An 87-year-old Ukrainian immigrant lost his appeal to keep his US citizenship after a US federal court ruled he had collaborated with Nazis 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, Sept. 5.

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 labor, kill those trying to escape and lead survivors to extermination and forced labor camps, including Belzec in Poland.

Evidence of personal involvement

He allegedly committed the crimes in Lviv, formerly in Poland and now part of Ukraine, from 1941 to 1944.

The court decision from Thursday was announced Friday by acting assistant attorney general Matthew Friedrich of the US justice department's criminal division.