Three decades of attempts to deliver justice to a man accused of being a guard in Nazi concentration camps took a new twist on Wednesday when a United States judge ordered the deportation of John Demjanjuk, an 85-year-old retired car factory worker.
The judge, Michael Creppy, ordered Demjanjuk sent back to his native Ukraine, rejecting defence claims that he would face torture there. Demjanjuk was stripped of his US citizenship in 2002 after a court accepted documentary evidence that he had been a guard at several death or forced labour camps. Demjanjuk denies the allegations, and now has 30 days to appeal the deportation order.
The frail defendant, once dubbed Ivan the Terrible, spent the hearings in a wheelchair and listening to the proceedings through a Ukrainian translator, occasionally groaning from chronic back pain.
His lawyer, John Broadley, said the US government had ”marked Mr Demjanjuk with a blood scent of Ivan the Terrible. Now they want to take Demjanjuk, covered in that blood scent, and throw him into a shark tank,” Broadley said. ”If Mr Demjanjuk is sent to the Ukraine, he will likely be imprisoned and beaten.”
The prosecutor, Stephen Paskey, argued that Demjanjuk had failed to prove that he would face any harm if deported. ”He has shown little more than a series of speculations of what might happen,” Paskey said. ”Ukraine is intent on improving the behaviour of its police and improving its public image … It’s highly unlikely a high-profile individual from the US is going to be mistreated.”
The ruling marked the latest twist in a saga spanning almost 30 years. Demjanjuk was first accused of being a Nazi prison guard in 1977. He was alleged to have been a sadistic gas chamber operator at the Treblinka death camp known as ”Ivan the Terrible” and was stripped of his citizenship four years later and flown to Israel for trial in 1986. He was convicted and sentenced to hang, but the Israeli supreme court ruled in 1993 that it was a case of mistaken identity.
Demjanjuk was freed and returned to the US, where his initial prosecution was found to have been deeply flawed and his citizenship was restored in 1998.
However, stung by criticism that it had bungled the case, the justice department mounted a new prosecution in 2001, accusing him of lying when he filled in immigration documents in the 1950s.
The prosecution submitted eyewitness accounts and documents including a Nazi identification card and handwriting samples suggesting that Demjanjuk had been a guard at four separate Nazi camps in 1942 and 1943, including the Sobibor death camp in Poland. Demjanjuk insisted he was once more a victim of mistaken identity, claiming he spent much of the war as a prisoner of the Germans.
However, the judge in the case, Paul Matia, ruled that: ”The government has proven by clear evidence that the defendant assisted in the persecution of civilian populations during world war two.”
Consequently, Demjanjuk’s citizenship was revoked for a second time in 2002. – Guardian Unlimited Â