Demjanjuk’s Citizenship Won’t Be Restored
A federal appeals court said that Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship cannot be posthumously restored.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled Thursday that his death made the case moot. Demjanjuk died in southern Germany on March 17 at the age of 91.
Restoration of his citizenship would have enabled his widow to seek Social Security benefits.
Demjanjuk’s defense attorneys had asked the appeals court to restore the former suburban Cleveland resident’s citizenship, saying the American government withheld potentially helpful material.
A Munich court convicted the Ohio autoworker last year on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. Demjanjuk, who maintained that he had been mistaken for someone else, died while his conviction was under appeal.
His defense claimed that U.S. District Judge Dan Polster in Cleveland violated basic fairness by ruling against Demjanjuk’s citizenship appeal without holding a hearing on a 1985 secret FBI report uncovered recently by The Associated Press. The document indicates that the FBI believed a Nazi ID card purportedly showing that Demjanjuk served as a death camp guard was a Soviet-made fake.
The government argued that the defense filing contained no new information in the matter and the court rejected the arguments on Demjanjuk’s behalf.
“Over three decades, we have repeatedly rejected Demjanjuk’s challenges to the authenticity of the Trawniki card and fraud on the court,” the court said, as reported in Haaretz.
But the Supreme Court judges also said that they still believed Demjanjuk had served the Nazis, probably at the Trawniki SS training camp and Sobibor, and declined to order a new trial.
Carole S. Rendon, first assistant U.S. attorney for northern Ohio, said she hopes Thursday’s decision puts the case to rest.
“The 6th Circuit confirmed once and for all that the real victims were the tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children who suffered and died at the camps where Demjanjuk was a Nazi guard,’’ she said in an email, reported by The Associated Press.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
