauthausen from August 1944 to May 1945 when the U.S. Army liberated the camp, said all of the Mauthausen guards killed prisoners. If they didn't, Offen said, the guards were sent to front lines for combat.
Leprich acknowledged he was a guard at the Mauthausen Concentration Camp in his 1986 denaturalization hearing. In his deposition, he said he was forced to leave the Hungarian army and coerced into becoming a Nazi death camp guard, when he was 18.
American prosecutors said Leprich voluntarily joined Germany's Waffen SS unit and guarded the Mauthausen camp for about a year as a member of the elite Nazi group Death's Head Battalion.
"Nobody was forced to be an SS guard; they volunteered because they didn't have to go to the front lines," said Rabbi Charles Rosenzveig, director of the Holocaust Memorial Center in West Bloomfield.
The Mauthausen camp was in northern Austria, less than 100 miles from Germany. Records at the Holocaust Memorial Center indicate nearly 200,000 Jews and other ethnic, religious and political prisoners of the Holocaust passed through Mauthausen. Of them, 119,000 were killed, including 38,120 Jews.
"Prisoners were not intended to leave the camp alive," Leprich's court records say. "From his post, he could see into the camp and see the barracks where the prisoners lived. ... He could smell the odor of bodies being cremated."

Average U.S. lifestyle
Leprich apparently was able to leave the foreboding corner of his existance behind and ease into an average American life.
In 1976, Leprich and his wife Maria moved from Detroit to Clinton Township, Macomb County deed records show. The couple paid $10,500 for their brown brick suburban ranch, where they brought up two children.
Neatly maintained flower beds and Leprich's garden grow in the back of the house, which is now valued at $211,800, Clinton Township records show. Leprich wasn't registered to vote, but his wife was. He last renewed his Michigan driver's license 10 years ago when he was a fugitive, records show. His license expired in 1997.
Leprich, who became a U.S. citizen in 1958, was stripped of his citizenship because it's a federal crime to lie about Nazi membership.
Before he became a fugitive, Leprich told some of his neighbors about his past.
"He told me he was ... in the SS and was a ... guard in a concentration camp," said Sonntag, a retired postal worker. "Everybody based their knowledge of John on the present and not his past."
Neighbor Patricia Sebastian agrees.
"You couldn't have asked for better people," Sebastian, 68, said from the front door of her home. "This happened a long time ago. He was a kid. Let's get over it."

Canada joined search
Canadian authorities acknowledged they searched for Leprich more than once.
Canada flagged Leprich, meaning if he used his real identification and was stopped at the border he would have been arrested for illegally entering the country, said Jean Dube, head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police War Crimes division. "That leads me to believe he was operating under an assumed name."
Palmore said Leprich might have sneaked across the U.S.-Canadian border illegally.
"If he would have used conventional means to go through (the border) he would have been apprehended," Palmore said.

In 1997, Leprich was profiled on "America's Most Wanted." Steven Rambam of New York, who leads a team of investigators who locate and build cases against Nazi war criminals, tracked down Leprich and provided the TV show with information about Leprich.
"He has been able to successfully thumb his nose at the U.S. government and America for the past 55 years," said Rambam, who discovered Leprich collected Social Security for 10 years after he was deported in 1987, and even was able to renew his driver's license in person.
Rambam said Leprich worked at a small tool-and-die shop in Fraser, retiring before fleeing the country in 1987.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation in Macomb County was approached by the Department of Justice and the Immigration and Naturalization Service in January of this year to investigate Leprich.
Rob Casey, supervisory agent of the Macomb County FBI, would not discuss specific details of the investigation but he said his agency used "every sophisticated investigative technique available to ascertain (Leprich's) location."

(Original article at: http://www.detnews.com/2003/metro/0307/09/a01-213382.htm.)