MUNICH — After three decades of fighting in court, John Demjanjuk
was incarcerated Tuesday in a German prison, deported from
the United States to face allegations of being an accessory
to the murder of 29,000 Jews and others as a Nazi guard
at the Sobibor death camp.
As the retired Ohio autoworker was formally placed into investigative custody,
his lawyer, Guenther Maull, immediately filed a challenge
against the arrest warrant that brought his client to Germany.
Maull argued that the evidence was not solid and Germany's
jurisdiction was questionable.
If the 89-year-old is found fit to
stand trial, it would be the culmination of a legal saga
that began in 1977 and has involved courts and government
officials from at least five countries on three continents.
After Demjanjuk flew into Munich and
was transferred to a prison in Stadelheim, a judge read him
the 21-page arrest warrant in German. It was translated into
Ukrainian for Demjanjuk as he sat in a wheelchair, receiving
oxygen through a nasal tube, Maull said.
"He understood what was
being read to him," Maull added.
Earlier Tuesday, Demjanjuk arrived
in Munich from Cleveland aboard a private jet that taxied
directly into a hangar. Munich prosecutors said he slept
for most of the trans-Atlantic flight.
From the airport, he rode in a police-escorted
ambulance to a special medical unit at Stadelheim prison,
the same one where Adolf Hitler spent several weeks in 1922
after his arrest.
The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk says
he was a Red Army soldier who spent World War II as a Nazi
POW and never hurt anyone.
But Nazi-era documents obtained by
U.S. justice authorities and shared with German prosecutors
suggest otherwise. They include a photo ID identifying Demjanjuk
as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and saying he was trained
at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki. Both sites
were in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Demjanjuk's case is an example of
how difficult it has become to bring alleged Nazi war criminals
to trial more than six decades since the end of World War
II.
The next step will be for prosecutors
to formally press charges, which they said could happen "within a few weeks" providing "no exonerating arguments are made." That would be fast, as it can take months under Germany's justice system for
charges to be pressed.
Anton Winkler, a spokesman for Munich
prosecutors, said they had called for an expert opinion on
whether Demjanjuk is fit to stand trial. He said it could
take up to two weeks to make that determination, because
a doctor would have to examine Demjanjuk and also observe
him over time.
He indicated that Demjanjuk's health
was satisfactory on arrival, according to a doctor who examined
him. Demjanjuk understood what was being said to him and
answered "yes" and "no" in German, Winkler said.
Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in Israel, praised U.S. and German authorities
for bringing Demjanjuk in.
"I think this is an extremely
important day for justice and the fact that Demjanjuk, who
actively participated in the mass murder of 29,000 Jews at
Sobibor, will be put to trial is of great significance and
reinforces the message that the passage of time in no way
diminishes the guilt of the murderers," he said from his office in Jerusalem.
Yet the key to Demjanjuk's fate may
lie not with the evidence but rather with a German court's
decision about whether he is medically fit to stand trial.
In any case, Demjanjuk, who has been without a country since
the U.S. stripped him of his citizenship in 2002, is likely
to spend the rest of his life in Germany.
Germany's main Jewish leader urged
authorities to act quickly.
"It is a race against time," Charlotte
Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor, said in a statement.
"For survivors of the Shoah,
it is intolerable to watch how a suspected Nazi war criminal,
who knew no mercy for his victims, seeks sympathy and compares
his deportation to torture," she said, using the Hebrew term for Holocaust.
Demjanjuk insists he is innocent and
fought bitterly for decades against efforts to strip him
of his U.S. citizenship and later deport him.
Dramatic photos last month showed
Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN'-yuk) wincing in apparent
pain as he was removed by immigration agents from his home
in Seven Hills, Ohio, in an earlier attempt to deport him
to Germany. However, images taken only days earlier and released
by the U.S. government showed him entering his car unaided.
Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr.,
said Monday his father is dying of leukemic bone marrow disease
and claimed he would not survive a trans-Atlantic flight.
The deportation came four days after
the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider Demjanjuk's request
to block deportation.
Among the documents obtained by the
Munich prosecutors is an SS identity card that features a
photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk along with his height
and weight, and says he worked at Sobibor.
German prosecutors also have a transfer
roster that lists Demjanjuk by name and birthday and also
says he was at Sobibor, and statements from former guards
who remembered him being there.
The case dates to 1977, when the Justice
Department moved to revoke Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship,
alleging he hid his past as a Nazi death camp guard.
Demjanjuk had been tried in Israel
after accusations surfaced that he was the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes
and crimes against humanity but the conviction was overturned
by the Israeli Supreme Court.
That decision came after Israel won
access to Soviet archives, which had depositions given after
the war by 37 Treblinka guards and forced laborers who said "Ivan" was a different Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko. Some even identified Marchenko
in photographs.
A U.S. judge revoked Demjanjuk's citizenship
in 2002 based on U.S. Justice Department evidence showing
he concealed his service at Sobibor and other Nazi-run death
and forced-labor camps.
A U.S. immigration judge ruled in
2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland or Ukraine.
Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March.
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