Justice Department accuses suburban Cleveland man of hiding Nazi past

Friday, October 11th 2002, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

CLEVELAND (AP) _ A man the Justice Department said was an armed guard at two Nazi concentration camps during World War II has been a tailor in recent years and often tends the garden at his suburban home.

Jakob Miling, 78, of Lyndhurst, lied about his Nazi past when he applied for U.S. citizenship, the Justice Department alleged Thursday.

Miling, a native of Yugoslavia, became a citizen in 1972.

He works as a tailor at a Saks Fifth Avenue department store in suburban Beachwood.

He could not immediately be reached for comment. A phone message was left at the address listed for Miling in the government's complaint. A woman answering the phone at Saks Fifth Avenue said he is on vacation and could not be reached. No one answered the door at Miling's home.

Miling is vacationing in Europe, said his nephew, Ivan Miling, who told The Plain Dealer in a story published Friday that the Nazi accisation is ``off the wall.'' He said his uncle ``could never do this. No way.''

The government charged that when he applied for citizenship in 1972, Miling didn't disclose his Nazi service. In visa applications about six years earlier, he claimed he had been in high school from 1941 to 1944 and had worked as a tailor from 1944 to 1950, according to an affidavit from Elizabeth White, the Justice Department's chief historian.

According to the government's complaint filed in U.S. District Court, Miling was a guard from 1942 to 1944 at the Gross-Rosen camp in Poland and the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany.

The complaint describes Gross-Rosen as one of the most brutal camps in the Nazi concentration camp system. It says Miling was one of the guards responsible for making sure prisoners did not escape.

At Sachsenhausen, guards were ordered to shoot any prisoner standing in a 6-foot wide ``path of death'' along the camp's electrified barbed-wire fence.

White said after serving in the camps, Miling was a member of the German infantry until he surrendered to British troops in 1945.

He came to the United States as a visitor in 1964 and applied for an immigrant visa in 1966, saying he planned to work as a tailor.

The complaint against Miling is the eighth filed this year in the United States against a suspected former Nazi, said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.

The office reviews World War II-era documents from archives in Europe for names and biographical information on Nazi soldiers. Names on those lists are compared to names on U.S. immigration documents to see if any former soldiers applied for U.S. citizenship.

Rosenbaum would not say how Miling came to the department's attention.

``I can tell you that nearly all of our cases for the last 15 years or more have been the result of our own investigative work,'' he said.

The Justice Department has twice revoked the citizenship of John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker living in suburban Cleveland. A judge stripped Demjanjuk of his citizenship in February, saying wartime documents prove that he worked at concentration camps. Demjanjuk has appealed that ruling.

Demjanjuk had lost his citizenship earlier and had been extradited to Israel. The government had said Demjanjuk had been a murderous guard known as Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp. Israel's highest court rejected the charge and sent Demjanjuk back to the United States.