Before Shirley Sherrod, Kirkland and Ellis Represented Nazi Camp Guard

PJ Media has numerous postings about Kirkland and Ellis representing Shirley Sherrod and the disgraceful effort to drag Andrew Breitbart’s widow Susie into Sherrod’s case against the deceased new-media pioneer. (Posts here, here and here.) We also learned that Kirkland and Ellis is attacking North Carolina Voter ID, pro bono.

Taking up these dubious causes is bad, but it’s not like Kirkland and Ellis has had Nazis for clients… except they have.

Kirkland and Ellis hasn’t represented just any old Nazis, they represented a guard at the Treblinka slave labor camp who was fighting deportation from the United States. Meet Kirkland and Ellis client Liudas Kairys (from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruling):

In March of 1943 Kairys was transferred to the Treblinka labor camp in Poland to serve as a Nazi camp guard, where he remained until the camp was closed in July 1944 when the Russians advanced into Poland. At some point during his service he was promoted to Oberwachmann of his Nazi guard unit.

More from the court opinions against Kirkland and Ellis’ Nazi client:

They worked six days a week from early morning until evening. As a result of these conditions the death of prisoners by disease or exhaustion was a weekly, and sometimes a daily, occurrence. Prisoners who became too weak to continue working were killed by members of the guard unit and the German SS. In addition to those deaths, prisoners of the Treblinka labor camp were shot, hanged, beaten or stabbed to death with and without apparent reason by the German SS and the camp’s guards. During the course of its operation several thousand Jewish prisoners died at the labor camp. . . . as the Soviet army approached the vicinity of Treblinka, the labor camp was abandoned and burned. Over 300 Jewish prisoners were shot at that time, with only 10 to 15 survivors. Members of the guard unit participated in that massacre.

Everyone has a right to counsel, no doubt. But offering free representation to people like Sherrod to hound widows, and to attack election integrity laws is another matter. And frankly, representing former Nazi slave labor camp guards is a choice that needs no further commentary. Thankfully Kirkland and Ellis failed in their attempt to keep a Nazi camp guard in the United States.