What happened to the accused Sunny Hills Nazi?
SUNNY HILLS — The deportation last week of 95-year-old Jakiw Palij, a Nazi concentration camp guard, reminded a local woman of a similar story that played out in nearby Sunny Hills, a quiet, rural community in Washington County. It involved a suspected Nazi collaborator living in the area for years, until Office of Special Investigation agents showed up wanting to speak with him.
The woman, who didn’t want to be named in the article but did say she has a lot of Jewish friends who keep up with these stories, wanted to know if the man living in Sunny Hills was Palij — who is coincidentally about the same age as the man in question — and if not, what happened to the supposed Nazi war criminal living in Sunny Hills?
It’s a story that might start in the small town of Sunny Hills, but stretches to reach halfway across the globe, to Pensacola, Chicago, Lithuania, Belarus and beyond. It’s a story that spans from jail cells to the Supreme Court.
And it’s a story that has helped form the foundation of case law, shaping cases like it ever since.
Vytautas Gecas
The man in question, Vytautas Klobas Gecas, was a Lithuanian immigrant. Born on Sept. 25, 1922, Gecas left Lithuania after the war, first immigrating to England in 1947, where he worked for 15 years as a miner, according to Justice Department documents, before moving to Chicago in 1962.
Understandably, being a war criminal or associated with the Nazi regime would preclude someone from being able to immigrate, both to England and the United States. On his immigration and naturalization documents, Gecas claimed to have been a “pupil” during the war years, from 1938 to about 1944, saying he attended a trade school in Kaunas, Lithuania, at the time. He was given a four-month visa and went to live with a cousin in Chicago, eventually obtaining a green card and becoming a resident alien. A 1972 telephone directory lists his address as 1826 49th Ave. in Cicero, a Chicago suburb, and his name appears in several obituaries that would suggest he had a large family in the area.
At some point in the 1980s, Gecas packed up and moved from a busy Chicago suburb to the borderline rural Sunny Hills. It’s not clear when this move occurred — Washington County official records show Gecas purchasing property in the Oak Hill area in 1981 and 1985 with a Eugenija Gecas, but some sources don’t have him actually moving to the area until 1989.
The investigation begins
It’s about this time that Gecas’ name starts popping up in places that a Nazi collaborator and war criminal wouldn’t want to have their name pop up. A declassified document from 1983 addressed to the Office of the General Counsel lists Gecas with 24 individuals under investigation by the Department of Justice for Nazi war crimes. Gecas is given the designation OSI (Office of Special Investigations) #639. Under his name, it states that OSI, at the time, had “no identifiable information” — meaning they had documents linking him to war crimes, but could not definitively link him to the Vytautas Gecas in those documents.
Also named on that particular list, OSI #630, is Istvan Eszterhas, who published vicious anti-Semitic propaganda in his native Hungary before and during the war. Eszterhas is the father of famous Hollywood screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, who wrote a screenplay about a woman discovering and coming to terms with her father’s Nazi past.
According to OSI documents, the agency had evidence that Gecas was a member of the notorious 2nd Battalion of the Lithuanian Auxiliary Police, which was later redesignated as the 12th Battalion.
The 12th Battalion
Lithuania occupies the rather unenviable space in Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, meaning every few years, the country would change hands as part of the inevitable east vs. west power struggle. Originally a part of the Soviet Union, the country was invaded by the Germans in 1941 as part of their ill-fated campaign against the Soviets. By most accounts, the German army encountered little resistance and in Lithuania, where there already had been an anti-Soviet uprising, many welcomed the Germans as heroes.
As part of their occupation, the Germans transformed already existing Lithuanian military units and blocks of volunteers into auxiliary police units known as Schutzmannschaften. These units took orders from German officers, were paid in German marks and helped carry out deportations and massacres against enemies of the Nazi regime, namely Jews, Roma and communists, in their native countries. Similar Schutzmannschaften were formed throughout the Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia, as well as in Ukraine and what would become Belarus.
Among the various auxiliary police units operating in Lithuania, the 2nd Battalion — later to become the 12th Battalion — was notorious in its cruelty. The unit was so brutal that the local Nazi commander once wrote a report back to his superiors protesting the unit’s violent means during a massacre of 5,000 Jewish residents in the Belorussian city of Slutsk.
But the events that truly cemented the members of the 12th Battalion as war criminals occurred in Minsk in 1941. The unit, based in Kaunas, moved to Minsk, in what would become Belarus, to meet up with the German 11th Reserve Police Battalion. During the last few months of 1941, the two battalions participated in the murder of more than 19,000 civilians, including the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto — killing its 6,600 Jewish residents — to make room for Jewish deportees coming from Germany and Western Europe.
