Intense scrutiny has been directed, in particular, against Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, a retired auto worker from Cleveland, Ohio, who had immigrated to the United States in 1951 and became a naturalized citizen in 1958. In 1986 Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel, where he stood trial for crimes against humanity. He was cleared, however, when evidence from the Soviet Union cast doubt that he was the infamous Treblinka gas-chamber operator known as "Ivan the Terrible." The U.S. Justice Department initiated proceedings in a federal court on May 19, 1999, to strip Demjanjuk of his U.S. citizenship. Demjanjuk may not have been at Treblinka, but the Justice Department charged that he was, among other things, an armed guard at Sobibór and Majdanek, two notorious Nazi death and concentration camps on Polish soil where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The U.S. criminal code has lacked provisions relating explicitly to war crimes. However, falsification of information pertaining to citizenship applications has been used in the United States as a basis to remove citizenship and facilitate deportation for war-crimes suspects. If the government's case against Demjanjuk is successful--it was pending at the time of this writing--he will likely be deported to his native Ukraine.

Controversial Scholarship