Demjanjuk Denied Posthumous U.S. Citizenship

John Demjanjuk in May 2011

A U.S. appeals court has denied a request to posthumously restore U.S. citizenship to a Ukrainian-born man who was convicted of Nazi war crimes.

The court ruled that John Demjanjuk's death in March rendered the request moot, while his defense attorneys claimed the U.S. government withheld potentially helpful material in his case and that restoring his citizenship would aid an investigation.

Demjanjuk lived for decades in the United States before he was convicted by a German court in May 2011 on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

He died while his conviction was under appeal.

Based on reporting by AP and "The Plain Dealer"