The legal ping-pong continued this week for John Demjanjuk as an 11th hour court ruling put off his deportation to Germany to face charges he helped murder 29,000 Jews at Sobibor death camp.

In about six chaotic hours Tuesday, immigration agents took the 89-year-old retired auto worker into custody at his Seven Hills home, transported him to the downtown federal building to await deportation to Germany, and then released him after a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court in Cincinnati stopped his deportation.

In granting the stay about an hour after immigration agents seized Demjanjuk, the court will consider Demjanjuk’s motion to review an April 10 ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals refusing to stop his deportation. He also asked the court to reopen his case.

Demjanjuk, who was stripped of his citizenship over six years ago for lying about his service as a concentration camp guard on his naturalization application, returned home to his family about 7 p.m. Tuesday.

Earlier Tuesday, John Demjanjuk Jr. drove to Cincinnati to hand-deliver his father’s appeal to the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The U.S. attorney general’s office filed a response that the Cincinnati court lacks jurisdiction to rule on the issue.

Legal experts say that although the Sixth Circuit typically takes months to decide cases, in this instance the judges probably could decide Demjanjuk’s application quickly.

“I think this is going to be fast,” says Cleveland immigration attorney David Leopold. “The court has no jurisdiction to hear a denial of a motion to stay. I think the stay is going to get vacated.”

“I view this as a temporary matter,” says Jonathan Drimmer, former Justice Department prosecutor who successfully argued the government’s case against Demjanjuk at his 2001 Cleveland trial. “It’s an emergency motion.”

The Cincinnati appeals court halted the deportation “to buy some time” so they could fully consider the question of jurisdiction, adds Drimmer, who worked on Demjanjuk’s denaturalization case for 6-1/2 years. “There is no jurisdiction. I think the issue will be resolved fairly quickly.”

Demjanjuk’s family claims he suffers from numerous disorders including chronic kidney and blood diseases and is too sick to travel or to defend himself. Deporting him constitutes torture, they say. A doctor hired by the U.S. government examined him last week and found him able to travel to Germany.

“The prospect of the torture argument succeeding hovers between zero and 1% chance of success,” Drimmer maintains.

Demjanjuk’s deportation “doesn’t come close to the definition of torture,” says Leopold. “Unless you can show a country is going to subject him to extreme pain and suffering for the purpose of eliciting information or intimidating him, then it’s not torture.”

Demjanjuk’s deportation to Germany was scheduled for 8:30 p.m. Tuesday. He was to depart from Burke Lakefront Airport aboard a private jet to Munich, where German authorities seek to try him for war crimes. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived at Demjanjuk’s yellow-brick ranch home on Meadowlane Road home in Seven Hills at 1 p.m. Tuesday. About an hour and a half later, federal agents carried Demjanjuk in a wheelchair outside to a waiting white van.

With his head back and his eyes shut, Demjanjuk appeared to be grimacing in pain; his wife Vera, 83, and granddaughter Olivia Nishnic, 20, both in tears, stood outside the house and waved goodbye.

When and if Demjanjuk arrives in Munich, he would be held in prison, says Michael Scharf, professor of law at Case Western Reserve University and an expert in international war-crimes trials. Within 48 hours, he would appear before a judge. The German court would consider his age and health, especially in deciding whether to grant clemency, adds Scharf.

The German court may order a pre-trial medical examination and discontinue proceedings due to his ill-health, as the court did in the case of Erich Honecker, former East German leader, explains Scharf in an e-mail.

However, “it is unlikely that the German court will terminate its criminal proceedings because of Demjanjuk’s old age and ill health,” Scharf maintains, given the German government’s special interest in the case and the fact that U.S. courts did not find his health a bar to deportation.

Unlike some other countries, Germany has no age limit on imprisoning someone convicted of a crime, adds Scharf. “There have been other former Nazis as old as Demjanjuk that are in German prison.”

Speaking to the CJN before Demjanjuk’s aborted deportation, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said, “We urge Homeland Security to make every effort to expedite Demjanjuk’s (deportation) as quickly as possible so he can finally be held accountable.”

It has been 32 years since Demjanjuk was first accused of being “Ivan the Terrible,” the brutal Treblinka gas-chamber guard. After a U.S. judge ordered him denaturalized, he was extradited to Israel in 1986 to stand trial. There he was convicted and sentenced to death.

In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned that conviction. He returned to the U.S. and regained his citizenship, but the U.S. later charged him with serving as a guard at three other concentration camps.

Demjanjuk has always denied serving as a concentration camp guard. He claims he was a soldier in the Soviet Army, was captured by the Germans, and spent most of the war in prisoner-of-war camps.

Speaking mid-afternoon, after immigration agents took Demjanjuk into custody, Zev Harel, former head of Kol Israel, the survivors’ organization, lamented the numerous bureaucratic delays. But deportation now is “better late than never,” Harel says.

Late as it is, trying Demjanjuk for war crimes is at least “some measure of justice,” says Harel, professor emeritus of social work at Cleveland State University. “All these years, he has not gotten what he deserved. I’m looking forward for him to be in a judicial facility and for the justice system in Germany to do what they have to do.”

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