Demjanjuk lawyers raise citizenship issue

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

A recently deceased Ohio autoworker convicted of Nazi war crimes should have his U.S. citizenship restored because the American government withheld potentially helpful material, his attorneys said.

The defense team for John Demjanjuk, who died March 17 in Germany at age 91, asked the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati to restore his citizenship or order a hearing on the case.

The filing late Thursday night said U.S. District Judge Dan Polster in Cleveland erred last year in refusing to reopen the citizenship case at Demjanjuk’s request.

Demjanjuk, who lived for decades in Seven Hills in suburban Cleveland, was convicted by a Munich court in May on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. The Ukrainian-born man maintained that he had been mistaken for someone else; he died while his conviction was under appeal.

A political leader in the Ukraine told The Associated Press that Demjanjuk’s body was returned to the U.S. for burial. Rostislav Novozhenets, deputy head of the nationalist Ukrainian Republican Party, said in a telephone interview that Demjanjuk was buried March 31 at an undisclosed location. Family members living nearby will care for the gravesite, Novozhenets said.

Dennis Terez, a public defender representing Demjanjuk, said Friday he couldn’t comment on where Demjanjuk was buried.

Prosecutors have until next month to file a response to the citizenship issue, Terez said. The defense will then get a chance to reply.

The government rejected the defense’s arguments.

“In a reasoned and meticulously supported decision, Judge Polster rejected these same contentions by Mr. Demjanjuk’s lawyers,” spokesman Mike Tobin, of the U.S. attorney’s office in Cleveland, said in an email.