Efforts to Deport John Demjanjuk Continue

AP repots that the Sixth Circuit once again is hearing about the efforts to deport an alleged nazi war criminal.  The U.S. Justice Department began trying to deport former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk more than three decades ago, claiming that he was an armed guard at a Nazi death camp and helped murder Jewish prisoners in World War II. Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 and was under a death sentence until Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that Demjanjuk was not the sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp in German-occupied Poland whom prisoners called “Ivan the Terrible.”

Since Demjanjuk’s return to the United States, the Justice Department has continued its efforts to send him back to his native Ukraine — or Germany or Poland — saying it was sufficient that Demjanjuk falsified information on his applications to enter the U.S. in 1952 and to become a citizen in 1958. His U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1981, restored in 1998, and revoked again in 2002. Now 87, Demjanjuk is facing what may be his last chance to stay in the U.S. Oral arguments are scheduled for Thursday in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for teh Sixth Circuit on a motion to set aside a deportation order based on a U.S. District Court judge’s decision in 2002, affirmed on appeal in 2004, that Demjanjuk — although not “Ivan the Terrible” — was a guard at the Nazis’ Sobibor extermination camp, where an estimated 250,000 Jews were murdered, and at two other concentration camps in German-occupied Poland.

KJ