The trial of accused Nazi mass murderer John Demjanjuk was halted today because he is running a temperature.
Demjanjuk, 89, is on trial in Munich, Germany, charged with being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland in WW2.
This latest trial for the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk began on Monday and will not resume again until December 21.
The court was due to hear further testimony on Wednesday from the so-called ‘co-plaintiffs’ in the case – people who lost loved ones in Sobibor during the time prosecutors say Demjnajuk was based there.

'It’s galling to think that some people came from half-way around the world with a bit of a fever and he wriggles out of this because he is half-a-degree above normal,' said Thomas Blatt, 88, a Sobibor survivor whose parents were murdered there.
He neither confirms nor denies he was a volunteer S.S. guard in the camp between March and September 1943.
At an earlier trial in Israel nearly 20 years ago he was sentenced to death after being convicted of atrocities at the Treblinka death camp, also in Poland.

But he was freed when appeal judges decided eye-witness testimony was unreliable.
His appearance on a stretcher yesterday- seemingly in worse condition than the day before- is likely to cause more controversy as his lawyers continue attempts to paint him as a victim.

Prosecutors say Demjanjuk once wore a Nazi badge on his cap and carried a gun in his hands as he herded naked men, women and children to their fate at the Sobibor death camp.
His lawyers say he's so ill he should not be in a courtroom.
But for Efraim Zuroff, a man who has made it his vocation to bring Nazis to justice, Demjanjuk's closed eyes and efforts to draw breath were all an act.
'He should have gone to Hollywood, not Sobibor,' he said.
Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Israel Office, believed the old man was faking it for all he was worth as he witnessed the performance in court.
Demjanjuk, who wore a black leather jacket under the hospital blanket, often seemed to be straining to understand what his female interpreter was telling him and on two occasions at least seemed to gasp for breath as two medical attendants seated behind him looked on.
His trial began yesterday with death camp survivors in court 101 in Munich recoiling in horror as the lawyer for the accused mass murderer tried to paint him as a victim.
Without acknowledging Demjanjuk was ever in Sobibor in occupied Poland in WW2, Ulrich Busch said press-ganged guards 'were just like Jews forced to work in the gas chambers; either they did their jobs or were murdered.'

There were boos, hisses and exclamations of astonishment from the public gallery.
Busch said the court had no jurisdiction to try his client, and went on to draw a direct parallel between the Ukrainian guards at the camp and Thomas Blatt, an 88-year-old survivor of Sobibor who was in the court, who lived only because he worked as an orderly.
He said, 'Those guards are no different from Thomas Blatt who did what the Nazis ordered him to do.'
Blatt lost his family at Sobibor in 1943 during the months that the prosecution say Demjanjuk was a guard there, and is a co-plaintiff in the case against him along with 34 others whose relatives were murdered there.
Demjanjuk's trial in Munich State Court takes place 66 years after Sobibor was destroyed by the Germans. If found guilty, he could receive up to 15 years in jail - in effect, a sentence which would mean he would likely die behind bars.
The case continues today.
Tom Bower, who has interviewed survivors and the evil officer in charge, asks if the 89-year-old in the last great Nazi war crimes trial will be found guilty
Like wild animals, they screamed. Both the father and his son anticipated their terrible fate. Wielding a solid axe handle, the black-uniformed SS officer laughed as he methodically smashed his victims' skulls. For dozens of cowed inmates glancing across the bleak parade ground, Major Gustav Wagner's daily ritual of murder had become living hell.
The 32-year-old deputy commandant of Sobibor, an extermination camp built by Nazi Germans in a remote Polish forest, had become, according to eyewitness Esther Raab, 'a restless sadist. You knew he needed blood.'
Thomas Blatt, another of the few prisoners who survived, agreed: 'Murder was Wagner's pleasure. He was unable to eat his lunch if he didn't kill every day two or three Jews.'

Wagner's personal murders were a hobby or sideline. His real task was organising the mass murder of 250,000 men, women and children shipped from across Europe to the gas chamber constructed under his personal supervision.

Among those recruited to ensure the smooth running of Wagner's conveyor belt were Ukrainian soldiers who were fighting with Nazi Germany against Russia.
One of those Ukrainians was allegedly John Demjanjuk, whose trial for aiding and abetting the murder in Sobibor started in Munich yesterday. According to German prosecutors, Demjanjuk was one of the guards at Sobibor who 'readily participated' in murdering 27,900 Jews during 1943.
Now sick and enfeebled, Demjanjuk, 89, was pushed into court in a wheelchair, with some observers wondering if he'd make it through to lunchtime, never mind the end of his trial.
With a blue baseball cap on his head and his hands clasping a turquoise blanket raised to his chin, he struggled for breath and his eyes remained closed behind his glasses as the charges against him were outlined.
Some observers claim he is exaggerating his frailty in a bid for sympathy. But his lawyers insist he's so ill with a f

To gasps of astonishment from the public gallery in Court 101, Ulrich Busch, defending, said that men like Demjanjuk 'were just like Jews forced to work in the gas chambers: either they did their jobs or were murdered'.
It is certainly true that establishing Demjanjuk's guilt will be difficult. Only 34 inmates out of the 250,000 Jews who arrived in Sobibor actually survived the war. And none can actually identify Demjanjuk directly.

