The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down the case of a former guard at a Nazi slave camp suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

The Justice Department succeeded in revoking the U.S. citizenship of 86-year-old Iwan Mandycz, paving the way for his deportation.

Mandycz's lawyers say the right that prevents the U.S. government from prosecuting a mentally incompetent person also should apply to citizenship cases, which are civil proceedings. The accused should be able to assist in the preparation of his defense and consult with his attorneys before he may be punished by the government Mandycz's lawyers said in a filing that had asked the Supreme Court to take the case.

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The Justice Department, which wants to remove him from the United States,
initiated denaturalization proceedings, saying Mandycz had concealed that he worked for the Nazis.

Officials said that Mandycz was a guard in 1943 at the Trawniki and Poniatowa labor camps in Poland, where prisoners were starved, beaten and executed en masse.

Mandycz has denied working at the camps and has said he spent World War working at his parents' farm in Poland and, later, as a forced laborer at a farm in Austria.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati had ruled there was considerable evidence that Mandycz was Guard 3308 and an absence of competing evidence supporting the contrary.