The battalion was so notorious that, according to OSI documents, the courts already had ruled that simply being a member and serving in the battalion opened grounds for persecution.
The investigation heats up
Agents with the Office of Special Investigations had obtained documents linking Gecas to the notorious 2nd/12th Battalion, but could find no definitive proof that the Vytautas Gecas in Chicago/Sunny Hills was the same Vytautas Gecas listed in the military documents, as they lacked a date or location of birth. The government, the documents state, couldn’t be sure they had the right person.
So the OSI needed to speak with Gecas in person. It’s important to note here that at no point was the government trying to charge Gecas with a war crime. Its case revolved around him lying on his naturalization forms to obtain entry into the country, and for that he would face deportation. What other countries did with him after wasn’t really its concern, but it would become a factor in the looming court case.
In July 1991, the OSI issued a subpoena, calling Gecas in to answer questions, under oath, about his time in Lithuania during the war. On Sept. 12, 1991, Gecas and his attorney appeared in federal court in Tallahassee. Under oath, Gecas gave his name, his address and produced for the court a copy of his green card. He refused to answer any questions related to his birth date, information on his immigration forms, his residences during the war, his associations during the war or any military activities he participated in during the war, invoking his right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment, arguing that answering such questions could implicate him in crimes for which he could be persecuted in Germany, Israel and Lithuania and the punishment for said crimes was, in certain circumstances, death.
Legal precedence
Gecas’ silence kicked off a legal firestorm and raised the question — when exactly could a person under oath plead the Fifth? His case, and the very similar case of Aloyzas Balsys, helped set the precedent of whether a person could plead the Fifth to avoid implicating themselves in crimes for which they could be prosecuted in other countries. Both are cases that continue to be cited to this day..
Not accepting Gecas’ silence, OSI attempted to force him to comply with the subpoena by holding him in contempt of court. Grecas fought the motion and the ensuing legal battle stretched on for almost a decade, until finally, in 1997, the courts ruled in Balsys’ case that he could be found in contempt of court for refusing to comply with investigators. Faced with the decision of going to jail or answering questions from the OSI, Balsys chose neither and voluntarily left the country in 1999.
The ruling in the Balsys case meant that time was up for Gecas as well. Faced with the choice of complying with the subpoena or being held in contempt of court and going to jail, Gecas chose jail and was sentenced to 18 months — the maximum amount of time allowed — or however long it took him to cooperate, whichever occurred first. According to Department of Justice records, he was housed in the Santa Rosa County Jail for the duration of his sentence.
On May 5, 1999, in his 70s, Gecas began his jail term.
Prison time
Gecas was in prison, but OSI investigators were faced with a problem — they still didn’t have enough evidence to prove Gecas was a member of the 2nd/12th Battalion and have him deported.
Digging for clues, OSI agents and attorneys began interviewing Gecas’ roommates and other inmates he came in contact with. They listened to all of his recorded telephone conversations, hoping somewhere he would slip up and implicate himself.
He never did. In November 2000, he was released, and the OSI still didn’t have a case.
The big break
Finally, according to agency documents, in 2002 OSI historians began searching the records of all the vocational schools in Kaunas to find a lead.
Of the seven vocational schools active at the time, only three were still running, and their records were largely incomplete. However, the historians were able to find information on Gecas in the records and located his 1941 graduation certificate. For a second, it seemed like they had the wrong person.
That is, until they dug just a little deeper. Tucked into Gecas’ file was a letter written by his father. The letter actually was concerning Gecas’ younger brother, who also attended the school, and in it, his father was requesting a stipend for the younger brother as the elder brother, Gecas, no longer was providing for the family, having run off to join the 2nd Battalion.
Aftermath
For OSI investigators, it was a jackpot and they filed their deportation case against Gecas. Faced with the possibility of going through a trial or leaving the country, Gecas agreed to admit he served in the battalion and agreed to leave the U.S., flying back to Lithuania in August 2003.
From there, the trail goes cold, but several websites had information from the Social Security Office in Illinois showing a Vytautas K. Gecas, born on Sept. 25, 1922, dying on Dec. 13, 2005.
After doing the research (it was a lot of research) we called our question asker back and told her the tale of the accused Sunny Hills Nazi war criminal. So, what did she think of the story?
“What an amazing story!” she exclaimed. “Gee whiz, I cannot believe he was living in Sunny Hills all that time.”
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