Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, September 22, 1994                   TAG: 9409240038
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

BOSTON MAN ACCUSED OF NAZI CRIMES

The accusations came in a suit to take away the U.S. citizenship of Aleksandras Lileikis of Norwood, Mass., an 87-year-old retired publishing company employee. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston.

The complaint says Lileikis headed the Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian Security Police for Vilnius and in that role was a major figure in the destruction of Jews in a capital city known before World War II as a major center of Jewish life.

He was ``a senior-level perpetrator of the Holocaust,'' said Eli Rosenbaum, acting director of the department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations. He is the first senior Lithuanian police official prosecuted in connection with Nazi-period crimes, Rosenbaum said.

``The best evidence against Mr. Lileikis is his own signature on one after another captured Nazi document,'' Rosenbaum said. The documents were made available to U.S. investigators by the Lithuanian government after the demise of the Soviet Union.

U.S. citizenship has been taken away from 50 people accused of participating in Nazi persecutions, and 42 have been removed from the United States.

The documents detail names and dates, and Rosenbaum accused Lileikis of complicity in the deaths of 6-year-old Fruma Kaplan and her mother, Gita, of Vilnius, also known as Vilna.

``Fifty-three years ago, on a day in late December 1941, a little girl, just 6 years old, was removed from a cell at the dreaded Vilnius Hard Labor Prison, the so-called Lukiski Prison,'' Rosenbaum said. ``She was taken, with her mother, to a heavily wooded site a few miles from the city. This was Paneriai - called `Ponary' by the Jews - a place from which, as all of the terrorized Jews of Vilna knew, there was no return.''

An estimated 40,000 Jews were shot to death there during the three-year Nazi occupation, when at least 55,000 of the city's 60,000 Jewish residents were killed or deported to concentration camps, according to the complaint.