BERLIN (Reuters) - A German court may take until the end of
August to set a date for the trial of John Demjanjuk, charged
with helping to kill nearly 28,000 Jews at a death camp
in World War Two, Munich court officials said Tuesday.
The long-awaited case is widely expected to be Germany's
last big Nazi war crimes trial.
Demjanjuk, 89, has been held in a jail near Munich since he was deported from
the United States in May, and prosecutors charged
the suspected death camp guard earlier this month.
He has six
weeks to respond, said the Munich court.
"The
court will probably not make a decision on the
opening of the main trial before the end of August," the court said in a statement. Prosecution and defense lawyers have said the
trial could start in the autumn.
Der Spiegel
magazine has reported that 22 witnesses are helping
the prosecution with their case.
The retired
U.S. car factory worker tops the Simon Wiesenthal
Center's list of most-wanted war criminals. The
Center says Demjanjuk pushed men, women and children
into gas chambers at the Sobibor death camp in
what is now Poland.
Demjanjuk
denies any role in the Holocaust and his family
argues he is too frail to stand trial.
Demjanjuk
has said he was drafted into the Soviet army
in 1941, became a German prisoner of war a year
later and served at German prison camps until
1944. He emigrated to the United States in 1951
and became a naturalized citizen in 1958.
He was stripped
of his U.S. citizenship after he was accused
in the 1970s of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp.
He was extradited
to Israel in 1986, tried and sentenced to death
there in 1988, but Israel's Supreme Court overturned
his conviction when new evidence showed another
man was probably "Ivan."
Demjanjuk
regained his citizenship, but the U.S. Justice
Department refiled its case against him in 1999,
arguing he had worked for the Nazis as a guard
at three other death camps. His citizenship was
stripped from him again in 2002.
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