Almost
16 years after Israel's Supreme Court overturned his conviction
and life sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity
at the Treblinka death camp, German prosecutors on Wednesday
charged retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk with more
than 29,000 counts of accessory to murder during his time
as a guard at the Nazis' Sobibor death camp, and will seek
his extradition from the US.
Demjanjuk is accused of participating in the murders while he was a guard at
the Nazi camp in occupied Poland between March and September
1943.
"In this capacity,
he participated in the accessory to murder of at least
29,000 people of the Jewish faith," Munich prosecutors said in a statement.
"We're on our way
to a victory for justice today," Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said from
Jerusalem.
"The passage of
time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators
and in a case like this, of a mass murderer who shares
responsibility for the annihilation of so many innocent
victims, it is especially important that he be brought
to trial as quickly as possible, while justice can still
be achieved," Zuroff said. "We hope that the process can be expedited to ensure that this Holocaust perpetrator
will finally be appropriately punished."
The 88-year-old Demjanjuk,
who lives in a Cleveland suburb, denies involvement.
Demjanjuk emigrated to the US in 1952 and gained citizenship
in 1958.
A native of what is now Ukraine,
Demjanjuk has denied ever serving the Nazis and said
his fear of being sent back to the Soviet Union prompted
him to falsely assert on his US visa application that
he was a farmer in Poland during the war. He has said
he served in the Soviet army and became a prisoner of
war when he was captured by Germany in 1942.
The Federal Court of Justice,
Germany's top criminal court, ruled in December that
Demjanjuk could be prosecuted in Germany. The judges
instructed the Munich Regional Court to take over the
case, because Demjanjuk had lived in various Bavarian
cities between 1945 and 1951.
Germany's Central Unit For
the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, based in Ludwigsburg,
had probed Demjanjuk for several years and suggested
he should be charged.
Demjanjuk was stripped of
his US citizenship and extradited to Israel in 1986,
when the US Justice Department believed he was the sadistic
Nazi guard known as "Ivan the Terrible" from Treblinka. Eighteen survivors, five of whom testified at his trial, identified
him as a guard at the camp, where an estimated 850,000
prisoners died. He was convicted and sentenced to death
in 1988.
That conviction and death
sentence were overturned by the Supreme Court in August
1993 after it received newly available evidence from
Soviet archives that another Ukrainian, Ivan Marchenko,
was "Ivan the Terrible."
Still, the court found that
Demjanjuk had served as one of a group of SS guards "whose purpose was murder and whose objective was genocide," ruling that he had been at an SS training camp in Trawniki, Poland, at the Flossenberg
and Regensburg concentration camps, and at Sobibor, where
250,000 people were killed.
However, since he had been
indicted, and convicted, primarily as "Ivan the Terrible," the court ruled, he would have to be given the chance to defend himself afresh
if new charges were filed against him. Given that he
had already spent seven years in jail, the court decided
that the most reasonable course of action was an acquital.
Although Demjanjuk's US citizenship
was restored in 1998, the US Justice Department renewed
its case, insisting he had been a Nazi guard and thus
could be deported for falsifying information on his entry
and citizenship applications in the 1950s.
A December 2005 US court ruling
determined that he could be deported to his native Ukraine
or to Germany or Poland, but Demjanjuk spent several
years challenging that ruling.
Last year, the US Supreme
Court chose not to consider Demjanjuk's appeal against
deportation, clearing the way for the Justice Department's
Office of Special Investigations, which oversees cases
against former Nazis, to seek his removal from the United
States.
Now, the Munich prosecutor's
office, which is handling the case because Demjanjuk
spent time at a refugee camp in the area after the war,
said it was working on the extradition request with the
German government.
By charging Demjanjuk, "Bavaria
sent a very powerful message about the necessity of pursuing
Holocaust perpetrators and holding them accountable for
their crimes - a message which continues to be timely
and important throughout the world even, and perhaps
especially, today," said Zuroff.
"Today the major
problem we face is the lack of political will in certain
countries to prosecute Nazi war criminals. That's why
today's decision in Germany is so important."
Germany lifted its statute
of limitation for murder in 1979, allowing prosecution
of Nazi criminals in its courts to continue until today.
Murder and genocide are the only crimes under German
law with no applicable statute of limitation, which normally
would bar prosecution after a certain period of time.
Munich prosecutors credited
help from the US Office of Special investigations in
clarifying the validity of Nazi-era identity papers in
enabling them to file charges against Demjanjuk.
They said Demjanjuk will be
formally charged before a judge once he is extradited
to Germany.
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