News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Ex-POW May Be Tried For War Crimes

Date: June 07, 2001

"Trial of Accused Nazi Camp Guard Ends in Ohio

CLEVELAND (Reuters) - A trial to determine whether to strip U.S. citizenship from John Demjanjuk, the man once thought to be Nazi death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible," ended on Thursday without the 81-year-old Ukrainian immigrant taking the stand.

U.S. District Court Judge Paul Matia, who presided over the bench trial that began on June 1, asked both sides to submit exhibits next week and indicated he would not make a ruling until near the end of summer.

Demjanjuk had been listed as a potential witness by both U.S. Justice Department Nazi hunters who prosecuted the case and by Demjanjuk's defense team headed by Michael Tigar.

Tigar had indicated he would call the retired autoworker to the stand to rebuff government arguments that even though he was not "Ivan" he still served as a death camp guard and lied about his past when he applied for U.S. citizenship after World War Two.

But over a lunch break the defense rested, as the government had earlier in the trial, and Demjanjuk, who lives in the Cleveland suburbs, did not appear.

Tigar, who is also defending convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, did call to the stand Demjanjuk's son, also named John, who said he had never taken blood or DNA samples from his father. Tigar had argued that the government had no real proof of who Demjanjuk was and instead was engaging in "trial by document," basing its case on old papers.

The elder Demjanjuk has denied cooperating with the Nazis, saying he was forced to join the Russian army and was held as a prisoner of war.

SS-RUN TRAINING CAMP

The Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) based its case on seven wartime documents, including an identity card issued to an "Iwan Demjanjuk" at the Nazi SS-run Trawniki training camp and a sworn statement by a former Ukrainian camp guard who remembered Demjanjuk.

The OSI, which has investigated around 300 former Nazis, said Demjanjuk was a guard at the notorious Sobibor, where 250,000 Polish Jews died, as well as the Majdanek and Flossenburg concentration camps.

Tigar had argued that Demjanjuk's cousin, Ivan Andreievich Demjanjuk, now deceased, was the guard at those camps.

Demjanjuk gained U.S. entry in 1951. In 1977 he was charged with war crimes and stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981.

Swayed by the identification of Demjanjuk by survivors of the Treblinka extermination camp, prosecutors accused Demjanjuk of being the brutal camp guard whom inmates nicknamed "Ivan the Terrible."

Extradited and put on trial in Israel, Demjanjuk was sentenced to death there in 1988. But evidence mostly from the former Soviet Union convinced the Israeli Supreme Court that another man was likely the brutal guard.

The Israeli court freed Demjanjuk in 1993. He returned to the United States, where judges reprimanded the Justice Department and his citizenship was restored."