An 87-year-old Ukrainian immigrant has lost his appeal to keep his US citizenship after a US federal court has ruled that he had collaborated with Nazis during Germany's occupation of Ukraine and helped liquidate a Jewish ghetto in Poland.
Ruling in the four-year-old case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said that John Ivan Kalymon had lied about his involvement with the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (UAP) when he emigrated to the US from Germany in 1949, US justice officials said Friday.
The Troy, Michigan, resident became a US citizen in 1955.
US investigators charged that as a member of the UAP, Kalymon had helped round up Jews, imprison them in a ghetto, terrorize them and supervise their forced labour, kill those trying to escape and lead survivors to extermination and forced labour camps, including Belzec in Poland.
He allegedly committed the crimes in Lviv, formerly in Poland and now part of Ukraine, from 1941-1944.
The court decision from Thursday was announced Friday by acting assistant attorney general Matthew Friedrich of the US justice department's criminal division.
The court based its decision in part on UAP documents, including one signed by Kalymon that "proved that in 1942 he personally killed and wounded Jews in Lviv by shooting them," a statement from the justice department said.
"The Nazis and their collaborators killed more than 100,000 of Lviv's Jews