John Demjanjuk is well enough to stand trial in Germany on war crimes charges, a decision Friday that his family blasted.

Prosecutors said doctors found the 89-year-old Demjanjuk healthy, a key issue in whether he could be tried on allegations that he was an accessory in the deaths of 29,000 Jews in 1943, according to published reports. Prosecutors said he could attend two, 90-minute sessions a day, the reports said. A trial could begin this fall.

In a statement, John Demjanjuk Jr. said his father has an incurable leukemic bone-marrow disease, and doctors have said he has about 16 months to live.

"With less than a year-and-a-half for my father to live, a career-seeking German prosecutor is hastily pressing forward with a 100-percent politically motivated effort to blame Ukrainians and Europeans for the crimes of the Germans," Demjanjuk Jr. said. "This has nothing to do with bringing anyone to justice or fitness for trial."

The elder Demjanjuk, formerly of Seven Hills, was deported to Germany in May, ending a 32-year legal fight. His family said it would be torture to send him overseas because of his health. He is in a prison hospital.

Demjanjuk's deportation means that he is not legally eligible to return to the United States, even if he is found innocent of charges. In order to bring him to trial, authorities needed to determine whether he was healthy enough to help his lawyers.

"It was the most formidable obstacle in his prosecution," Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem said in a phone interview. "If he wasn't healthy enough, the whole thing would have gone down the tubes."

Demjanjuk Jr. said he expects German prosecutors to create sensational allegations that will whip up a media storm but cannot be proven in a fair trial.

"Were he guilty, we could not continue defending him, and none of it would matter," the son said.

Demjanjuk was drafted into the Red Army in 1940, wounded in battle and later captured by the Germans. U.S. judges found that he then became a Nazi guard in 1942, serving at various camps, including Sobibor. His family has stressed that Demjanjuk worked in prisoner-of-war camps and then lived in displaced-persons camps.

In the 1980s, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel, where he was convicted of being a sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp. The Israeli Supreme Court, citing new evidence, overturned the conviction after Demjanjuk spent seven years on death row. He returned home to his family in Seven Hills, but within a few years, federal prosecutors in the United States accused him of working at Sobibor and two other camps.

blog.cleveland.com