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Old December 3rd, 2019 #1
alex revision
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Default From the Vault: The United States of America v. Frank Walus

From the Vault: The United States of America v. Frank Walus

Forty years ago, a Polish immigrant stood accused of heinous war crimes in a trial that couldn’t stay focused on him.

By Phoebe Mogharei

Published Dec. 7, 2018

One of the first cases the U.S. brought against an alleged Nazi war criminal was that of Frank Walus, a retired Chicago autoworker. Held here in 1978, the trial stirred massive interest and sensational coverage. “Nazi Jew Killer Living on SW Side?” asked a Chicago Daily News headline.

In the courtroom, 12 witnesses recounted stories of Walus brutally murdering civilians in occupied Poland as a member of the Gestapo. Walus countered that he was a forced farm laborer in Germany during the war and produced corroborating testimony. The judge found Walus guilty and revoked his citizenship. The adjudication, though, wrote Lowell Komie in his 1978 Chicago story “The United States of America v. Frank Walus,” had little to do with Walus.

Quote:
The defendant took on almost a demonic quality, but the trial focused on the political system of organized genocide that had created the man on trial. Walus, twitching in his blue suit, and Judge Julius Hoffman, hunched down in his black robe, became minor figures. What really came on trial in Chicago in Judge Hoffman’s courtroom was the Germany of World War Two.
In 1980, an appellate court came to a similar conclusion and ordered the case retried. The original judge had failed to consider, for example, that Walus’s height, age, and nationality would have barred him from serving in the Gestapo. The government dropped the charges and reinstated Walus’s citizenship. Still, he remained a villain to many and was attacked several times before his death in 1994.

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Ma...sM5uYcgamf5vOk



Simon Wiesenthal Screws Polish Survivor and Maybe about 1100 Other "War Criminals"

By Bradley R. Smith

Published: 1984-10-01

Dougherty writes that Simon Wiesenthal is responsible for bringing Adolph Eichmann and "some 1,100 other Nazi war criminals to justice," as if the statement were a proven fact. Of the 1,100, Wiesenthal is stated as saying, "only three confessed to their crimes." The implication being that while only "three confessed," the other 1,097 or so were clearly guilty anyway.

Wiesenthal has bragged publicly to reporters of the Chicago Sun Times that he has "never had a case of mistaken identity." Let us now turn to an account of the trial of "Nazi war criminal" Frank Walus. Perhaps the best account of this mistaken identity story is that reported by Flora Johnson in the Chicago Reader, 21 January 1981. The Reader headlined the story:

Quote:
"The U.S. government wanted a war criminal. So with the help of Simon Wiesenthal, the Israeli police, the local press, and judge Julius Hoffman, they invented one."


https://codoh.com/library/document/1611/?lang=en
 
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