The U.S. Supreme Court declined yesterday to hear an appeal by John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born former concentration camp guard who was stripped of his American citizenship in 1981 because he lied about his Nazi past when he obtained it.
Deportation hearings against Demjanjuk have been tentatively set for February 10, 1983, exactly two years to the day after his denaturalization trial opened in Federal District Court in Cleveland.
Demjanjuk, now 62, was identified by witnesses as a guard at the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps in Poland in 1942-43, where some 900,000 Jews and others were killed. Some of the witnesses, including death camp survivors now living in Germany, Israel and Uruguay, pointed out the defendant as the guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” because he tortured thousands of prisoners and herded them into the as chambers.
CITIZENSHIP ORDERED REVOKED
Demjanjuk denied the charges and maintained he had been a German prisoner of war at the time. But Federal Judge Frank Battisti ruled on June 23, 1981 that his citizenship be “revoked, vacated and cancelled” on grounds that Demjanjuk falsified his background when he applied for naturalization in 1958. Demjanjuk, an employe of the Ford Motor Co., had lived in the Cleveland area since 1952.
His appeal against the verdict on grounds that he should have had a jury trial was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit this year. The Supreme Court let that ruling stand without comment.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
