One of the world’s most wanted Nazi war crimes suspects is expected to arrive in Germany on Monday to face charges that he assisted in the murder of 29,000 Jews at a World War Two death camp.

John Demjanjuk, who was once accused of being the notorious SS guard Ivan the Terrible, will be extradited from America on April 5 and arrive in Munich the following morning, the German Justice Ministry said today.

He will be arrested and taken either to prison or a prison hospital to await trial as an alleged accessory to mass murder at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The move will open what must be the last chapter in a case that has spanned almost three decades.

Mr Demjanjuk, who is 89 tomorrow, was convicted of war crimes by an Israeli court in 1988 after witnesses identified him as being the infamous Ivan the Terrible, a sadistic figure who operated the gas chambers at Treblinka.

He was sentenced to death by an Israeli court before the verdict was overturned five years later.

At that point Mr Demjanjuk, who was born in Ukraine and changed his first name from Ivan to John when he moved to the US in 1952, returned to his family life in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio.

However, he has been stripped of his US citizenship and last year remained number two on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s most wanted list behind Aribert Heim who, according to a recent investigation, might have died in 1992.

Last mont prosecutors in Munich – who have led the German investigation into Mr Demjanjuk because he lived in Bavaria between the end of the war and 1952 – filed charges against him on more than 29,000 counts of being an accessory to murder during 1943.

Prosecutors said that most of those who died were women, children and the elderly. The oldest victim during the months that Mr Demjanjuk allegedly worked at Sobibor was 99; the youngest were babies. The US Office for Special Investigations described the camp as “as close an approximation of Hell as has ever been created on this planet”.

Mr Demjanjuk has always maintained his innocence, claiming that he fought in the Red Army before being taken prisoner by the Nazis in 1942. His family and American lawyer have repeatedly said that he is too frail and unwell to travel, and on Wednesday Mr Demjanjuk filed a petition to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claiming that his extradition would be inhumane.

“He can’t get up out of a chair on his own. He can’t walk on his own. He can’t get up out of bed without gasping in pain,” said his son John Demjanjuk, who added that his father had chronic kidney disease.

However Günther Maull, Mr Demjanjuk’s German court-appointed lawyer, said that the attempt to stop the extradition had failed and Mr Demjanjuk would board a plane to Munich via New York on Sunday. In the meantime, he has been fitted with an electronic ankle tag so that ICE can monitor his whereabouts.

Dr Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s chief Nazi-hunter who has followed Mr Demjanjuk’s case since before the trial in Israel, said that he would be delighted to see him face a court in Germany: “This is the most judicially complex case that there has ever been,” he said. “It is unique.”

However, he said that there were still “stumbling blocks” on the road to a trial, including the “well-known tactic” of claiming illness, employed by many suspected Nazis. “I don’t want to count my chickens before they have hatched,” he said.

Dr Zuroff rejected the often-repeated suggestion that Mr Demjanjuk’s could be the last major Nazi war crimes trial, pointing out that similar claims were made after Josef Schwammberger, the former SS officer, was arrested in Argentina in 1987. Nevertheless, he said: “It will be a very symbolic trial and one which reinforces the necessity and the validity of efforts to bring Nazis to trial at this time. I want to be there. For me, this has a special significance. I have followed this from the very beginning.”

timesonline.co.uk