Vladas Zajanckauskas

Alleged Nazi war criminal. He was born in Aukstadvaris, Lithuania. At age 95 (as of July 2010) he stood to become the oldest person ever deported as a result of an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI).

In 2005 and 2010 the U.S federal courts asserted that Zajanèkauskas deployed to Warsaw, Poland with a detachment of the Trawniki-trained guards who participated in the Nazi annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto, an operation that triggered the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and led to the extermination of more than 50,000 Jews. The federal courts rejected as incredible his claim that, as a captured member of the Lithuanian Army, he was only in charge of the canteen at the Trawniki training camp, and was never in Warsaw. Records released by Russian authorities in the 1990s were used by the OSI as evidence in the case. His name does appear on a roster of 351 men deployed to the ghetto, a document which was captured by the Red Army in 1945.

The U.S. Federal Court twice found Zajanèkauskas guilty (in 2005 and 2010) of having falsely concealed his wartime whereabouts on his original visa application on arrival in the 1950s and ordered his deportation from the United States. Immigration Judge Wayne R. Iskra ordered Zajanèkauskas removed to his native Lithuania. The Associated Press reported in July 2013 that Zajanèkauskas still lived in Sutton, Massachusetts as no country, including his native Lithuania, would accept him. He died there in August 2013.

Zajanèkauskas wrote a 99-page memoir, My Bits of Life in This Beautiful World, which described his childhood and wartime experiences.