So how did he end up on trial 66 years after his alleged crimes?
The plot is as complex as any crime thriller.
Demjanjuk emigrated to America under an alias in 1951. Tracked down in the Eighties in Ohio, he was accused of being 'Ivan the Terrible', an infamous guard at the Treblinka extermination camp.
Extradited to Israel, he was convicted and sentenced to death, but was eventually acquitted after the documentary evidence on which his conviction was based was proved to be false. Eyewitness evidence by survivors was also palpably wrong.
However, documents that had come to light during the trial led to his identification as a guard at Sobibor. Reluctantly, Demjanjuk was re-admitted to America while U.S. and German investigators built the new case against him.
Given his previous misidentification, his extradition to Germany to feature in what will probably be the last war crimes trial of WWII, was therefore highly controversial. Certainly, the prosecution's case in Munich is not watertight. Relying on Nazi records, his accusers assert that Demjanjuk volunteered to serve in the SS and was willing to become a guard in Sobibor as part of Wagner's mass murder machine.

Demjanjuk denies the records are authentic or accurate. But if their validity is proven, the testimony of the surviving eyewitnesses will be conclusive. According to those ageing witnesses, all of the SS officers serving in Sobibor were intimately involved in murder, and all of them took their cue from Gustav Wagner.
Exactly 30 years ago, I interviewed Wagner in prison in Brazil after he had been tracked down and identified by the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Equating the monster described by the survivors with the pathetic man in a hospital in Brasilia was difficult. Nevertheless, during the course of four hours, Wagner inadvertently revealed the inner mind of a mass murderer.
While hesitatingly denying his involvement in personally murdering inmates every day, he admitted his responsibility for the daily gassings.
He had been, he admitted, a passionate Nazi who believed in 'destroying sub-humans'.
Wagner had arrived in Sobibor after completing a thorough training course. Handpicked because he had joined the Nazi Party in 1931, he surprisingly did not claim that he had either been blackmailed or forced to join the secret operation organised to achieve the 'Final Solution', the annihilation of Europe's Jews.
But, after discovering the realities, he admitted: 'Everyone knew it was not a pleasant business, but we never discussed it. I had no feelings at the end of a day's work, although at the beginning I did. In the evenings, we never discussed our work, but drank and played cards.'
He even uttered the old cliche, 'The maxim was: the Fuhrer's orders must be carried out.'
Wagner's importance in the Nazi hierarchy was epitomised by his route to South America. After capture by U.S. troops in 1945, he escaped and was helped by Odessa, the underground Nazi escape organisation, to travel to Rome.
Introduced to Nazi sympathisers in the Vatican, he was given a Red Cross passport with a phoney name and sailed to Beirut. In 1952, he travelled on to Brazil. There he lived quietly and comfortably until he was exposed in 1978 by Wiesenthal.
Some months later, I arrived in Brasilia. After lengthy negotiations, Wagner agreed to an interview - his first and, as it transpired, his last. His ordinariness, I noted with some bewilderment, was breath-taking. Unlike Demjanjuk, the documentary and eyewitness evidence against Wagner was completely conclusive.

He had arrived in the Polish forest in March 1942 to construct an extermination camp. Diligently, he had directed prisoners to build wooden cabins, dig anti-escape trenches, erect electrified wire fences and finally construct the gas chambers.
Then, he organised the laying of a small railway siding so that the trains could pull off the main line from Warsaw and discharge their human cargo.
In winter 1942, Wagner was congratulated for completing a factory fit for the production line murder of over 1,500 people every day. Sobibor was chosen as an ideal location to overcome the inefficiency of mass shootings.
Wagner and the guards, including allegedly Demjanjuk, watched daily as men, women and children fell out of cattle trucks and were whipped on to the parade ground.
After Wagner had selected a few to work on camp maintenance, the rest were escorted by the guards for 'a shower'. In reality, the sealed shower rooms were gas chambers.
According to the eyewitnesses, the guards were encouraged by Wagner to be brutal. 'He'd go around and pick his people,' recalled Esther Raab. 'Like a drunk that needs drink, he had to have blood.' Nothing escaped Wagner's attention.
Once, looking through a window while inmates were sorting through the contents of suitcases belonging to the latest arrivals who were being gassed, Wagner noticed a boy stealing a tin of sardines.

Raab watched as Wagner grabbed the boy and summoned the others outside. 'He put us in a half circle and shot him in front of us,' said Raab tearfully. 'Then he said that's what would happen to every one of us if we touched anything.'
Appeal for clemency to Wagner was unthinkable. 'Wagner,' said Raab, 'was God. He had the right to decide if you should live or die. There were no questions asked. You don't ask God.'
Pertinently, Raab and other inmates recall that the Ukrainian guards stole a lot of the valuables - especially money, gold and precious stones - hidden in the luggage.
Bizarrely, Wagner denied to me that he had ever stolen any valuables: 'It's against my deepest convictions to make my fortune out of the misfortune of others. It's against my principles.' He evaded the question why it was wrong to take money from people, but not wrong to gas them.

Sam Lerer, a Sobibor detainee who later became a New York cab driver, recalled how Wagner's biggest tally of murders in one day was nine men, using an axe, shovel and occasionally one bullet, killing a father and son who had been forced to lean their heads against each other.

'Murdering was his pleasure - you could see it in his face. He didn't consider it a duty, it was more his private matter.'
After the sight of blood, Lerer noticed that 'Wagner's restless nail-biting would stop. He became very calm and happy. He would come and chat to people.' When pressed about his crimes during my interview, Wagner finally admitted: 'We knew it was wrong. But what was the use of that?' Then he admitted: 'We had the feeling that if we lost the war we would be saddled with the consequences.'

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