'Nazi' Demjanjuk declared fit to remain in jail

Doctors have determined that John Demjanjuk is fit enough to remain in custody at Munich's Stadelheim prison.

He is being held on suspicion of acting as an accessory to the murder of 29,000 people at a Nazi death camp.

Stadelheim prison said doctors determined the 89-year-old retired Ohio carworker is in good enough health to remain in detention.

Anton Winkler, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors, says Demjanjuk "did fine" during his first night in prison and is doing well under the circumstances.

Munich prosecutors must still determine whether Demjanjuk is fit enough to stand trial and have called for an expert opinion.

It could take up to two weeks to make that decision.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who spent the Second World War as a Nazi prisoner of war and never hurt anyone.

However, Nazi-era documents obtained by US justice authorities and shared with German prosecutors suggest otherwise.

They include a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and notes he was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki. Both sites were in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Demjanjuk's case is an example of how difficult it has become to bring alleged Nazi war criminals to trial more than 60 years since the end of the war.

The next step will be for prosecutors to formally press charges, which can take months under Germany's system.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel, praised US and German authorities for persuing Demjanjuk.

"I think this is an extremely important day for justice and the fact that Demjanjuk, who actively participated in the mass murder of 29,000 Jews at Sobibor, will be put to trial is of great significance and reinforces the message that the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the murderers," he said.

Yet the key to Demjanjuk's fate may lie not with the evidence but rather with a German court's decision about whether he is medically fit to stand trial.

In any case, Demjanjuk, who has been without a country since the US stripped him of his citizenship in 2002, is likely to spend the rest of his life in Germany.

Germany's main Jewish leader urged authorities to act quickly.

"It is a race against time," Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor, said in a statement.

"It is intolerable to watch how a suspected Nazi war criminal, who knew no mercy for his victims, seeks sympathy and compares his deportation to torture," she said.

Demjanjuk insists he is innocent and fought bitterly against efforts to strip him of his US citizenship and later deport him.

Photos last month showed Demjanjuk wincing in apparent pain as he was removed by immigration agents from his home in Seven Hills, Ohio, in an earlier attempt to deport him to Germany.

However, images taken only days earlier and released by the US government showed him entering his car unaided.

Among the documents obtained by the Munich prosecutors is an SS identity card that features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk along with his height and weight, and says he worked at Sobibor.

German prosecutors also have a transfer rota that lists Demjanjuk by name and birthday and also says he was at Sobibor, and statements from former guards who remembered him being there.

The case dates to 1977, when the Justice Department moved to revoke Demjanjuk's US citizenship, alleging he hid his past as a Nazi death camp guard.

Demjanjuk had been tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity but the conviction was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

That decision came after Israel won access to Soviet archives, which had depositions given after the war by 37 Treblinka guards and forced labourers.