Open Thread for Night Owls & Early Birds

Tom Teicholz at the Los Angeles Times writes:

The pariah loophole
^{Former Nazis remain free because no country will accept them.}

John Demjanjuk's last appeal to avoid deportation was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 19. The 88-year-old accused Nazi concentration camp guard was stripped of his citizenship and ordered sent to Ukraine, his birthplace; Poland, the locus of the crimes; or Germany, the heir to the Nazi regime under which he served.

Yet, as it now stands, he is still in the United States. Why? He can't be exiled unless another country agrees to accept him. For the time being, he remains free.

In this, Demjanjuk is not alone. There are five other former Nazi criminals against whom the U.S. Justice Department successfully completed deportation proceedings but whom no country has been willing to accept. Romanian-born Johann Leprich, a guard at Mauthausen camp in Austria, is one; his deportation was finalized in 2006. Another is Jakiw Palij, born in a region of Poland that is now in Ukraine. He was a guard at Poland's Trawniki labor camp (where in a single day in 1943, 6,000 prisoners were murdered), and his deportation was finalized in January 2006. Mykola Wasylyk, another Trawniki guard also found to be at the Budzyn camp, had his final appeal denied in 2004.

Theodor Szehinskyj, also born in a part of Ukraine that used to be Poland, was in the SS unit called the Death's Head Brigade and was a guard at the Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen and the Warsaw concentration camps. His deportation litigation was completed in March 2006.

Finally, there is Anton Tittjung. Tittjung was born in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia. He was a Waffen SS member and a guard at Mauthausen.

Should any of these criminals worry that deportation is imminent, they might take comfort from the fact that the Supreme Court declined to hear Tittjung's final appeal way back in 2000. He still remains free in the United States. In addition, in recent years, four of their denaturalized Nazi peers died before they were ever deported.

Demanjuk was first charged in 1977 at age 57 for falsifying his 1952 applications to enter the U.S. and to get his citizenship in 1958. His citizenship was revoked in 1981, and he was extradited to Israel in 1986. Convicted and sentenced to death in Israel, Demjanjuk later had his sentence overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court on the grounds of reasonable doubt. In 1993, when he was 73, a U.S. Appeals Court overturned the 1981 ruling. In 1998, Demjanjuk regained his U.S. citizenship. But it was revoked again in 2002, when Demjanjuk was 82, after a new trial. An appeals court upheld the revocation in 2004. Late in 2005, an immigration judge ordered him deported. In 2006, the Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the deportation order. In January, the Sixth Circuit Court refused to review the order. Last month, the Supreme Court did the same.

Now 88, Demjanjuk, like the other war criminals still alive, has two goals in mind: stay free and run out the clock.  

Demjanjuk is one of the Nazis the anti-Semite Pat Buchanan chose to defend in the 1980s. For instance, in a 1982 interview with Allan Ryan Jr., then head of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigation, Buchanan said: "You've got a great atrocity that occurred 35-45 years ago, okay? Why continue to invest...put millions of dollars into investigating that. I mean, why keep a special office to investigate Nazi war crimes. ...why not abolish your office?"

One of the camps where Demjanjuk has been accused of being a guard was the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. Some 800,000 people were murdered in the camp's gas chambers. Today on the site, 17,000 stones stand in a symbolic cemetery. It is said that 17,000 is the largest number of Jews gassed in a single day at the camp. More than 130 of the stones are inscribed with the names of the cities from where victims were deported to Treblinka.

Should aged Nazi war criminals, those who helped put the 800,000 into mass graves at Treblinka and the ashes of millions of others into the ground at other camps be left in peace to live out their dotage? What should be the statute of limitations on war crimes?

The Overnight News Digest is posted,  and includes a story that puts the lie to Senator Lindsey Graham's comment Thursday: "They said an al Qaeda member has a constitutional right to go to a federal court of their choosing and say, 'Judge, let me go,' The Nazis never had that right."

John Demjanjuk would beg to differ, Senator.