United States v. Demjanjuk

John Demjanjuk (defendant) was born Iwan Demjanjuk in Ukraine, drafted into the Soviet army during World War II, and captured and recruited by the Nazis. After Germany surrendered, Demjanjuk was held in a displaced-persons camp. Demjanjuk applied for a US visa under the Displaced Persons Act (DPA) and was naturalized in 1958. In 1977, the United States (the government) sought to denaturalize Demjanjuk for concealing on his visa application that he had served as a Schutzstaffel (SS) guard. The court revoked Demjanjuk’s citizenship based on a photographic card identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at Trawniki concentration camp and testimony that the photograph was of Ivan the Terrible, the Treblinka camp’s gas-chamber operator. Demjanjuk was deported, extradited to Israel, convicted of war crimes, and acquitted after eyewitnesses identified another as Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk’s extradition judgments were vacated, and his citizenship was restored because the government had suppressed exculpatory evidence. In a second denaturalization proceeding, the government submitted documentary evidence of Demjanjuk’s service as an SS guard at Trawniki and three other camps. Experts testified that the documents were authentic. The court found that Demjanjuk had lied on his visa and naturalization applications; helped persecute a civilian population, making him ineligible for a DPA visa; and illegally procured citizenship. Demjanjuk was deported and tried by Germany. The press reported that a 1985 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report cast doubt on the Trawniki identification card’s authenticity. An FBI agent had stated that the Soviet Union punished anti-Soviet dissidents by providing the US with falsified records of dissidents’ participation in war crimes and opined that Demjanjuk’s prosecution could have been initiated and controlled by the Soviet Committee for State Security, known as the KGB. The agent did not independently investigate, interview witnesses, or review documents. The German proceeding was stayed. Demjanjuk moved for relief from his denaturalization judgment, arguing that the government’s withholding of the FBI documents constituted a fraud on the court.