Accused Nazi guard arrives in Germany

AN 89-year-old former Nazi death camp guard arrived in Germany yesterday after being deported from the United States to face the prospect of a trial for war crimes over the killing of 29,000 Jews.

After losing a months-long fight against deportation, John Demjanjuk landed in a specially-chartered plane at an isolated area of Munich airport where he was met by officials from the state prosecutor’s office.

As the retired Ohio car worker was formally placed into custody accused of helping murder 29,000 people, his lawyer, Guenther Maull, filed a legal challenge against the warrant that brought his client to Germany claiming that the evidence was unsound.

If Demjanjuk is found fit to stand trial, it would be the culmination of a legal saga that began in 1977 and has involved courts and government officials from at least five countries on three continents.

Germany issued a warrant for Demjanjuk’s arrest on March 11 on charges of helping to murder Jews during his time as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943.

According to German television, Demjanjuk was accompanied off the plane by a doctor and a priest who had flown with him on the flight from Cleveland’s Burke Lakefront Airport.

After Demjanjuk flew into Munich, a judge read him the 21-page arrest warrant in German. It was translated into Ukrainian for Demjanjuk as he sat in a wheelchair, receiving oxygen through a nasal tube.

He was transferred to nearby Stadelheim prison.

Demjanjuk is right at the top of Nazi hunters’ most-wanted list, and was sentenced to death by an Israeli court two decades ago, suspected of being the feared death camp guard nicknamed “Ivan the Terrible” who would hack at naked prisoners with a sword.

That verdict was overturned in 1993 when statements from former guards identified another man as “Ivan the Terrible”.

Demjanjuk has always insisted he was forced to work for the Nazis and has been mistaken by survivors for other cruel guards.

German television reported that a survivor of the Sobibor camp, where he was a guard in 1943, could help confirm his identity.

This witness, 82-year-old Thomas Blatt, has described the conditions at Sobibor akin to a death factory.

“They shot new arrivals who were old and sick and could not go on. And there were some who pushed naked people into the gas chambers with bayonets,” Blatt told the latest edition of Spiegel magazine.

“Sobibor was a factory. Only a few hours passed between arrival and the burning of a body.”

Demjanjuk’s relatives however say there is nothing to tie him to any deaths at the camp.

“Given the history of this case and not a shred of evidence that he ever hurt one person let alone murdered anyone anywhere, this is inhuman even if the courts have said it is lawful,” his son John wrote. “This is not justice, it is a vendetta in the falsified name of justice with the hope that somehow Germany will atone for its past.”

His family had argued that flying the wheelchair-bound octogenarian to Germany with, they said, kidney disease and blood disorders, would cause him pain amounting to torture. He was expected to undergo medical tests in prison.

The president of the Central Council for Jews in Germany, Charlotte Knobloch, said it was imperative that authorities move swiftly.

“Now it is time to do everything legally possible to bring Demjanjuk before a court. This is a race against time,” she said.

“This is not about revenge but rather about justice for those crimes of which the Munich prosecutor’s office accuses [Demjanjuk].”