Dec. 18




USA:

U.S. Seeks to Deport Accused Nazi Demjanjuk

The U.S. government said on Friday it had asked an immigration judge to
deport John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant and retired auto-worker who
is accused of working as a guard at several Nazi camps.

Demjanjuk, 84, who was once thought to be the sadistic Nazi death camp
guard "Ivan the Terrible" during World War II, has been found guilty of
lying to gain entry to the United States.

In April, a federal appeals court affirmed a lower court decision revoking
Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship on multiple grounds, including his "willing"
service in a unit "dedicated to exploiting and exterminating" Jewish
civilians in Nazi-occupied Poland.

A charging document filed on Friday by the Justice Department and the
Department of Homeland Security seeks Demjanjuk's deportation for his
participation in Nazi-sponsored persecution while serving as an armed SS
guard at the Sobibor, Majdanek, and Flossenburg camps; and because he lied
about his wartime job and residences when he applied for a U.S.
immigration visa in 1952.

"John Demjanjuk's involvement in the infamous process through which
thousands of innocent men, women, and children were gassed to death at
Sobibor clearly deprives him of any legal or moral right to live in this
country," Assistant Attorney General Christopher Wray said.

About 250,000 Polish Jews were killed at Sobibor.

"To allow him to remain in the United States would be an insult of the
first order to survivors of the Holocaust, to family members of those who
perished and to veterans of the U.S. forces whose heroism helped bring an
end to the Nazi reign of terror," Wray said in a statement.

It was not clear where Demjanjuk might be sent.

The United States accused Demjanjuk in 1977 of being the Nazi guard "Ivan
the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp. Extradited to Israel, he was
tried and sentenced to death.

But subsequent evidence from the former Soviet Union undermined eyewitness
testimony from death camp survivors, and Israel's supreme court freed him
in 1993.

Demjanjuk returned to the United States and regained the citizenship that
had been revoked in 1981, though prosecutors still maintained he had a
role in the Nazi killing machine.

In a 2002 trial to revoke his citizenship, the government based its case
on carefully preserved Nazi documents, including an identity card issued
to an "Iwan Demjanjuk" at the SS-run Trawniki training camp and a sworn
statement by a now-dead Ukrainian camp guard who remembered Demjanjuk.

He has denied he was ever a death camp guard, saying he was in the Soviet
Army but spent much of the World War II as a German prisoner.

(source: Reuters)