BERLIN (Reuters) - A German prosecutor rejected criticism on Wednesday that suspected
Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk is not being brought
to trial fast enough before the 88-year-old dies.
Munich state prosecutor Anton Winkler said his office has been examining evidence
against Demjanjuk since December 30 and hopes to have
him extradited from the United States for a trial in
Germany as soon as possible -- possibly in the next month.
"We're working
as fast as possible and assume Demjanjuk will be brought
to trail here," Winkler told Reuters. "As soon as we have finished preparing the charges, the extradition process will
move forward."
In November, Germany's chief
Nazi war crimes investigator in Ludwigsburg, Kurt Schrimm,
asked prosecutors in Munich, where Demjanjuk once lived
before he emigrated to the United States, to charge him
with involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews.
Schrimm said his office had
evidence that Demjanjuk had been a guard at the Sobibor
death camp in Poland and personally led Jews to the gas
chambers there in 1943. Last week Schrimm criticized
the Munich prosecutors for not moving faster.
"The accusation
is unfair," Winkler said, adding that a final report should be ready in about three weeks.
Winkler said charges could
be raised at that point and a request for his extradition
made to the Berlin government.
Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter
at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its Jerusalem
office, said time was running out to prosecute Demjanjuk,
second on its list of top war criminals.
"The evidence has
all been checked time and again," Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.
"It's strange to
claim a month's delay is needed. The biggest problem
prosecuting war crimes all over the world now is a lack
of political will."
Winkler rejected that criticism.
"It's not true," he
said. "We have prosecuted many Nazi war criminals in Munich and will continue to follow
up every lead."
Ukraine-born Demjanjuk denies
any involvement in war crimes. He said he was in the
Soviet army and a prisoner of war in 1942. He later went
to the United States, working in the car industry.
Stripped of his U.S. citizenship
after he was accused in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the Treblinka death camp, Demjanjuk was first extradited to Israel
in 1986.
He was sentenced to death
in 1988 after Holocaust survivors identified him as a
guard at Treblinka. But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned
his conviction when new evidence showed another man was
probably the notorious "Ivan."
Demjanjuk returned to his
home near Cleveland in 1993 and the United States restored
his citizenship in 1998.
But the U.S. Justice Department
refiled its case against him in 1999, arguing he had
worked for the Nazis as a guard at three other death
camps and hid these facts when he immigrated.
He will turn 89 on April 3,
said Ed Nishnic, his ex son-in-law, who added that Demjanjuk
was in poor health.
"He is ill, he's
in no condition to go through another trial," Nishnic told Reuters. "He's not able to go anywhere. He is oblivious to it. He doesn't know what is
going on."
"I think they have
at best a flimsy case and they're walking on very thin
ice if they try to bring Mr. Demjanjuk to Germany."
(Additional reporting by Andrea
Hopkins in Cincinnati; editing by Michael Roddy)
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