John Demjanjuk found guilty of helping kill Jews in Nazi death camp

The newly declassified FBI field office report, obtained by The Associated Press, casts doubt on the authenticity of a Nazi ID card that is the key piece of evidence in allegations that Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland.

…

The FBI agents argued that the Soviets had an interest in faking the documents as part of a campaign to smear anti-communist emigres. Those conclusions contradict the findings of another branch of the Department of Justice, the Office of Special Investigations, or OSI, which was in charge of the overall Demjanjuk probe.

…

It is unclear whether prosecutors in the U.S. and Israel knew about it.

…

The March 4, 1985, report, on FBI letterhead and marked “SECRET,” says the Cleveland office’s investigation “strongly indicated” a Soviet scheme to discredit “prominent emigre dissidents speaking out publicly and/or leading emigre groups in opposition to the Soviet leadership in the USSR.”

…

The defense has argued throughout the trial that the ID card is a clever fake, noting that Demjanjuk’s height and eye color don’t match and alleging there are indications the photograph was taken from old identity papers and glued to the card.

…

The OSI in the past has been accused of withholding evidence that could have cleared Demjanjuk.

…

In a 1993 review of the American denaturalization hearing that led to his extradition, a federal U.S. appeals panel concluded that the OSI engaged in “prosecutorial misconduct that seriously misled the court.”

…

A Department of Justice report from 2008 made public last November said the OSI’s handling of the Demjanjuk case was “the greatest mistake it ever made.”

…

The FBI report accuses the Soviets of anonymously feeding names of emigres to the United States as suspected Nazis. The OSI would then ask the Soviet Union for evidence from captured Nazi records, and “the KGB produces a record purporting to tie the accused with the commission of Nazi atrocities,” it said.

“In court, the KGB officer thereupon ‘shows’ the documents to the judge but does not permit the documents to be presented in evidence or to be otherwise copied,” it adds.

By the time the field report was sent to FBI headquarters in Washington, Demjanjuk had already had his citizenship revoked and was facing extradition to Israel.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110413/ap_on_re_eu/eu_demjanjuk_fbi_doubts/