US seeks to oust Michigan man over Nazi-era charge

[September 01, 2009]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- An 88-year-old Michigan man accused of helping the Nazis during World War II faces deportation after the Justice Department filed court papers against him.

U.S. authorities say John Kalymon, once known as Iwan Kalymon, shot Jews while serving in the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian Auxiliary Police Force in what is now the city of Lviv, which until 1939 was part of Poland.

Crying on the front porch of his home in Troy, Mich., Kalymon told The Associated Press on Monday he did not shoot anyone during World War II.

"I live in this country 60 years and four months. I love this country because it's my country. I'm going to die here. They want to remove me, an old man. I never was arrested, pay my taxes. I don't know anyone as honest as me," he said.

The retired auto engineer has been under investigation for years, and has repeatedly denied the charges.

U.S. officials have not yet said to which country they wish to send him, but Poland is investigating the role of Ukrainian police in the deaths of Jews.

Kalymon's lawyer, Elias Xenos, has argued Kalymon guarded coal from looters. The lawyer did not immediately return a call for comment Monday on the government's decision to seek deportation.

Kalymon lives in Troy, Michigan, and came to the United States in 1949. He said he lied about his police work because he feared being sent to the Soviet Union. He became a naturalized citizen in 1955, and went on to work at Chrysler.

The U.S. government became aware of Kalymon after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. World War II-era archives that had been inaccessible revealed people who may have concealed their Axis allegiance when they entered the United States decades ago.

In 2007, after a civil trial, a federal judge in Detroit stripped Kalymon of his citizenship, saying his two years in the Ukrainian police resulted in the persecution of civilians.

The government produced a handwritten document in which "Iv Kalymun" reported firing four shots, killing one Jew and injuring another. Kalymon acknowledges he spelled his last name both ways when he was a young man but says he did not go by "Kalymun" when he was a Ukrainian officer. He denied shooting Jews and claimed the record was a forgery.

Authorities say the actions were part of an operation to remove 40,000 Jews from the Lviv Ghetto in August 1942.

"With the active assistance of collaborators like John Kalymon, the Nazis annihilated some 100,000 innocent Jewish men, women and children in Lviv," said Eli Rosenbaum, who leads the Justice Department's effort to find and deport former Nazis and their helpers. "Participants in such crimes have forfeited any right to enjoy the precious privilege of U.S. citizenship or to continue residing in the United States."

In May, U.S. authorities deported John Demjanjuk from Cleveland, sending him to Germany to face trial as an accused accessory to the murder of 27,900 people at the Sobibor death camp.

That same month, the Justice Department disclosed that Poland's Commission for Prosecution of Crimes Against the Polish Nation wanted U.S. prosecutors to interview Kalymon.

[Associated Press; By DEVLIN BARRETT]

Associated Press writer Ed White in Troy, Mich., contributed to this report.

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