Walus denaturalization case

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral argument from Walus' attorneys in 1979. It vacated Hoffman's verdict and ordered that there be a new trial, this time with a different judge. Their ruling noted Hoffman's "disturbing" behavior, especially his cutting off defense efforts to cross-examine witnesses. It also noted the weaknesses of the prosecution's case and observed that the newly found evidence would "almost certainly compel a different result."

The trial lasted seventeen days. Two mutually exclusive possibilities had been presented. Either Walus had been a Gestapo officer in Poland or a forced farm laborer in Germany. Hoffman decided upon the former, relying upon the eyewitness testimony from the persecuted Poles as well as the claims by former boarder Alper. Hoffman disregarded eyewitness testimony from defense eyewitnesses as well as the defense's documentary evidence. He issued his ruling in 1978 that Walus' citizenship be revoked. Shortly thereafter, the defense located five Polish forced laborers who would testify that Walus was with them in Germany during the war. Some old German residency papers proving Walus was in Germany in 1940 were also located. With this additional evidence, Walus' defense attorneys asked Hoffman for a new trial. He refused.

By 1976, the INS was under pressure to address public outcries about former Nazis in America. INS sent a grainy, washed-out 1959 photograph of Walus to the police in Israel requesting information. The police put an advertisement including Walus' name in local newspapers requesting any information Polish survivors might have. Some who came forward and viewed the photo said they recognized Walus as a Gestapo officer who had killed Jews in the Polish cities of Kielce and Częstochowa. In 1977, the US Attorney in Chicago filed suit to revoke Walus' citizenship on the basis that Walus had been a Gestapo officer who committed wartime atrocities and had lied in order to gain entry into the US. Once denaturalized, Walus could be deported.

Walus expelled a boarder, Michael Alper, from his home in 1973 after a bitter argument. A year later, Alper told a Chicago Jewish agency that Walus had bragged about his work as a Nazi in Poland. The allegation ultimately reached Simon Wiesenthal, a well known Nazi hunter, who brought the matter to the attention of the INS. Alper was Jewish and his parents had been killed by the Nazis. Nonetheless he and his wife had continued to live with Walus even after Walus' alleged disclosure about persecuting Jews.

Immediately after World War II, Americans chose not to dwell upon the war's atrocities, and Cold War threats caused Western governments to recruit former Nazis for intelligence work. This, along with U.S. immigration policies, made it relatively easy for former Nazis to enter the United States and become citizens. In the 1970's, growing awareness and concern about these "quiet neighbors" resulted in the establishment of US government organizations to identify, denaturalize, and deport them. The early work by the Special Litigation Unit (SLU) of the INS was regarded as ineffective and, according to legal scholar Lawrence Douglas, led "botched litigations." One of these was the Walus case.

Walus asserted that he was not in Poland during the war, but was one of the millions of Poles sent to Germany to provide forced farm labor. There was documentary evidence from German archives that farmers had paid for Walus' health insurance there and that his forced service in Germany was continuous starting in 1940. He had worked on four or five farms, and the wives of the farmers where he had worked remembered his being there. Further, as a Pole he could not have been a member of the Gestapo, which restricted its number to members of the "master race" and to people taller than Walus' 5'4" height.

Frank Walus (1922-1994) was born in Germany of Polish parents and emigrated to the United States in 1963. He worked in a factory in the Chicago area and became a US citizen in 1970. In 1973 he was accused of having been a Nazi who beat and killed Jews in Poland during World War II. Prosecution was initiated by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in 1977. He was convicted based upon questionable testimony in a bench trial before a judge who appeared visibly hostile to the defense. An appeals court vacated the verdict and ordered a new trial before a different judge. By this time, the new Office of Special Investigations (OSI) had been established in the US Department of Justice. After conducting a lengthy and exhaustive investigation of witnesses and documents, OSI concluded that it "could not responsibly go forward with a new trial." OSI dropped the charges, expressed regret that they had ever been filed, and partially reimbursed Walus for his expenses.

Walus was born 29 July 1922 to Polish parents residing in Germany. His father died in 1932, and his mother moved to the Kielce area in Poland. He was 17 when Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939, and he was forced to go to Germany to work on farms in the area around Neu-Ulm. After the war, he returned to Kielce for ten years, after which he and his wife emigrated to the United States. He worked in an automobile factory and bought a duplex in Chicago's southwest side. Walus died of a heart attack in Chicago 17 August 1994. He had four children.