Retired Florida machinist Anton Bless, who served as a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II, has been stripped of his U.S. citizenship, the Justice Department announced Friday.

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Bless, 67, of Lecanto, Fla., fled to Germany earlier this year when he was told the Criminal Division's Office of Special Investigations planned to file a complaint against him, the department said. The office is in charge of the department's hunt for Nazi war criminals.The complaint says Bless served in the Death's Head Battalion of the Waffen-SS at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland where more than 1 million people, including at least 960,000 Jews, were murdered.

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