Defense attorneys for accused Nazi death-camp worker John Demjanjuk say Justice Department prosecutors withheld evidence and committed fraud in the case against him, the Cleveland Jewish News reported.
In a motion filed Thursday, Demjanjuk’s attorneys told U.S. District Court Judge Dan Aaron Polster that prosecutors failed to turn over a 1985 FBI memo that challenged the validity of a Nazi identity card allegedly issued to Demjanjuk. They also asked the court to rescind an order stripping him of his citizenship and deporting him.
Since 1977, Demjanjuk has waged a legal battle against claims he worked at Nazi concentration camps and a gas chamber as the guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.” He has faced legal proceedings in the U.S., Israel and Germany.
In 1993, the Israel Supreme Court ordered him released because evidence indicated another man, Ivan Marchenko, was “Ivan the Terrible,” but when Demjanjuk returned to the U.S. six years later, the U.S. charged him with being a guard at other concentration camps. In 2009, he lost his citizenship and was deported to Germany, where he was convicted of war crimes.
The identity card, allegedly issued to Demjanjuk at an SS guard-training camp called Trawniki, indicates that he worked at various concentration camps and has been used in all those proceedings.
But at least one Cleveland FBI agent questioned the card’s authenticity, writing a memo in 1985 that said it was “quite likely fabricated” by the Soviet Union’s KGB.
Defense attorneys seized on that memo in their latest motion, calling the failure to turn it over “a major miscarriage of justice, especially when there are strong indications Mr. Demjanjuk is innocent of the charges against him.”
But others don’t believe the memo will change much.
“I don’t think this goes anywhere,” immigration attorney David Leopold told the Cleveland Jewish News. “[Demjanjuk] is throwing everything against the all to see what sticks.”
