Posted on 11/30/2005 9:14:56 AM PST by joeclarke
Demjanjuk in court to fight extradition to Ukraine
Long story, short: John Demjanjuk is an ill, wheelchair bound 85 year old Russian immigrant who originally served as a Russian soldier, but was taken prisoner by the Germans in WW II. As a Russian prisoner of war he may have been assigned to Jewish death camps [his entire history is conjecture] Wilkipedia
He emigrated to the U.S. in 1951 and spent the most of his American life working at a Ford plant and raising a family. In the late seventies Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal with fellow U.S. Justice Department Nazi Hunters charged Demjanjuk with crimes against humanity for being the infamous "Ivan The Terrible," death camp Jew-killer. He was deported to Israel, and sentenced to hanging, but after languishing in prison for five years awaiting the death penalty, the Israeli Supreme Court judged that there was not enough evidence.
Wiesenthal's Nazi Hunters and U.S. Department of Justice Nazi Hunters have been pounding on this man ever since. Relentless. Unmerciful.
Demjanjuk has been under the Nazi hunter gun for various reasons, including the fact that he was not completely honest on his immigration application to the U.S.
Well, excuse me, why are an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants allowed to live and work in the U.S. today, but John Demjanjuk, who has been contributing to American Society for over thirty years be, may be stripped of his citizenship and deported because he cannot give a credible account to the nazi hunters in the Justice Department?
It has been so long since we have been involved in a full scale world war in the United States that, perhaps, we have no idea how much pandemonium and displacement is experienced in a world war. So, Demjanjuk cannot account for where he was at any particular time during WW II - just like millions of other victims of the war.
Maybe its time for Wiesenthal's and the Justice Department's Nazi hunters to see if there are any Jewish Capos still living in the United States. The Caposwere Jews who collaborated with Nazis in the WW II death camps.
Your moral equivalence arguments here are sickening, as are your excuses.
No Israel court acquitted him of war crimes, they simply acknowledged that he was not the person the prosecutor claimed he was.
I'm not exactly comfortable with the Demjanjuk case. Even witnesses said they couldn't be sure it was the same guy.
You're kidding, right? You're equating a person who was thought to have committed Nazi war crimes with illegal aliens?
You and me both. If the Israeli Supreme Court couldn't even see their way clear to identify the guy as being who others claimed him to have been and witnesses don't seem able to say, I don't know what is supposed to be done, but it sure would seem to me that his various accusers have had a full run of "due process" to try to establish the truth. I thought the guy had died actually. I guess I need to also make it clear that I believe that anyone who hates Jews is a fool and an enemy of God and I don't blame anyone at all for going after this guy IF he were who they, no doubt, honestly thought he was.
So, you know as a fact that Demjanjuk is guilty. Of what?
What war crimes?
What Nazi war crimes did he commit?
As far as his immigration status is concerned, I suspect there are thousands more from that period that are in the same boat. There was a great scattering of people at that time.
I had a Russian science teacher who had a Polish name. He told us the story of being captured by the Germans and released by the Americans only to run away to Canada to avoid a Siberian gulag for being captured. First he became a Canadian citizen than years later became an American citizen.
What about liberal Jews who hate Christians? What does God say about that?
His ID card proved that he was there, just as his ID card simultaneoulsy proved that he was not the infamous Ivan Marchenko but Ivan Demjanjuk.
Ping.
These palaeos just can't stop tying Israel to Mexican immigrants. I wonder why?
I think Joe should move to Syria with David Duke. We all know that the Syrians are the best friends the White Man has ever had in his eternal struggle with Mexican-infesting Zionist scum! [/sarcasm]
It's pretty clear to me.
Lying on your immigration forms to conceal the fact that you personally helped murder women and children while you fought for America's enemies is basically the same thing as sneaking over the border to work as a dishwasher.
Morally, it's a wash.
Every court thats dealt with Demjanjuk, both in Israel and the US, has determined that he was a member of the SS (one of 5,000 or so of 3 million Red Army prisoners who took the easy way out) and served as a guard at Sobibor as well as Majdanek and Flossenburg. Theres no question he lied about it or that our laws require deportation.
As to the accusation that the Weisenthal Center and the US Government are Nazis, Id say that fits those who demand an exception to our immigration laws for former Nazis far better.
