22 November 2006
A former member of a Ukrainian police unit which participated in the mass murder of Jews in Poland during World War II has been stripped of US citizenship and returned to his country of origin. Prosecutors said that the Florida resident Orest Galan, 84, "joined the Nazi-operated Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (UAP) in the city of Lviv in January 1943 and served in it until at least May 1944, during the Nazis' occupation of the then-Polish city, which is today part of Ukraine. The UAP rounded up Jews, terrorized them, oversaw forced labor, killed those attempting to escape, and delivered others to Nazi killing sites for mass execution," according to the statement. Galan, prosecutors added, "admitted that he served in the UAP in Lviv during World War II, and he consented to the entry of a federal court order revoking his US citizenship, conceding that he would be deportable from the United States following denaturalization." He arrived in the United States in 1950 and became a citizen two decades later. He has returned to Ukraine and cannot reenter the USA, officials said according to an AFP report.
