U.S. judge denies citizenship bid by Nazi guard Demjanjuk

usatoday.com
By Michael Winter, USA TODAY
Dec 20, 2011
Updated 1h 7m ago



Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk has lost his bid to regain his U.S. citizenship, the Associated Press reports.

The 91-year-old retired autoworker from suburban Cleveland was convicted of war crimes by a German court and sentenced to five years in prison. He is free pending appeal.

Demjanjuk, who was born in Ukraine and served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland, argued his citizenship should be reinstated because "a newly discovered document suggested that an incriminating document against him was a Soviet fraud," AP writes.

He was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and deported in May 2009 to stand trial.


CBS News summarizes the long saga of efforts to bring Demjanjuk to justice since World War II:

Demjanjuk was charged with 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, one for each person who died during the time he was accused of being a guard at the Sobibor camp. There was no evidence he committed a specific crime. The prosecution was based on the theory that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing -- the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts.

In the 1980s, Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel after he was accused of being the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp. He was convicted, sentenced to death -- then freed when an Israeli court overturned the ruling, saying the evidence showed he was the victim of mistaken identity.

Demjanjuk maintains he was a victim of the Nazis -- first wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces, then captured and held as a prisoner of war under brutal conditions before joining the Vlasov Army, a force of anti-communist Soviet POWs and others was formed to fight with the Germans against the Soviets in the final months of the war.

Last week in Germany, the Simon Wiesenthal Center launched a new drive and reward fund to catch and punish the last perpetrators of the Holocaust before they die.

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