While some local Jews expressed dismay that a Butler Twp. man who recently admitted to guarding a Nazi prison camp and then lying about it was not deported, the lawyer heading the prosecution called the case’s resolution fair.

According to Eli Rosenbaum – director of the Office of Special Investigations, a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. – although 85-year-old Ildefonsas Bucmys won’t be deported, “he has not been given a free pass.”

Rosenbaum said as far as the OSI was concerned, several aspects of the settlement reached with Bucmys, signed by U.S. District Judge Walter Rice on Feb. 17, were non-negotiable.

For example, Bucmys was forced to relinquish his U.S. citizenship and formally admitted to guarding a Nazi camp in Majdanek, Lithuania during World War II.

He is also required to cooperate with the U.S. government should it seek to prosecute others for their wartime activities.

Moreover, while the OSI agreed not to deport Bucmys to his native Lithuania, “we can transfer him to another country if they choose to prosecute him,” Rosenbaum said.

He added that Bucmys displayed a “great resistance to agree to that.”

According to Rosenbaum, Bucmys was also hesitant to admit he knew Jews were being killed at Majdanek.

Throughout the case, Rosenbaum said, Bucmys proclaimed “he didn’t do anything wrong.”

However, Rosenbaum said that in the case’s settlement agreement, Bucmys admitted to committing crimes against humanity under the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

In his trial deposition, Bucmys admitted knowing Germans had “killed all the Jews in his community,” Rosenbaum said.

Elsewhere in his deposition, Bucmys testified he guarded only the periphery of prisoner work details. According to Rosenbaum that means, “he enforced their incarcerations.”

Dayton lawyer R. Mark Henry, Bucmys’s lead defense attorney, said that the government didn’t uncover anything new about his client.

“We filed an answer to the government’s initial complaint in 2002 acknowledging he was a guard at Majdanek,” he said.

However, Henry countered that moral issues, such as how Bucmys came to be a guard in the first place, outweigh what he called legal technicalities.

“The related events (the Holocaust) were so horrible, some people may have a need to make Bucmys evil simply because he was there…but I don’t think it’s that simple,” Henry said, adding his client was “never a Nazi” and his service “was hardly voluntary.”

In his deposition, Bucmys was also asked whether his service in the Lithuanian military unit was voluntary or forced. Under oath, he testified, “Yeah, I talk Lithuanian voluntary to serve my country.”

Despite settling the Bucmys case, Rosenbaum’s department maintains an enormous caseload, made heavier by the Intelligence Reform Bill signed by President George W. Bush in December 2004.

That legislation expanded the OSI’s mandate to include not only the prosecution of illegal World War II activities, but to “nearly an entire gallery of evil doers” charged with acts of genocide, foreign government-sponsored torture and murder.

Those prosecuted by Rosenbaum’s department under the new law must be American citizens.

Rosenbaum said the OSI’s expanded workload had “no bearing” on the settlement of the Bucmys matter. “We don’t settle cases because we don’t have the resources to try them,” he said.

To his credit, Rosenbaum said, Bucmys eventually deserted his wartime post, a fact the government never disputed.

Still, by formally confirming the basic facts of his wartime activities, Bucmys can “never again deny them to the world,” Rosenbaum said.

He added, “We won this case.”