John Demjanjuk, extradited to Israel in 1986 to stand trial as "Ivan the Terrible," will return to the United States after Israel's top court cleared the way for his release, a congressman says.
The Supreme Court on Sunday set aside appeals for a new Nazi war crimes trial, ending the long saga involving the retired Ohio auto worker. His departure from Israel had been delayed five times.Demjanjuk was acquitted July 29 of being "Ivan the Terrible," a Nazi guard who operated gas chambers at Treblinka death camp in Poland during World War II. With the new ruling, he is free to leave the country immediately.
In Ohio, Demjanjuk's son-in-law, Ed Nishnic, called the decision "definitely good news." But citing past delays, he added: "We are going to approach this thing very cautiously, very carefully."
Nishnic and U.S. Rep. James Traficant, D-Ohio, planned to leave Monday to escort the 73-year-old Demjanjuk, who stayed in protective custody. Traficant said he expected Demjanjuk to be back in the United States before Friday.
The ruling by Justice Theodore Orr was the sixth time the court has dealt with Demjanjuk's case since his acquittal, when a five-member panel said there was reasonable doubt about his identity as Ivan the Terrible but found that he had been present at other Nazi camps.
Orr rejected appeals by Holocaust survivors and Nazi hunters who sought to have Demjanjuk retried on charges that he was at the Sobibor death camp as well as concentration camps.
They had mounted an international search for Sobibor survivors who could identify him. Dem-jan-juk has said he spent World War II as a German prisoner of war and said he was the victim of mistaken identity.
Israeli Attorney General Yosef Harish already had decided not to prosecute Demjanjuk further, saying the evidence was too weak and there was risk of double jeopardy, or trying him twice on the same charges.
The Supreme Court needed exceptional circumstances to overturn the attorney general's decision. Orr's ruling meant those circumstances did not exist.
Nazi hunters and Jewish organizations criticized the ruling, arguing that Israel was letting a war criminal go on a technicality.
"This is a very sad day for Israeli justice, for Israel and the Jewish people," said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Nazi hunters group. "Israel is in essence ending its role in the pursuit of Nazi war criminals."
In New York, the president of a Holocaust survivors group said he would ask U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to begin deportation proceedings against Demjanjuk as soon as he arrives in the United States for lying to American authorities about his past.
"Only in that way will the terrible injustice that has permitted him to escape punishment be alleviated," said the statement by Benjamin Meed, head of the New York-based American Gathering/-Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel for trial in 1986, five years after being stripped of U.S. citizenship for lying about his wartime past on immigration papers. But U.S. appeals courts ruled he would be allowed to return for court proceedings on the original extradition order.