Bid to deport camp guard in 'Ivan the Terrible' case

The US Justice Department has asked an immigration judge to deport the man once accused of being notorious Nazi death camp guard “Ivan the Terrible”.

The government says retired Ford worker John Demjanjuk, of Seven Hills, Ohio, served during the Second World War as an armed guard at Nazi extermination and concentration camps.

In 1977 Demjanjuk was accused by the justice department of being Ivan the Terrible, a Nazi guard who ran the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp in occupied Poland during 1942 and 1943.

Demjanjuk was convicted in Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to be hanged, but eventually persuaded the Israeli Supreme Court to overturn his conviction based on new evidence that someone else was Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk’s US citizenship was restored, but the government brought a new case against him.

In April, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit unanimously affirmed a lower court decision revoking Demjanjuk’s US citizenship on several grounds, including his “willing” service in an SS-run unit “dedicated to exploiting and exterminating” Jewish civilians in Nazi-occupied Poland.

“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 A. Wray, of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said yesterday.

In 2002 US District Judge Paul Matia ruled in Cleveland to strip Demjanjuk of citizenship. The 6th Circuit upheld the ruling.

A document filed yesterday by the Justice and Homeland Security departments states that Demjanjuk should be deported because of his participation in Nazi-sponsored persecution while serving as an armed SS guard at Sobibor, Majdanek and Flossenburg; and because he lied about his wartime occupations and residences when he applied for a US immigration visa in 1952.