Shchekhinsky's fate was decided over three years. Back in 2000, a court stripped him of his US citizenship. At that time, one of the main witnesses in the Shchekhinsky case was a Philadelphia tailor, Stanley Glucksman, who had been a prisoner of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp during the war. Glucksman could not identify Shchekhinsky as a guard, but he spoke of the horrors of the camp. The court was struck by the horrific life in the concentration camps, which had become "carefully conceived, methodically organized enterprises of state-sponsored murder." Shchekhinsky, a retired machinist from Philadelphia, categorically rejected the accusations. According to him, he was not an executioner but an Ostarbeiter, and during the war he was taken to Austria, where he worked on a farm. The prosecution, however, found and presented to the court video testimony from an Austrian farmer's wife, who testified that the laborer Shchekhinsky had indeed worked for her, but only until the end of 1942.
The basis of the accusation was Nazi documents which, according to the Americans, until recently had been inaccessible to justice because they were kept in the USSR's archives. The documents concerning the SS guard Shchekhinsky contain his name, date and place of birth, and his mother's maiden name. The court did not accept the defense's arguments that documents from Soviet archives were untrustworthy because Soviet intelligence services could have had a hand in them. The court found Shchekhinsky's testimony "unconvincing" and his participation in Nazi crimes "beyond doubt."
Theodore Shchekhinsky arrived in the United States in 1950 with his wife and daughter. Eight years later he received American citizenship. At first, as in Austria, he worked on a farm. Then he changed profession and became a machinist. The investigation was conducted by the Office of Special Investigations of the US Department of Justice, established in 1979. Over a quarter of a century, 71 people were stripped of US citizenship on charges of collaboration with the Nazis, of whom 57 were deported from the United States. Another 200 cases are under investigation.
Meanwhile, 94-year-old Simon Wiesenthal, famous for his effective hunting and prosecution of Nazi criminals, decided to retire. "My work is done," he told the Austrian magazine Format, "I have found those guilty of mass murder whom I was looking for. I outlived them all. And those I am no longer looking for are now too old and ill to stand trial."