Posted on 05/01/2009 10:02:59 PM PDT by BuckeyeTexan
A US federal court has denied former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk's latest attempt to block extradition to Germany to face charges of aiding in the wartime murder of thousands of Jews. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment on when Mr Demjanjuk would be deported but said the government would continue to seek his removal to Germany. His son said the family is considering an appeal to the US Supreme Court and has also filed a lawsuit in Germany seeking an emergency stay.
The decision is the latest development in a decades-long saga over the elder Demjanjuk's wartime actions. In a dramatic twist last month, the octogenarian won an 11th-hour reprieve when the court stayed his deportation shortly after he was carried out of his Cleveland, Ohio home in a wheelchair to be put on a flight to Munich.
The appeals court on Friday rejected an argument by Mr Demjanjuk's lawyer that his client is in such poor health that jailing and trying him in Germany would cause him pain amounting to torture.
Born in Ukraine in 1920, John Demjanjuk was a soldier in the Red Army when he was captured by the Nazis in the spring of 1942. He was trained at Treblinka in Nazi-occupied Poland and served two years in the camps of Sobibor and Majdanek, also in occupied Poland, and in Flossenburg in Bavaria, southern Germany. He has always insisted he was forced to work for the Nazis and had been mistaken by survivors for other cruel guards. He immigrated to the United States in 1952 with his family, settling in Ohio, where he found work in the car industry.
Condemned to death in Israel in 1988 after he was convicted of being the sadistic "Ivan the Terrible", the verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court because of doubts about his identity. He was returned to the United States over strenuous objections from Holocaust survivors and Jewish groups, who argued there was sufficient evidence that he served as a death camp guard to warrant another trial.
In 1999, the US government filed new charges using fresh evidence that surfaced following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he was stripped of his US citizenship in 2002. Germany issued a warrant for his arrest on 11 March on charges of assisting in the murder of 29,000 Jews.
Copyright © 2009 Radio New Zealand
We want to send a decrepid old man to trial for warcrimes, while at the same time we want to pull todays terrorists out of Gitmo and send them home?????
So, Mr. Tannenbaum is 75 years old now, but he was a “kapo”
in a camp?
So, was he born around 1934?
How many “kapos” were 10 years old in the camps?
BTW, I literally just got back from a unique family meeting, where my family met a couple of relatives who we did not even know existed.
We have a very rare name in the world.
Our families all came from a small province in is what is now
Ukraine.
It was the Volhynian Oblast, under Polish, and then Russian rule.
My family was able to escape from 1900 to 1915, while this other part of our “new family” that we met, only tonight,
was sent to Siberia.
That they ever made it out is amazing to me.
John Denjanjuk will be judged by an entity much more wise than a European court will ever be.
Sorry Chet, I missed the 1987 tag on your post.
It certainly puts him there, mature, at the time.
It was a horrific period, not too long ago.
I fear for our future.
(But I am prepared.)
(Interesting side note: the original "Ivan the Terrible" for Ivan IV of Muscovy, is a mistranslation. "Grozny" means "awe-inspiring" or "fearsome", not what we usually think of as "terrible".)
The US government imported thousands of not just Nazis but in fact SS troops to help form the basis of what later was called the CIA, in order to work against the Communist threat. This of course explains why American policy which was inherently anti-Communism was transformed into anti-Russian, as it still is. But evidently, you can be a real Nazi and get into America as long as you didn't lie on the paperwork.
No, the US Gov’t let it go because they did not want undue attention brought to those events by a large war crimes trial. Personally, given Imperial Japan’s atrocities, the trials should have been held.
No doubt trials should have been held. I am not sure POWs were ever treated any worse than the Japanese treated our American soldiers.
They weren’t in my judgement. Hence, I think that they should have went forward with them..
From the US point of view, that would be the thing..
Tannenbaum lost his citizenship but wasn't deported anywhere. There were about three other procedings in the fifties, one successful, but it doesn't look like denaturalization and deportation were very seriously pursued in more than a handful of cases. Of course "kapo" has different connotations. Not all kapos -- Jewish or gentile -- were guards or killers.
Maybe I'm wrong about that. I was thinking about work details, who survived when others died. So far as I can find out a kapo was an overseer, and hence, in a way, a guard.
Last month, when the Ted Stevens conviction was thrown out, I did some reading about the prosecutors. One of the DOJ attorneys that was held in contempt for failing to turn over documents and thrown off the Stevens case (Patty Stemler) is the same one that was rebuked by a judge in 1992 for failing to disclose evidence in Demjanjuk’s case, specifically documents and witness statements that showed he was not Ivan as had been alleged.
And yet, as I noted, we allow George Soros, a man convicted of a felony in France and who admitted in his own biography to identifying Jews for teh Nazis so they could be sent off to the concentration camps to be killed, to remain in this country? If we’re going after Demjanjuk, a draftee, then we should denaturalize and deport Soros, who did worse IMO than Demjanjuk did.
On what authority were the Nazis or the Japanese tried?
no they didnt!
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1997/08/10/1997-08-10_osi_has_nailed_scores_of_ex-.html
“Kapos” were Jews who agreed to oversee fellow prisoners in exchange for favorable treatment by their Nazi captors. Tannenbaum was charged with beating Jewish prisoners, and he settled with the OSI by admitting to its charges to dodge deportation. “
He was in a german prison camp - there is no doubt about that and he only lied to stop being sent back to the communists where he was surely to be killed.
http://www.geocities.com/kitezhgrad/history/keelhaul.html
Doesn’t matter.
On the citizenship application it warns that lying on the form will result in rejection.
He lied.
Out he goes.
“Doesn’t matter.
On the citizenship application it warns that lying on the form will result in rejection.
He lied”
Well then how come they let the Jewish Nazi off Scott Free?
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1997/08/10/1997-08-10_osi_has_nailed_scores_of_ex-.html
The Soviets had their Nazis working for them, we had ours.
So the evidence against Demjanjuk, came from the KGB? Now they would never falsify anything, would they? FWIW, any Red Army soldier captured by the Germans, by Soviet policy, were considered traitors and therefore condemned to death should they ever return to Soviet soil.
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