After three decades of defending himself from prosecution, former Nazi concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk should soon be leaving the U.S. to stand trial in Germany for his wartime crimes.

On Wednesday, German prosecutors charged Demjanjuk with more than 29,000 counts of accessory to the murder of Jews and announced that they will seek his extradition, the AP reported. The retired U.S. autoworker, 88, is accused of taking part in the crimes between March and September 1943, while he served as a guard at Sobibor, the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland.

Last summer, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Demjanjuk's appeal of his deportation order to Ukraine, Poland or Germany. Demjanjuk, who had argued that the nation’s chief immigration judge lacked authority to order his deportation, has now exhausted all of his court appeals.

The German extradition request and Supreme Court denial make it likely that “in a matter of weeks” Demjanjuk will be on a plane to Germany, says David Leopold, a Cleveland immigration attorney. The U.S. now “has the authority to pick him up and remove him.”

Once he’s delivered to Germany under a valid, final order of deportation, “he’s not coming back” to the U.S., even if Germany does not convict him of the war crimes charges, says Leopold. “Once he’s removed, it’s over with.”

The U.S. does not need to hold an extradition hearing, which could take months, because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could just deport Demjanjuk to Germany, which presumably would agree to accept him, Leopold explains. However, Germany could require an extradition hearing, delaying his deportation, Leopold acknowledges.

Demjanjuk has been stateless while the U.S. has tried, thus far unsuccessfully, to persuade Ukraine or another country to take him. Last fall, when Munich prosecutors first announced their intent to seek Demjanjuk’s extradition, his attorney and family said he was too frail and ill to travel to Germany.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem and that nation’s chief Nazi hunter, could not be reached by telephone. But Zuroff told the AP earlier that he was very pleased with Germany’s announcement. “We’re on our way to a victory for justice today.”

Last November, Germany’s chief Holocaust-crimes prosecutor recommended that German authorities seek Demjanjuk’s extradition from the U.S. to try him for war crimes. Enough evidence existed to prove that the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk took part in the 1943 murders of at least 29,000 Jews at Sobibor.

According to Zuroff, a guard previously gave testimony that he saw Demjanjuk actively participate in the mass murders at Sobibor. While the guard is now dead, the evidence still exists, Zuroff told the CJN in an interview last November.

Demjanjuk was convicted in 2002 in Cleveland federal court of serving as a concentration camp guard, denaturalized and later ordered deported. In his 2002 ruling, federal Judge Paul R. Matia wrote, “Guards (at Sobibor) forcibly unloaded Jews from trains, compelled them to disrobe, and drove them into gas chambers, where they were murdered by asphyxiation with carbon dioxide.”

Previously stripped of his U.S. citizenship for lying on his naturalization documents about being Treblinka death camp guard “Ivan the Terrible,” Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986. There he was convicted and sentenced to death.

In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction based on new evidence made available after the collapse of the Soviet Union that someone else was Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk returned to the U.S. and his citizenship was reinstated, but the U.S. later charged him with lying on his immigration papers about his service in other concentration camps.

Demjanjuk, a resident of the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, has always denied that he served as a concentration camp guard. He insists that he is a victim of mistaken identity; he claims that he was a soldier in the Soviet Army, captured by the Germans, and spent most of the war in prisoner-of-war camps.

Consensus among young people in Germany today is that the country still must take responsibility for the Holocaust, says Susanne Ehard, 20, a CJN editorial intern and a native of Düsseldorf. Sometimes she and her friends get tired of hearing about Nazi crimes from decades before they were born, she says, especially as she grew up taught the ideals of equality and to respect everyone.

Still, Ehard says, extraditing Demjanjuk to stand trial for war crimes “is the right thing to do. It shows that Germany still cares about its past.” She plans to return to Germany in June after two years working as a nanny for the family of Rabbi Edward Bernstein of Congregation Shaarey Tikvah.

Germany must take responsibility for its past, she insists, “to show the world that we have changed and that it’s not going to happen again.”

clevelandjewishnews.com