Demjanjuk Citizenship Appeal Rejected by Court
A U.S. appeals court dismissed a request to help posthumously restore U.S. citizenship to convicted Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk.
Demjanjuk’s estate had asked the full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati to take up the case. In June, a three-judge panel of the court had ruled that Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship cannot be posthumously restored and that his death made the case moot.
The dismissal was filed Tuesday.
Demjanjuk, a former Ohio autoworker, died in southern Germany on March 17 at the age of 91.
The defense has said the American government withheld potentially helpful material and said the full court must take up the matter.
The 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 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.
Restoration of his citizenship would have enabled his widow to seek Social Security benefits.
A Munich court convicted Demjanjuk 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.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