Commentary from the real Nazis
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FRIDAY, APRIL 30, 2004 WWW.USDOJ.GOV |
CRM (202) 514-2008 TDD (202) 514-1888 |
APPEALS COURT AFFIRMS RULING THAT JOHN DEMJANJUK
PERSECUTED JEWS AS NAZI GUARD
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray of the Criminal Division announced today that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit unanimously held that the Government proved through clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence that John Demjanjuk was a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp and at the Majdanek and Flossenbürg concentration camps, and a member of the SS-run Trawniki unit dedicated to exploiting and exterminating Jews in Poland.
As a Sobibor guard, Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto-worker, is only the second person to be prosecuted in the United States for having served at one of the four Nazi camps constructed solely to murder civilians. The courts decision affirms a 2002 federal District Court ruling stripping Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship.
We are pleased with todays Sixth Circuit ruling and the important principles it upholds, Assistant Attorney General Wray said. Those, like Demjanjuk, who participated in Nazi atrocities do not belong in this country. We will take all appropriate steps to make sure that these individuals do not enjoy the privileges of U.S. citizenship.
Eli M. Rosenbaum, Director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which brought the case with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Cleveland, said, The courts decision sends a powerful message to every participant in the ghastly Nazi campaign of genocide who is still living in this country: the government will not waiver in its determination to find you, prosecute you, and remove you from the United States.
Gregory A. White, United States Attorney in Cleveland, noted, Demjanjuk is one of the most seriously implicated Nazi persecutors to be found in the United States, and the courts decision is a critical step in the governments effort to secure a measure of justice in this case.
Demjanjuk was first tried on allegations of Nazi persecution in 1981. A federal court found that Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible, a gas chamber operator at the Treblinka extermination camp. He was extradited to Israel in 1986, convicted of crimes against humanity by an Israeli trial court, and sentenced to death. After the Israeli Supreme Court found that reasonable doubt existed as to whether Demjanjuk was Ivan the Terrible, he was released and returned to the United States. In 1998, Chief Judge Paul R. Matia of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, vacated the original denaturalization order, finding that the government recklessly failed to produce potentially exculpatory evidence to Demjanjuk in the original proceedings. Chief Judge Matia authorized the government to reinstitute denaturalization proceedings if it had evidence supporting other charges against Demjanjuk.
The government filed new charges in 1999, relying in large part on evidence that had come to light following Demjanjuks conviction in Israel, when the collapse of the Soviet Union made available to investigators Nazi records that had been captured by the Soviet army. In 2002, Chief Judge Matia found that Demjanjuk was a willing armed guard at Sobibor, where 250,000 men, women, and children were murdered; at the notorious Majdanek concentration camp, where at least 170,000 civilians died; at the Flossenburg concentration camp, where some 90,000 civilians perished; and a member of a unit trained at the infamous Trawniki-training camp to implement Operation Reinhard, the Nazi program to dispossess, exploit, and murder Jews in Poland. Judge Matia specifically found that at Sobibor Demjanjuk participated in the process by which thousands of Jews were murdered by asphyxiation with carbon monoxide in the camps gas chambers.
In affirming that decision, the Court of Appeals stated that Demjanjuk was identified by seven Nazi-created wartime documents, three of which bear his name, birth date, and birthplace. One of those documents, a Nazi service identity pass, has his photograph, nationality, fathers name, facial shape, eye color, hair color, and reference to an identifiable scar on [his] back. The court noted that although Demjanjuk tries to raise doubt as to the identity of the person on the service pass... he offers no evidence to support his assertion. Based on the evidence against Demjanjuk, the appeals court held that Demjanjuk was not legally eligible to obtain his citizenship and affirmed the district courts denaturalization order. The appeal was argued by OSI Deputy Director Jonathan C. Drimmer.
The case is part of OSI's ongoing efforts to identify U.S. citizens and residents who assisted in Axis-sponsored acts of persecution. Since OSI began operations in 1979, it has won cases against 94 individuals who assisted in Nazi persecution. In addition, 170 individuals who sought to enter the United States in recent years have been blocked from doing so as a result of OSI's Watch List program, which is enforced in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security.
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That information was helpful. Basically, even though he's not who they originally thought he was, he is still ineligble to remain in the U.S. That's fine with me.
Pretty much how I feel.
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