KANSAS CITY (JTA) — Local Jews believe the man who engaged in an armed standoff with police last week after being charged with hiding a Nazi past was indeed an SS guard.
The bizarre series of events started when Michael Kolnhofer, 79, of Kansas City learned that the Nazi-hunting arm of the U.S. Justice Department, the Office of Special Investigations, had moved to revoke his American citizenship.
Reporters began to gather at his tidy Kansas City ranch home to interview the man accused of serving as a SS guard during World War II at the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps.
The accused Nazi would not comment, and reporters began to question his neighbors. Kolnhofer then emerged from his house, yelling at reporters and waving a small black handgun, police said.
Within hours, the situation escalated. Kolnhofer at one point fired two to three rounds at police, who shot Kolnhofer in the leg. He spent New Year’s Eve in surgery at the University of Kansas Medical Center.
No one else was injured. Kolnhofer, who was in critical condition this week, now faces charges in connection with shooting at police and journalists.
Sam Nussbaum, an Auschwitz survivor who lives in the Kansas City area, called SS guards the “greatest murderers in the world.”
“You can see what kind of guy he is,” Nussbaum said of Kolnhofer’s clash with police. “I believe now he was there” at the camps.
Nussbaum, who five years ago was a witness in Germany in the case of Josef Schwammberger, a Nazi war criminal who was sentenced to life, also said of Kolnhofer: “He should be locked up in [an] isolation room, and he should not see the sun anymore. They shouldn’t kill him. Just lock him up and let him sit there in the room, until he dies. This will be worse than hanging.”
Jean Zeldin, executive director of Kansas City’s Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, said area Holocaust survivors “want to see justice served.”
“It would be inexcusable to say, `Oh, well. It happened 50 years ago and doesn’t matter anymore,'” Zeldin said.
The OSI said Kolnhofer came to this country in 1952 and became a citizen in 1957.
He is accused of taking part in the persecution of Jews and other civilians while serving as a SS guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during World War II.
The OSI charges that Kolnhofer lied about his World War II activities to enter the United States.
“He never would have received a U.S. visa had he disclosed the truth,” said OSI Director Eli Rosenbaum.
Kolnhofer worked in construction since moving to the United States. His wife, Eva Kolnhofer, owned a massage therapy business in Kansas City for 25 years.
In 1985, the couple moved to Hollywood, Fla. After Eva Kolnhofer died in 1988, Michael Kolnhofer returned to Kansas City.
According to the OSI, captured wartime records show that Kolnhofer was admitted to the Waffen SS in September 1942, becoming a member of the SS Death’s Head Guard Battalion, also known as the SS Death’s Head Battalion, at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in January 1943. He served as an armed guard there until January 1944, the OSI said.
Sachsenhausen was the site of gruesome medical experiments that took the lives of many prisoners.
OSI added that records also show that Kolnhofer was transferred in 1944 to the Buchenwald concentration camp.