BERLIN (AP) — The wife of a retired Ohio auto worker accused of serving as a Nazi death camp guard maintains her husband is not fit to be extradited from the U.S. to Germany for trial, a newspaper reported Friday.

Vera Demjanjuk was quoted as telling Germany's top-selling Bild newspaper that her husband John Demjanjuk, 88, "is not doing well."

"His brain isn't functioning right," Vera Demjanjuk, 83, said, according to the report. "One day he's aware of everything, the next day he's forgotten it all."

Munich prosecutors are considering whether there is enough evidence of John Demjanjuk's alleged involvement in the deaths of 29,000 Jews at Sobibor camp to charge him and request that he be sent to Germany for trial. Demjanjuk, 88, lives in suburban Cleveland.

The Munich prosecutors are handling the case because Demjanjuk spent time at a refugee camp in the area after the war. Germany's federal office that pursues Nazi-era crimes has said it believes there is enough evidence to charge him.

Bild, which talked with Vera Demjanjuk at her home, reported that she said he could not make the trip to Germany even if his extradition is requested.

"Such a long trip? He's not up to that," she was quoted as saying. "We just want to die in peace. And here."

But Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, expressed skepticism about the claim.

"Nazi war criminals invariably try to portray their mental and physical health as terrible as possible in order to help avoid prosecution, so any claim of ill health really has to be examined extremely carefully so that these people are not allowed to elude justice on false grounds," he said by telephone from Jerusalem.

"I think it's imperative that the German authorities expedite the case so that at long last he can finally be adequately punished for the terrible crimes he committed."

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