John Demjanjuk could be whisked off to Germany within a few months to face charges that he helped kill 29,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp.

German prosecutors on Wednesday filed an arrest warrant for Demjanjuk, an 88-year-old retired Seven Hills autoworker, and accused him of being an accessory to murder as a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland from March to September 1943.

The allegations are based on documents first filed nearly 10 years ago in U.S. District Court in Cleveland that linked Demjanjuk to Sobibor, according to federal prosecutors and published reports.

The case also would include Nazi transport records that list the names and ages of victims taken to the camp and killed when authorities say Demjanjuk was there.

The arrest warrant is the latest in a 32-year legal odyssey that has seen the United States, Israel and now Germany accuse Demjanjuk of sadistic atrocities at Nazi camps. Demjanjuk has denied the allegations, first saying he was set up by the Soviets and later that he was the victim of mistaken identity.

His family says Demjanjuk, who turns 89 on April 3, suffers from kidney failure and a rare blood disease and is not able to travel internationally, let alone face the strain of a trial. His son, John Jr., said in a statement that his father "has never hurt anyone before, during or after the war."

Demjanjuk's case has prompted intense debate 64 years after World War II ended. Some say that Demjanjuk is too old and frail to be charged and that if Germany was serious, it would have filed charges years ago. Others say that if Demjanjuk was at Sobibor, he was ordered to be there.

But some say he needs to be charged and face the consequences of working for the Third Reich.

"It is a happy day in Israel," boomed Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in a phone interview from Jerusalem. "It is the first step in getting him prosecuted in Germany and getting his just rewards."

The Rev. John Nakonachny, the pastor at St. Vladimir Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Parma, where Demjanjuk and his family worship, said he believes in Demjanjuk's innocence. He said, however, that he was stunned to hear of Germany's role in trying to prosecute a man for crimes he supposedly committed on its behalf.

"It's absolutely absurd that the country that forced thousands of people from many nations to follow its orders, simply to stay alive, is now going to charge someone," Nakonachny said.

"If it wasn't so sad and tragic, it would be laughable."

Demjanjuk was born in Dub Macharenzi, Ukraine, and U.S. prosecutors said he was serving in the Soviet army when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. The Germans captured Demjanjuk and sent him to the Trawniki training camp for guards in 1942. He then went to work at various camps, prosecutors said.

Demjanjuk, however, says the Germans captured him in 1942 and forced him to work in several prisoner-of-war camps before he lived in displaced-persons camps. He then immigrated to the United States in 1952.

The arrest warrant comes three years after a U.S. immigration judge ordered Demjanjuk deported to his native Ukraine, Poland or Germany for lying about his wartime past. No nation, however, would take him, allowing him to stay at his Seven Hills home.

But after the German investigation, authorities in Munich are expected to ask for him, and they can simply request that the United States put Demjanjuk on a plane, since he has already been ordered for deportation. That move could take a few weeks, and Demjanjuk could not appeal.

Germany could also push for his extradition, but that could take several months, and two federal officials said that is doubtful.

"As soon as the defendant is in Germany, he is to be questioned and presumably to be charged before the special criminal court for the most serious crimes . . . as an accessory to murder in 29,000 cases," German prosecutors said in a statement.

The charges were filed after Eli Rosenbaum, the leader of the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, flew to Munich last month to verify that a Nazi guard identification card, listing Demjanjuk's name, birth date and eye color, was authentic.

Demjanjuk contended for years that the card was a forgery, but forensic analysis showed it was genuine.

He later argued that the card belonged to a different Demjanjuk.

The identification card has been at the core of Demjanjuk's legal fights, first in Cleveland in 1977, when the Justice Department accused him of being "Ivan the Terrible," the sadistic guard who ran the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp.

In 1983, Israel charged him with being Ivan, and he was later convicted and sentenced to death. The Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1993 based on new evidence that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The opening of Soviet archives enabled U.S. prosecutors to uncover more evidence that helped them prove Demjanjuk worked at Sobibor and Majdanek in Nazi-occupied Poland and Flossenburg in Germany. They filed new charges in Cleveland, seeking to have him deported. Federal judges and appellate courts have agreed that Demjanjuk worked at the camps.

On Wednesday, no one answered the door at Demjanjuk's modest ranch house in Seven Hills.

His family wishes that he simply stays there for his wife, Vera, and his grandchildren. "I say, 'Let the dead rest and let God deal with the rest,' " said Ed Nishnic, a longtime family spokesman.

cleveland.com