The Holocaust

07/03/2009

All Clear for Nazi War Crimes Case

Doctors Declare Demjanjuk Fit to Stand Trial

Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk has been deemed fit to stand trial by doctors in Munich. The 89-year-old could appear in court as early as this autumn in what will most likely be Germany's last big Nazi war crimes trial.

The final hurdle to what is expected to be the last major Nazi war crimes trial in Germany has been cleared. On Friday prosecutors said that doctors had given the all clear for John Demjanjuk to stand trial on charges related to the deaths of 29,000 Jews in a World War II death camp. The retired auto worker had recently been deported to Germany from the United States after his family failed to prove that he was too frail to stand trial.

The doctors determined that Demjanjuk, who has been held in custody in Munich since May 12, was fit to stand trial. However, they imposed one condition -- saying that his court appearances be limited to two 90-minute sessions a day. State prosecutors said Friday that formal charges could be expected this month and that a trial could commence as early as the autumn.

The 89-year-old, who was born in Ukraine, had fought bitterly to stay in his home in Ohio despite the fact that he had already been stripped of his US citizenship. His health became a key issue after images taken by the US government showed him walking unaided to his car even though he had claimed to be too ill to travel. In May he was finally put on a plane to Germany by US immigration officials and was arrested on his arrival. He has since been held in the Stadelheim prison in Munich, where Adolf Hitler served time after his failed 1922 coup.

Demjanjuk claims that he was drafted into the Red Army in 1941, became a German prisoner of war and never harmed anyone. However, documents obtained by the US justice authorities and shared with the German prosecutors include a photo ID that seems to identify him as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, welcomed the doctors' decision that should pave the way for a trial. "This has been a very complicated case," he told the Associated Press. "But it is important that Demjanjuk, who actively participated in the implementation of the Final Solution, finally receive an appropriate punishment." Demjanjuk has been at the top of the Wiesenthal Center's list of 10 most wanted war criminals involved in the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. The Jerasulem-based center claims that he pushed men, women and children into the gas chambers at Sobibor.

In the 1970s Demjanjuk was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp. He was extradited to Israel and sentence to death but the conviction was then overturned when new evidence pointed to another man's guilt.

smd with wire reports

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