Accused Nazi guard arrives in Germany to face charges

MUNICH – Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk arrived in Germany from the United States yesterday to face charges he helped kill 29 000 Jews in 1943, raising the prospect of Germany’s last major Nazi trial.

Police cars and ambulances surrounded Demjanjuk’s small white plane when it landed at Munich airport in southern Germany and after a medical examination, the 89-year-old was taken to Stadelheim prison, near Munich, said prosecutors.
Demjanjuk tops the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of its 10 most-wanted war criminal suspects. A Munich judge issued an arrest warrant in March to put him on trial for assisting in the murders at Sobibor death camp, in what is now Poland.
The Wiesenthal Center says Demjanjuk pushed men, women and children into gas chambers at the camp.
Germany’s Central Council of Jews welcomed the deportation.
‘All living Nazi war criminals should know there can be no mercy for them, regardless of their age,’ said the Council’s President Charlotte Knobloch in a statement.
Demjanjuk, born in Ukraine, has denied any role in the Holocaust and a German court may yet decide he is unfit to stand trial. His family argues he is frail and sick.
More than 60 years after World War Two and the Holocaust, there is little appetite for a new Nazi crimes trial in Germany which is now at the heart of the European Union and Nato.
While most Germans feel duty-bound to pursue Nazi perpetrators, there is also a desire, especially among younger generations, to draw a line under the dark chapter of the past.
The transfer marks the end of a prolonged legal battle for the retired US auto worker
The looming trial has, however, highlighted Germany’s patchy record of bringing Nazi perpetrators to justice. The Wiesenthal Center says the number of criminals brought to justice is way below the total of those involved in the Holocaust.
‘After the war, an unbelievably large number of war criminals were able to escape,’ said Wehler. ‘The German justice system did not react quickly enough at the beginning,’ he said.
Demjanjuk has said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war and later became a guard in German prison camps until 1944.
He was stripped of his US citizenship after he was accused in the 1970s of being ‘Ivan the Terrible’, a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.
He was extradited to Israel in 1986, and sentenced to death in 1988 but Israel’s Supreme Court overturned his conviction when new evidence showed another man was probably ‘Ivan’.
He regained his citizenship in 1998, but the US Justice Department refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death camps and hid the facts. His US citizenship was stripped again in 2002.
– Nampa-Reuters