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289 12 The Trials of John Demjanjuk Renee C. Redman Prominent among the duties of federal district courts in American society is the enforcement of citizenship and extradition laws. In the first type of case, the court must determine whether the citizenship of a naturalized U.S. citizen should be taken away. In the second type, the court is called on to certify to the secretary of state the veracity of the underlying facts in an extradition request made by another country. In both types of cases, the district courts play an important role in fact-finding and in interpreting complicated U.S. immigration and treaty law. The high-profile trials of John Demjanjuk in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio demonstrate how courts perform these roles, as well as the challenges they confront in weighing forty-year-old witness testimony and foreign documentary evidence. From 1977 to 2002, John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant living in Seven Hills, Ohio, faced five legal proceedings brought by the U.S. government before two district court judges and two federal immigration judges: two denaturalization cases, an extradition proceeding, and two deportation proceedings. The first two cases were later reexamined in detail by a third district court judge acting as a special master, and Demjanjuk filed a motion to reopen the second 290 Renee C. Redman denaturalization case in July 2011 before a fourth district court judge. All of these complicated proceedings centered on Demjanjuk’s whereabouts and activities between May 1942, when he was captured by the German army in Poland, and June 1945. The government alleged that he was working in Nazi concentration camps. Over the years, Demjanjuk made numerous claims about his whereabouts but denied ever working in a concentration camp. In between the U.S. trials, he spent seven years in prison in Israel, where he was convicted but later acquitted of war crimes. This chapter focuses on Demjanjuk’s three trials in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. The legal proceedings, particularly the first denaturalization trial, were avidly followed in the Cleveland area and nationally . The government’s effort to denaturalize and remove him from the United States and Demjanjuk’s efforts to prevent this outcome would have symbolic importance for countless individuals and groups, especially Jews and Ukrainians , who share historical animosity. Indeed, it could be said that Demjanjuk chose to make himself a symbol. Self-described as a Ukrainian hero,1 he opted to put himself through more than thirty years of litigation and imprisonment even as other accused Nazi collaborators simply left the United States to live peacefully elsewhere. John Demjanjuk John Demjanjuk was born Iwan Demjanjuk in the village of Dub Macharenzi, Ukraine, on April 3, 1920. He completed four grades in school and survived the famine in the early 1930s, becoming a collective farmer and tractor driver before being conscripted into the Russian army in 1940. Wounded in the back by shrapnel in September 1941, which left a scar, he returned to his artillery unit on the Crimean front after a brief stay in a hospital. In 1942, he was one of the more than one hundred thousand Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) captured by the Germans during the battle of Kerch.2 Demjanjuk testified at his first denaturalization trial that after his capture, the Germans transported him to POW camps in Rovno in the Ukraine and later Chelm, Poland. He did not recall the exact dates but suggested that he might have been transferred to Chelm as late as 1943 or 1944.3 He then claimed that in 1944, the Germans transported him to Graz, Austria, where he joined the Ukrainian National Army, an organization formed by the Germans to fight the Soviets. He stated that in Graz, he received 291 The Trials of John Demjanjuk a blood-type tattoo on the inside of his upper left arm, which he later cut out, leaving a scar. Soon afterward, he asserted, the Germans transferred him to a place he knew as Oelberg, Austria, where he remained from about November 1944 until May 1945 while assigned to guard a captured Soviet general.4 All sides agreed that after Germany surrendered in May 1945, Demjanjuk spent years in displaced persons (DP) camps in Europe before landing a job with the U.S. Army’s transportation corps in Regensburg, Germany.5 He married his wife, Vera, and had three children, one born in Europe and...

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