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FRANKFURT (JTA) — A German university plans to display a portrait of a leading Nazi ideologue, despite protests by Jewish community leaders.

Karl Astel, who led the University of Jena from 1939 to 1945, was an ethnologist.

But according to Wolfgang Nossen, president of the Jewish community of Thuringia, the German state in which Jena is located, Astel also played a key role in developing racial theories for the Nazi government.

Noting that during the Third Reich, Astel headed a state office for racial ideology, Nossen said it is shocking that the university would display a portrait of a top-ranking Nazi.

The controversy erupted after the university announced a showing of newly commissioned portraits of eight former university presidents.

University spokesman Wolfgang Hirsch said the school did not commission the portrait of Astel from artist Anke Doberauer, who painted the picture on her own initiative.

Hirsch added that the university had decided to display Astel's picture separately from the other seven portraits.

Russian legislator talks at extremist conference

MOSCOW (JTA) — A recent convention of Russian extremists in St. Petersburg featured a large swastika and a leading member of the country's Parliament.

The two-day event in a hall adorned with a swastika attracted leaders and activists from 20 such groups. Among those attending the fourth annual convention of Russian ultra-nationalists was Sergei Baburin, the first deputy speaker of the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.

He told the gathering that he would like to head what he termed a "unified national opposition" to the Kremlin.

Former Nazi guard ordered to leave U.S.

NEW YORK (JTA) — A Philadelphia man who served as a guard at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps has been ordered deported to his native Slovakia.

A federal immigration judge issued the deportation order Monday against Johann Breyer, 72, who admitted that he served in the Nazi SS at the two camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The United States will "seek to have Johann Breyer removed from this country as expeditiously as possible," said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations.

Rosenbaum said that when Breyer was a guard at Auschwitz between May and September 1944, at least 500,000 people were killed by the Nazis, including some 100,000 children.

In granting the OSI's deportation request, the immigration judge ruled that Breyer's wartime service as an SS guard constituted membership in a movement hostile to the United States, which rendered him ineligible to immigrate to the United States.

To date, 60 former Nazis have been stripped of their U.S. citizenship as a result of OSI investigations, and 48 have been deported, according to Rosenbaum's office.