Judge Cites U.S. Errors in Demjanjuk Case; ‘Irrelevant,’ Israel Says

Ending a yearlong inquiry, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that Justice Department lawyers had erred when they investigated the background of an alleged Nazi war criminal who was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and extradited to Israel for trial.

But U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Wiseman Jr. of Cincinnati said the errors did not invalidate the denaturalization of John Demjanjuk, 72, a Cleveland auto mechanic, who is facing a death sentence in Israel for Nazi war crimes.

Even though Demjanjuk may not have been the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” who executed Jews at the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland during World War II, Wiseman said evidence still indicates that he worked at Nazi Germany’s Trawniki facility where death camp guards were trained--sufficient grounds for losing his American citizenship.

In Jerusalem, the Israeli Justice Ministry said that Wiseman’s ruling does not affect its own case against Demjanjuk.

“It will not influence the legal system in Israel. It is irrelevant,” a government statement said.

The Israeli Supreme Court is expected to rule early in July on Demjanjuk’s appeal of his war-crimes conviction in that country. After 10 months of deliberations, the court’s decision is reported to be in its final draft and runs into hundreds of pages, reviewing the trial procedures, the evidence against Demjanjuk and his conviction and death sentence.

Ed Nishnic, Demjanjuk’s son-in-law, told reporters that relatives are encouraged because “it’s clear to the U.S. judge that Demjanjuk is not Ivan the Terrible.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who followed the case closely and attended part of Demjanjuk’s trial in Israel, said Wednesday in an interview from London that “Israel did not rely on evidence provided by the U.S. Justice Department.”

“No one can credibly claim that Demjanjuk was an innocent auto mechanic in Cleveland who was branded a Nazi war criminal by mistake,” Hier added.

Wiseman said in his ruling that members of the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, “acted in good faith” despite their mistakes. But the judge said that “there is much to lament in this story” because department attorneys “denied Mr. Demjanjuk’s supporters access to materials that would have been helpful to his defense to the criminal charges against him.”

Times staff writer Michael Parks in Jerusalem contributed to this report.