Torture
Ban Argued in
Israel MARK LAVIE Associated Press
Writer WASHINGTON-- The Justice Department
Wednesday renewed its court battle to
strip U.S. citizenship from John
Demjanjuk, an alleged Nazi death camp
guard who escaped a death penalty in
Israel when evidence arose that he was a
victim of mistaken identity. Mark Duncan/AP The Justice Department renewed its
court battle to strip U.S. citizenship
from John Demjanjuk, an alleged Nazi death
camp guard. The department's Nazi-hunting
Office of Special Investigations, which
was criticized by a U.S. appellate court
for "reckless" withholding of evidence
that might have cleared Demjanjuk in the
earlier case, filed a new complaint in
U.S. District Court in Cleveland, where
the 79-year-old retired auto worker
lives. The new complaint alleges that
Demjanjuk was a guard at the Sobibor
extermination camp and at the Majdanek and
Flossenburg concentration camps during
World War II and served in the Nazi SS-run
"Trawniki" unit that participated in a
campaign to annihilate the Jews of
Europe. The government dropped its previous
claim that Demjanjuk was a guard known as
"Ivan the Terrible," who operated a gas
chamber at the Treblinka extermination
camp. Throughout the proceedings against
him, which began 22 years ago, Demjanjuk
has denied serving as a guard in any
concentration or death camp. But both the
Israeli Supreme Court and a U.S. federal
judge assigned to review the earlier
proceedings cast doubt on Demjanjuk's
alibi. The Israeli Supreme Court found
Demjanjuk's alibi "unreasonable" and
flatly concluded, "It is a lie." U.S.
District Judge Thomas A. Wiseman
Jr. of Nashville, Tenn., who was
appointed by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of
Appeals to examine the government's
conduct in the case, stated, "Mr.
Demjanjuk's alibi was so incredible as to
legitimately raise the suspicions of his
prosecutors that he lied about
everything." Demjanjuk's
son-in-law, Ed Nishnic,
responding Wednesday on his behalf,
said that, although the Justice
Department earlier accused Demjanjuk
"of being the most heinous war criminal
of World War II," that case "proved
that the Department of Justice
defrauded the American courts, deceived
the American people and destroyed Mr.
Demjanjuk's good name. Hopefully, it
will not take another 22 years to clear
his name once again." In February of last year, a federal
trial court threw out the earlier order
stripping Demjanjuk of his U.S.
citizenship but specifically permitted the
government to file a new complaint if it
believed that evidence warranted it. In
that new complaint Wednesday, the
government alleged he was an armed guard
at Sobibor, which was established by the
Nazis solely to murder Jewish
civilians. It said Jewish prisoners arrived by
train and armed guards ordered them to
strip naked and then herded them into gas
chambers. Exhaust from a diesel engine was
then pumped into the Sobibor gas chambers,
where more than 200,000 men, women and
children were murdered, the government
said. The new complaint also alleged
Demjanjuk began working for the Nazis in
1942 at the Trawniki training camp, an
SS-run base in Nazi-occupied Poland that
prepared Eastern European recruits to
assist German soldiers in implementing
Adolf Hitler's genocidal race policies.
Demjanjuk and other Trawniki men
participated in "Operation Reinhard," a
Nazi program that rounded up 1.7 million
Jews in Poland and murdered them in mass
shootings or in death camps with poison
gas, the government alleged. Ten of thousands of other Jews were
confined to slave labor camps where many
starved, died of exhaustion or were
murdered. The government said Demjanjuk
was an armed guard at Majdanek
concentration camp in the occupied Polish
city of Lublin. This camp functioned as
both a death and a labor camp, and between
200,000 and 360,000 prisoners died or were
murdered there. Demjanjuk also served as an SS guard at
Flossenbürg concentration camp, where
30,000 prisoners died, the government
charged. Refiling the case is "the right
and courageous thing to do," said Neal
Sher, who headed the investigations
office from 1983 to 1994. "Every judge to
look at this case in United States and
Israel had no doubt about documents being
fully authentic in establishing his
service at Sobibor and the other camps and
that his abilis were fabricated." When he entered the United States in
1952 and became a naturalized citizen in
1958, Demjanjuk concealed his work on
behalf of the Nazis by claiming he spent
the war working on a farm in Sobibor,
Poland, and as a laborer in Germany, the
government alleged. In 1981, a federal
court in Cleveland revoked his citizenship
after finding that he was "Ivan the
Terrible" and a guard at Trawniki. The court never ruled on the
government's contention that he was a
guard at Sobibor. Demjanjuk was ordered
deported, but instead was extradited to
Israel in 1986, where he was tried and
convicted of being "Ivan the Terrible" by
an Israeli trial court and sentenced to
death. In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court
reversed the conviction after prosecutors
discovered evidence from the Soviet Union
suggested that another man could have been
Ivan the Terrible. Although the Israeli Supreme Court
found that Demjanjuk had been a guard at
Sobibor, Trawniki, Majdanek and
Flossenburg, it released him on grounds
that he had been extradited to stand trial
on the Ivan the Terrible charges.
Demjanjuk subsequently returned to the
United States. | 
Aug.
25, 1977 -- Justice Department seeks to
revoke his U.S. citizenship, alleging
Demjanjuk hid a past as SS death camp
guard "Ivan the Terrible."
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to David Irving