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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Immigration Kicks Ex-Nazi Out of the Country

(CN) - An 89-year-old former Nazi who shot Jews in World War II will be deported from Detroit "to Germany, Ukraine, Poland or any other country that will admit him," the Justice Department said Wednesday.

John Kalymon, who also goes by Ivan, voluntarily served two years as a Ukrainian Auxiliary Police officer in the Nazi-occupied city of L'viv, Ukraine, an immigration judge found.

Evidence at the trial included an Aug. 14, 1942 report, handwritten by Kalymon, in which he informed supervisors that he personally killed one Jew and wounded another that day, authorities say.

Kalymon has reportedly insisted that he did not shoot anybody, and that his job primarily involved guarding coal from looters. He says he concealed his service in the Ukrainian police force on applications for an immigration visa to avoid being sent to the Soviet Union.

"I love this country because it's my country. I'm going to die here," he told the Associated Press in 2009. "They want to remove me, an old man. I never was arrested, pay my taxes. I don't know anyone as honest as me."

The Justice Department says Kalymon immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1949 and became a U.S. citizen in 1955.

A federal judge revoked that citizenship, following a trial, in 2007. Kalymon had reportedly worked as an auto engineer in the Detroit area.

The immigration judge, who authored the removal order on Jan. 31, considered surviving records from the Ukrainian police to establish that Kalymon's duties included helping the Germans round up Jews and send them to death camps.

"Ivan Kalymon was part and parcel of the Nazi machinery of persecution that ended the lives of more than 100,000 men, women and children in L'viv," Justice Department director Eli Rosenbaum said.

Immigration Judge Elizabeth Hacker ordered Kalymon to be deported to Germany, Ukraine, Poland or any other country that will admit him.

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