Fraud Found in Demjanjuk Extradition : Law: Federal court says Justice Dept. denied ex-Cleveland auto worker access to materials. Officials are still determined to deport him.

A federal appeals court concluded Wednesday that the government was guilty of fraud and serious misconduct for withholding evidence that cast doubt on charges John Demjanjuk was the notorious World War II death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.”

In a sharply worded opinion, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals said that Justice Department prosecutors denied the court and Demjanjuk access to materials that might have helped the retired Cleveland auto worker avoid extradition to Israel, where he was convicted of war crimes in 1988 and sentenced to death. He was released in August and returned to the United States after the Israeli Supreme Court found that he had been wrongly convicted.

Demjanjuk’s supporters contend that the appellate court’s decision will bolster his chances of reclaiming his U.S. citizenship, which was revoked in 1981. But the Justice Department is still determined to deport Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant, on grounds that he committed other war crimes and lied about his past when he first sought to enter the United States after the war.

Although the Cincinnati-based appellate panel Wednesday reversed the order that had authorized Demjanjuk’s 1986 extradition, it did not address the lower court proceeding that stripped him of his citizenship.

Ed Nishnic, a son-in-law and spokesman for the 73-year-old Demjanjuk, said that Demjanjuk would fight to regain his American citizenship. “We want this nightmare over with,” he said, adding: “Justice has been done. God bless America.”

Justice Department officials said they were studying the latest ruling. The department has maintained that even if Demjanjuk was not “Ivan the Terrible” of the Treblinka camp, other evidence indicates that he served in Nazi Germany’s Trawniki facility, where death camp guards were trained. That, the department argues, would be sufficient grounds for losing his American citizenship.

In its Wednesday ruling, the appeals court said that the government lawyers who sought Demanjuk’s extradition should have disclosed statements they obtained through Russian archives from two former Treblinka guards who identified “Ivan the Terrible” as another man, Ivan Marchenko. They also concealed conflicting statements from a German guard who identified Demjanjuk as Ivan but had been unable to pick out his photograph, as well as a list of Ukrainian guards at Treblinka furnished by the Polish government that included Marchenko’s name but not Demjanjuk’s, the court said.

In June, a special judge appointed by the appellate court found that Justice Department lawyers had erred in their investigation of Demjanjuk’s background. But U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Wiseman Jr. concluded that the lawyers had acted in good faith.

The appeals court, using Wiseman’s report as well as other findings, went further, concluding that lawyers assigned to the department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations “acted with reckless disregard for the truth” in arguing that Demjanjuk was “Ivan the Terrible.” The court did not raise the issue of possible sanctions against the lawyers.

Critics of the office, formed by the department in the late 1970s, have claimed that it was under pressure from Congress, from American Jews and from Israel to be aggressive in ferreting out former Nazis and that its lawyer-investigators became advocates for a cause.