Demjanjuk, once suspected of being "Ivan the Terrible," was extradited to Israel in 1986. A new complaint alleges he was a guard at three Nazi concentration and extermination camps

May 19, 1999
Web posted at: 4:35 p.m. EDT (2035 GMT)

In this story: Demjanjuk's alibi ... ... is challenged The new complaint RELATED STORIES, SITES

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In the latest twist of its long-running battle with suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, the Justice Department asked a federal court Wednesday to strip the 79-year-old retired auto worker of his U.S. citizenship.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk lives in Cleveland.

He was extradited to Israel in 1986 to stand trial for crimes against humanity, but then was cleared of being the infamous gas chamber operator known as "Ivan the Terrible."

Demjanjuk, who would have faced the death penalty in Israel if convicted, returned to the United States when evidence from the Soviet Union suggested another man could have been "Ivan."

The Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations, which was criticized by a U.S. appellate court in 1994 for "reckless" withholding of evidence that might have cleared Demjanjuk in the earlier case, filed a new complaint Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland.

A Justice Department official told CNN that if the government is successful in the proceedings, it will likely move to deport Demjanjuk to his native Ukraine.

Demjanjuk's alibi ...

The new complaint alleges that Demjanjuk was a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland and at the Majdanek, Poland, and Flossenburg, Germany, concentration camps during World War II. It further alleges that he served in the Nazi SS-run "Trawniki" unit that participated in a campaign to annihilate the Jews of Europe.

The government dropped its previous claim that Demjanjuk was "Ivan the Terrible," the guard who operated a gas chamber at the Treblinka extermination camp.

Throughout the proceedings against him, which began 22 years ago, Demjanjuk has denied serving as a guard in any concentration or death camp.

He claimed he was a farmer in Poland and then a Soviet Red Army soldier who spent most of the war in a German prison camp.

... is challenged

But both the Israeli Supreme Court and a U.S. federal judge assigned to review the earlier proceedings cast doubt on Demjanjuk's alibi.

The Israeli Supreme Court found Demjanjuk's alibi "unreasonable" and flatly concluded, "It is a lie."

U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Wiseman Jr. of Nashville, Tennessee, who was appointed by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to examine the government's conduct in the case, stated, "Mr. Demjanjuk's alibi was so incredible as to legitimately raise the suspicions of his prosecutors that he lied about everything."

In February of last year, a federal trial court threw out the earlier order stripping Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship but specifically permitted the government to file a new complaint if it believed that evidence warranted it.

The new complaint

In the new complaint filed on Wednesday, the government alleged Demjanjuk was an armed guard at Sobibor, which was established by the Nazis solely to murder Jewish civilians.

It said Jewish prisoners arrived by train and armed guards ordered them to strip naked and then herded them into gas chambers.

Exhaust from a diesel engine was then pumped into the Sobibor gas chambers, where more than 200,000 men, women and children were murdered, the government said.

The new complaint also alleged that Demjanjuk began working for the Nazis in 1942 at the Trawniki training camp, an SS-run base in Nazi-occupied Poland that prepared Eastern European recruits to assist German soldiers in implementing Adolf Hitler's genocidal race policies.

Demjanjuk and other Trawniki men participated in "Operation Reinhard," a Nazi program that rounded up 1.7 million Jews in Poland and murdered them in mass shootings or in death camps with poison gas, the government alleged.

Ten of thousands of other Jews were confined to slave labor camps where many starved, died of exhaustion or were murdered.

The government said Demjanjuk was an armed guard at Majdanek concentration camp in the occupied Polish city of Lublin. This camp functioned as both a death and a labor camp, and between 200,000 and 360,000 prisoners died or were murdered there.

Demjanjuk also served as an SS guard at Flossenburg concentration camp, where 30,000 prisoners died, the government charged.

When he entered the United States in 1952 and became a naturalized citizen in 1958, Demjanjuk concealed his work on behalf of the Nazis by claiming he spent the war working on a farm in Sobibor and as a laborer in Germany, the government alleged.

CNN's Terry Friedan and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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