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Monday, March 18, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Demjanjuk Deported From U.S. to Germany

(CN) - Former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk was deported to Germany on Tuesday. Demjanjuk, 89, a retired auto worker and resident of Seven Hills, Ohio was arrested in March on suspicion of assisting in the murder of at least 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

Demjanjuk was born in present-day Ukraine and immigrated to the United States in 1952 by concealing from authorities his true whereabouts during WWII and his service as a guard.

Demjanjuk was tried on allegations of participation in Nazi persecution in a civil denaturalization case decided in 1981. He was extradited to Israel in 1986, where he was tried and convicted. However, after the Israeli Supreme Court found that reasonable doubt existed with regards to Demjanjuk's participation, he was released and returned to the U.S. in 1993.

In 1999, the Department of Justice initiated a new case against him, relying on captured Nazi documents that came to light after the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In revoking his citizenship in 2002, the district court found that in addition to serving at Sobibor, where approximately 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered, Demjanjuk also served as a guard at Majdanek, a concentration camp and extermination center where at least 170,000 victims perished.

The court also found that Demjanjuk served at Flossenbürg, where thousands died from inhumane conditions, or were murdered.

Demjanjuk is just the second person to be removed from the U.S. after having served at one of the four Nazi camps constructed solely to murder civilians.

Office of Special Investigations Director Eli M. Rosenbaum stated, "John Demjanjuk's actions helped seal the fate of thousands of innocent people during the Holocaust. He has at last received his summons from history."

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